LTB #3: A trap I made for myself - trying to be the smartest!

I know this newsletter is probably diving too much into psychology, and I will run out of stories sooner or later, but I am still surprised how much our everyday issues and business issues come from our own limiting beliefs and psychological patterns we have developed over the course of life. Learning to notice them changed my business 180 degrees and skyrocketed it. That is why I am sharing these stories!

Here is what I am covering today:
1. The beginning of the story
2. Where it gets nasty
3. Where does this nonsense come from?
4. How do you not fall for it?
5. Update on my journey
6. Random thing I want to share

TL;DR

I struggled with my company's growth for over six years, caught in a cycle of micromanagement and poor hiring decisions. A conversation with another founder helped me realize my biggest issue: I was passing over qualified candidates because I felt threatened by their skills and experience. This insecurity stemmed from my own self-worth and false beliefs about leadership. Recognizing this, I saw how it had hindered my company's potential and knew I needed to change my approach to hiring and management.

The beginning of the story

I had this one story I was ashamed of. I wanted to write about it, but could not fully understand what it was about, so it took a bit longer to figure it out.

Then I had one conversation with another founder, and it clicked. Here is the story.

My company struggled for more than six years—the growth was very subtle, and we could barely cover our operations. The biggest struggle for me was that I was not able to devote enough time to company growth. I was caught up in operational tasks, and most of my time was spent micromanaging people.

I hated micromanagement, but I could not see a way out—it felt like a closed loop. If I did not manage, everything stopped (at least that is what I thought), and if I did manage, I did not have time for anything else.

Looking back, I understand that there were two interconnected reasons/issues that led to that outcome:

• Micromanagement - I will cover this in the next newsletter. This is a huge one for many founders.

• Hiring - This is what this story is about. 👇

Where it starts to get nasty

I needed to hire a project manager for my company, and that is usually not the hardest position to fill. I posted a job ad, and CVs poured into my inbox.

As I started reviewing applicants, I quickly noticed some were completely unqualified, some overqualified, and most somewhere in the middle. I shortlisted the top five CVs, and I remember that there was this one guy—he was a bit older than me, he had worked in a few impressive companies, and he had achieved impressive results. All my rationality was screaming - this is the guy, but I passed him. Also, I noticed some kind of unease while making the decision to pass, so I decided to stop, go deeper into the feeling I had at that moment, and understand why I passed him.

After some digging, I realized that I thought that this guy was much smarter than me- where does that leave me within the company? At that moment mind was like, “Wait, what?”, “Why?”.

It turns out that I felt threatened by him. I was thinking - How am I going to manage this guy? How will I lead in front of other team members when I have this guy who is smarter than me?

This is where I got it, and the first thing that came to my mind was “FUCK!!!”. How many hires have I passed just because of feeling threatened? What should I expect of company performance when most of the hires were intentionally hired so that I can be the smartest person in the room?

I know this sounds crazy, and that is why I said that I am a bit ashamed of this story, but it is not me anymore, and it holds a very important message. That is why I am sharing it.

Where does this nonsense come from?

After some more digging, I got to the root of this issue - it was all about my self-worth and how I measured it within my company and many false beliefs.

For some reason, I had these beliefs:

• What if the guy that will come will have better answers? - I thought that I was worthy of being called CEO only if I knew all the answers, how to do everything, and solved all issues—that I would be the one who knew best how to do things.

• What if he can bring better or more results than me? - I thought that I should be the most capable one and that would be one of the reasons people would follow me. It was important for me to be the one that brings most of the results.

• Why would people follow me, If I am not the smartest? - I got the picture from glorified leaders like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, where it seems like they know all the answers and could deliver everything. Maybe, I wanted to be glorified and ego played a role here.

• How will I manage this person who is smarter than me? This is where one of the issues with micromanagement comes into play, which I will cover in the next newsletter. Hiring and micromanagement - they are just too connected.

How do you not fall for it?

I think you can start to see how I closed the loop for myself - I wanted the best people possible, but I was keeping the ceiling of hires so that I do not get threatened. I still cannot believe that I was doing that 😀, but EGO is a funny animal, and I am grateful that I learned about it and started to tame this animal years ago.

Okay, so how do you notice that you have a similar trap?

This is what allowed me to notice:

• How do you measure - try to see IF you are measuring yourself against the person. have you Then, try to understand how you are measuring - are you measuring in terms of better/stronger or experienced/talented? If you notice that internally you are measuring in terms better/stronger that is a red flag.

• learning to listen(the most important one), catch the moments when you feel insecure or threatened, and analyze these moments. Usually, when we feel insecure or threatened, we have automatic reactions we learned during childhood, so it is not easy to step back and analyze what just happened. Sounds cheezy, but this means learning to hear what you feel, which is a bit of a challenge for me and other founders. Feelings are for pussys, right? Not really, but founders have to deal with delayed gratification ( I touched a bit on this in a previous post), so we learn to detach emotions.

• mentor who was asking uncomfortable questions and teaching me to notice when something was off. Now, to some extent, I can feel when something is off, and I can dig into myself - a great skill to have.

• literature - accumulating thoughts from some books helped me notice this issue. I knew what I needed and noticed when I went against that for some reason. My favorites on this topic: Good to Great, Leaders Eat Last and my all-time favorite book I will leave for the next newsletter on micromanagement.

A great exercise to do - take an hour off, go to a coffee place where you will not meet people, and think about your self-worth within the organization. What makes you valuable? What is the added value you give? What makes people in the company follow you? Can you see any red flags there? Write that all down on paper. If there is something you are thinking about, but do not feel safe to write down, there must be something. Formulating all that can help you notice when you are going against it subconsciously.

Last thing - in reality, if we are not speaking about physical strength, there is no such thing as “better/worse than me” it is all illusion - our EGO is comparing with our perception of others, but not the reality.

Update on my journey

Time is moving just too fast, but all this time I have been focusing on just one thing - learning to code.

My progress on learning to code

I got to 69% of the course (the last 25% is prep for interviews that I do not need), so I almost finished it, but I took a turn here - this course does not teach NextJS and NoSQL, that I want to base my knowledge on and tech stack I want to use, so I could say I have graduated course. Now, I am learning NextJS and Mongo myself and am starting to think about how I will create the tools I wanted to create initially.

I have to admit that learning to code is harder than I thought. Nowdays, you have to know and understand so many topics and frameworks to build. A comparison to learning to snowboard would be like this - I have watched all YouTube tutorials, I have done some training on the ground and gymnastic trampolines, but now I have to do everything on the mountain, and this is where it gets tricky.

This is very exciting—finally, after 250 hours of learning to code, I will try to deliver. And I see already that it is 3x harder than I thought 😅

Thanks to the video below, David Brooks is my discovery of the month. Worth watching.

I did not cover something you are interested in or wish to discuss more. Reply to this e-mail.