The Myth of “Knowing What You’re Doing”
The other day, I caught myself googling how to be a business owner. Not in a poetic, research-driven, “looking for inspiration” kind of way - I literally typed it into the search bar like a teenage girl asking the internet how to flirt. It was somewhere around 9:30pm, the hour when everything always feels more urgent and more existential. I'd just had a minor meltdown over something painfully boring (likely a tech thing I had no business trying to troubleshoot myself), and I was spiralling. Again.
I don’t know what I thought I’d find. A checklist? A TED Talk that would rewire my brain? A permission slip from someone older, wiser, and gainfully employed to say, yes, you’re doing it right, keep going?
Here’s what no one tells you when you decide to start a business - especially if you’ve never run one before: there is no single moment when you cross over from “someone figuring it out” to “someone who knows what they’re doing.” The myth of that moment is as seductive as it is cruel. I’ve spent so many nights chasing it, like a dog after a car. And when I do hit a milestone - a client booked, a good review, money in the account - it disappears as quickly as it came, replaced by the next unknown.
In theory, I wanted flexibility. Autonomy. Creative control. In practice, I’ve Googled “how to make a spreadsheet” more times than I care to admit, and I’ve had weeks where I swear I’m just one awkward invoice away from giving it all up to apply for a job with a lanyard.
But here’s the wild thing: I still want this. I still believe in whatever it is I’m building, even when it scares me. Especially when it scares me. The fear is weirdly clarifying. It’s like a signal that says: this matters.
There’s a specific kind of loneliness that comes with doing something no one asked you to do - starting something no one told you to start. It’s not a complaint, just a fact. When you don’t have a boss, there’s no one to praise you or promote you or tell you that you’re doing well. When you don’t have colleagues, there’s no one to side-eye across a meeting or message about how weird that email was. And when you don’t have a roadmap, every step feels like a guess - even when you’re following your intuition, even when it works.
So that’s what The Founder Edit is about, really. The behind-the-scenes of building something from scratch, with no prior experience, no blueprint, and a slightly chaotic mix of ambition and self-doubt. I want to write about what it actually feels like to be a first-time founder - not in glossy highlight reels or motivational reels, but in the in-between bits. The bits that make you question everything, and then somehow make you keep going anyway.
Because I’m learning that knowing what you’re doing might just be a myth. And maybe the real magic comes from building it anyway.
- S