Your Startup is Not Your Identity

"Your value doesn't decrease based on someone's inability to see your worth." —Zig Ziglar

Behind the scenes, many founders struggle with a fragile identity. Entrepreneurs can become completely entangled in their work, so emotionally absorbed that they lose sight of other areas of their lives. Your startup should not become your entire identity. Fixating on one single role in your life as your main source of self‑worth makes your identity so vulnerable to outside events that are out of your reach. Fixation makes you fragile.

I've been there. I'd feel good about myself only when my startup was going well, and I'd feel worthless when our company struggled. I felt only as good as my last battle, so I constantly needed fresh wins to justify my own worth. A minor mistake felt like hard evidence of my worthlessness. At a point in my life, fear of failure had me paralyzed.

Fearing failure every hour of the day leaves you in a place of emotional chaos. I'm sure you've felt it too. Perhaps you lost sleep over a comment one customer made, or maybe you agonized over the time it takes to ship a new feature. I get it—it's scary to work for years toward your life's purpose and have nothing to show for it yet. The idea of going down a dead‑end road for years is painful to imagine for any founder.

As part of my founder journey, I hit an emotional bottom in the months after selling our company, which I want to stress was an overall positive event for my team and me. I'll forever be grateful to Shopify leaders for seeing the potential in us. Shopify truly was the ideal place for me to work on bettering myself at that point in my life. But as a new employee integrating into a large organization, I felt pressured to live up to my identity: a startup superhero. I felt the necessity to not disappoint myself or others, no matter what. I'd had some success, only to feel even more terrified of failure.

A lifetime of seeking external approval as permission to feel good about myself was catching up to me. I realized I had become overly focused on not losing instead of winning. I didn't want to disappoint anyone. The traditional signs of success were present in my life, yet I still couldn't think of myself as a good, worthy person. It was all about my shortcomings. Don't fail, no matter what, I'd repeat to myself. I couldn't congratulate myself for anything positive. The cracks in my expiring identity were starting to show. I was depressed. I was unmotivated. I didn't recognize my "normal" self. That's when I truly began the inner work as a founder.

As mentally challenging as this episode was, I'm glad it drove me to understand how my inner and outer realities had become disconnected. My inner monologue was faulty, gripped by fear of failure. My self‑esteem was riding on one single dimension of my life. My life felt binary, black and white, win or lose, with nothing in between. I was trapped in duality.

Mind the expectations you place on yourself

Founders generally believe they are smart and talented. They have to. Having confidence in your own potential goes a very long way when your livelihood depends on being right, seeing around corners, and making high-stakes decisions. Naturally, founders place high expectations on themselves, sometimes trying to become nothing short of a superhero. That's because they are instinctively aware of their potential, and their work happens to be the vessel that propels them toward their destiny.

That said, the higher the expectations you place on yourself, the harder it becomes to experience satisfaction in who you are at this moment. Imagine you are building a Jenga tower: the higher you stack expectations, the more unstable your identity becomes as a whole. As you keep adding to the tower, it becomes harder to reach the expectations you created for yourself. Your self‑image gets shaky, eventually something upsets you, and your identity tips over. Suffering ensues.

A healthy self‑image means believing you can figure it out

"Self‑esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves." —Nathaniel Branden, author of Six Pillars of Self‑Esteem

How to form a solid, healthy self‑image? First, by not commanding yourself to be a superhero, and by adopting realistic expectations for yourself. I believe a healthy self‑image doesn't require you to perform at the highest level of excellence. A healthy self‑image means believing you can figure this out, welcoming setbacks and failures to help you learn, given enough time and effort.

Forming an identity distinct from your entrepreneurial pursuits can be tricky when you're emotionally, physically, intellectually, and financially all in. The thing is, for your dreams to come true, you have to sell other people on your dream. And when you're convincing others to buy into your story, it does help to be seen as a winner. Confidence in the face of hardships is contagious. That's why entrepreneurship is largely a confidence game.

"Confidence precedes competence" is a mantra I often hear among founders. History is full of founders, creators, and innovators who took on challenges they were clearly not equipped to face at that time, while also believing with total certainty in their potential and their ability to rise to the occasion. We've seen how James Cameron takes on hard movies. Each of his biggest hits was a masterpiece from a visual technology standpoint. Without confidence, Cameron and his team wouldn't have persisted in the face of technically impossible projects.

Still, I've often wondered if self‑confidence is just something you're born with, like a genetic winning lottery ticket. Modern entrepreneurial heroes can exude extreme levels of confidence, bordering on delusion. Watching Elon Musk explain with a straight face how SpaceX is going to Mars in our lifetime, it's easy to think he was born with it. Maybe there is a place in history for the grandiose egos like Musk or Napoleon, but that said, history also has a place for great founders who became confident over time, as they gained competence. Among them are Katharine Graham and Christian Dior, both of whom gradually overcame their self‑doubt, building confidence one challenge at a time. They show that self‑confidence is mostly a skill.

For example, Katharine Graham inherited the roles of publisher and majority owner at the Washington Post in 1963, after her husband sadly died by suicide. Born into a rich family and having spent her entire adult life in the supportive roles of wife and mother, she had not been prepared for a leadership position. Graham initially lacked confidence due to traditional gender roles and her sudden new responsibilities after her husband's death. Writing in her memoir, Personal History, she says:

I was always uncomfortable, always questioning myself and my decisions. I constantly worried that I wasn't up to the task, that I would fail and let everyone down. I was acutely aware of the skepticism around me. Many people, both inside and outside the company, doubted my ability to lead. It took years of hard work and many difficult decisions before I began to feel confident in my role.

Similarly, Christian Dior did not innately believe he could become a fashion icon. He had severe self‑doubt before starting his own label. He even walked away briefly just before the brand launched, despite being served the opportunity of a lifetime on a silver platter. Dior was unsure of himself but went ahead anyway.

He had to build confidence on the job. A year after launch, his fashion house hit gold with the "New Look" collection. Although Dior became a known brand, behind the scenes, Christian was still feeling intense anxiety and self‑doubt. His chronic worries about not being good enough drove him to define effective coping strategies: assemble a highly trusted team, demand excellent workmanship, and pour passion into the products.

Dior coped by trusting in his creative process when he didn't trust himself. He pushed back on his anxiety by adopting the confident persona of "Christian Dior, the Designer," which exuded certainty and decisiveness. This alter ego helped him channel his energies and project confidence. He gradually became more comfortable and confident leading his company. Dior is still an enduring brand 80 years later.

My point is that Graham and Dior didn't seem like obvious entrepreneurs; they grappled with self-doubt—and that's okay. What they always held was the belief that they had potential, that they could figure things out. So they did.

Confidence grows with good mental habits

If self‑confidence is a skill, then it can be trained. I've relied on a few techniques to actively build confidence. Maybe they can help you too.

Choose each word with care. Specific words shape your internal narrative, and that narrative shapes how you feel about yourself. Each word matters. Negative self‑talk is a form of self‑sabotage: A destructive narrative might stop you from trying in the first place. Choose precise words that support the most empowering version of your narrative.

Zoom out. To understand how far you've come, take a view of the trajectory of your entire journey. Where did it start? Where are you heading? By zooming out to see your entire founder story, it's easier to see that you are not your last win or loss. Zooming out makes it clear that patience is a virtue and time is our ally.

Believe your potential is infinite. Anchor your confidence in your innately human potential to learn and grow. There is no ceiling on your potential. An identity built on resilience and the resolve to figure things out along the way injects a sense of adventure and curiosity even in dire and draining situations.

Designing identity for resilience

Once you agree that you as a founder are more than your startup, your identity starts to feel more malleable. By being rooted in healthy expectations, it is not at risk of collapse. To be more resilient, make your identity small, broad, and imperfectly unique.

Make your identity small

Keeping your identity small means avoiding strong beliefs about who you are and how things should be in your life. A smaller identity doesn't require as much energy to protect your ego. A small house is less work to maintain than a large one. Minimizing your identity gets you freedom. A small identity means there is less to be offended about; you take things less personally. As an identity minimalist, unattached to any solid definition of who you are, you can interact with the world with clarity and humility.

Make your identity broad

Broadening your identity means defining yourself through multiple dimensions, by forming a series of distinct stories about who you are and who you want to become. You are not dependent on a single narrative that could wreck your self‑worth if it is threatened. You are a founder, but maybe you are also—and equally—a spouse, a parent, a friend, an athlete, a musician. Nurturing a portfolio of identities will bring you a stronger and more resilient sense of self. Paradoxically, you might also become a better founder than if you had put all your identity eggs in a single entrepreneurial basket. When your startup struggles, the other roles in your life can help you stay emotionally afloat, providing the energy needed to weather adversity and change.

Make your identity imperfectly unique

Kintsugi is a traditional Japanese art form of repairing broken pottery using lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The result is stunning. The philosophy behind kintsugi is to embrace, even elevate, flaws and imperfections. A broken piece can be put back together, with beautiful, unique scars, and become a work of art. Let your defects shine through, let them define you, celebrate them as part of your identity. We all have something unique, something weird about ourselves. Learning to love your imperfections gives you the confidence to show up exactly as you are.

The Master stays behind; that is why she is ahead. She is detached from all things; that is why she is one with them. Because she has let go of herself, she is perfectly fulfilled.

—Lao Tzu