Feeling uncomfortable is the path, not a bug

I feel uncomfortable as a founder. And that's fine 😅

I got there by working on myself, day after day, and doing a lot, a whole lot, of retrospectives on my days inside play2match. Feeling out of place, feeling that what you do is never as right as you'd estimated, feeling that you're never enough. At first I thought it was a warning sign. Instead it's normal, and you have to accept it.

Like moving up a league

It reminds me a lot of basketball, in the senior leagues, when I moved up a division. The feeling was always the same: huge passion for that league and extreme discomfort every week, because the games were harder, practices more technical and opponents stronger.

That discomfort didn't mean I wasn't good enough. It meant I was playing in a higher league. As a founder it's exactly the same.

The normal founders' club

That's why, after a year of notes on the journey, I started writing the Diario del Founder Normale, the Normal Founder's Diary. Not normal in the sense of easy, within everyone's reach: that stuff doesn't exist, building a company isn't for everyone. Normal because so many feelings you have along the way (discomfort, confusion, inadequacy, small wins) are part of the growth of the company and of the people who work in it.

I write it to lend a hand, to keep my impostor syndrome in check and to feel a little less alone alongside other normal founders. If I start getting too hyped and pumped up, I'll stop publishing. Promise.

In the second installment I talked about five serious mistakes I made while building the community: you'll find them, together with the others, in the guide on my mistakes as Head of Community.