The Founder or First Fool?
Disclaimer: Please read this blog post with a sense of humor—I’m not taking myself too seriously. I even got a laugh out of writing it. I have to laugh at my own self-awareness, its good for my soul.
I'm currently reading three books: Buying Back Your Time by Dan Martell, The Founder’s Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman, and The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. Each offers a unique perspective, and I’m not sure if I’m stirring up a stew of confusion or cultivating fresh insights. I’m diving into these books as my business enters its late adolescence phase—approaching early adulthood—a stage that’s forcing me to rework my leadership style, particularly my patience, while planning further into the future and carefully measuring progress (which is incredibly challenging for me).
During this journey, I came across the Dunning-Kruger Effect—a cognitive bias where individuals with limited ability or knowledge in a domain tend to overestimate their competence, while experts often underestimate their own expertise. Identified by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999, the effect is based on the idea that metacognition (our ability to evaluate our own knowledge and skills) requires a certain level of competence. In other words, those lacking expertise often fail to recognize their shortcomings, leading to inflated self-assessments, whereas experts assume that what they know is common knowledge, resulting in more modest self-assessments.
This got me thinking about a Dunning-Kruger graph applied to two areas of my life: fatherhood and entrepreneurial leadership (see Graphic 1 below). Sometimes, overconfidence can be beneficial—it acts as a noise filter and creates space for fresh ideas. I believe this holds true for me as an entrepreneur; if I had known then what I know now, I might have been paralyzed by the urge to do everything at once. My peak moment of foolishness came in 2013 while filing my 2012 taxes—I learned hard lessons in the MBA school of hard knocks as I attempted to file a 1040 along with a profit and loss statement and balance sheet for the first time.
On the fatherhood front, my biggest misstep occurred during a family crisis that made me realize I wasn’t fully present—neither physically nor mentally—with my kids. That experience accelerated my journey toward enlightenment (see Graphic 2).
My conclusion? None of us really knows what we’re doing. The older we get, the more we understand just how much there is to learn. Many of the moves I’ve made in life have been leaps of faith, and it’s that very faith gave and still gives me the courage to keep moving forward, even when I don't have all the answers.
- Ben
Figure 1:
Figure 2:
Ps. Elon Musk is very smart, but sadly is setting new heights for the amplitude of "Mount Stupid" because he does not understand society is an emotional being.
