Shower Thoughts: How to Create Informed Conviction

Hey everyone, Alex Lieberman from Founder’s Journal here. So the team was recently putting our heads together and we asked ourselves, how can we create more great content for the Founder’s Journal community? The thought we had: Shower Thoughts, basically feeding our audience ideas, thoughts, musings, to get you thinking harder about your career and your business over the course of a week. So today we're going to try our first Shower Thought and the topic is How to Create Conviction. Long story short, I've always felt this level of self-consciousness that I don't feel such conviction or passion in my views and opinions like many of my peers in the startup world do. And I've always asked myself, is there something wrong with me? Is there something wrong that I don't feel so strongly about my views, like so many other people?

And so I went down this rabbit hole of figuring out: How does one form conviction? How do you form opinions, but then feel so strongly about those opinions that you'd be willing to bet your whole career or a lot of money on them? And here's my learning: The number one way to build Informed conviction, meaning you feel passionate about views that you're actually really thoughtful about, is a ton of testing and taking bets. The more that over the course of your career, you take bets on things, whether it's taking a bet to launch a new product or taking a bet to hire a new person or taking a bet to invest in a new stock, the more you take bets in an informed way, and then future plays out, and you get to the future and you realize the bet that you took proved to be true, you proved to be right in the decision you made, all that does is it notches another point on your scoreboard where you should feel a level of trust in yourself for taking bets and forming views with conviction. 

And so, as I reflect on this, what I'm realizing is that it's okay for me to not feel a ton of conviction in my views yet. I'm early in my career. I've only founded one business. I'm 28 years old. I need to take so many more informed bets. I need to reflect on those bets after they've had time to play out and hopefully I've been right about a lot of those bets so I can build up the trust in myself that my conviction is oftentimes right. And I would actually say it's probably a little bit weird if I'm so convicted in all of my views, since I haven't proven to myself that I am right a lot of the time. 

And so I hope you enjoy the shower thought. I hope it takes pressure off of you if you don't feel a ton of conviction like me, and if you enjoyed the Shower Thought, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista. Let me know if you want me to do more of these and maybe we'll just throw you some more Easter eggs like this in the Founder's Journal feed. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.