As a startup founder, every day people will try to pull you down to mediocrity. Mediocre conversations. Mediocre ideas. Mediocre lives. This will frustrate you because you wish more people thought big, like you. You wish more people had ambition, like you. You wish other people wanted to change the world, like you.

The challenge is that most of the world is mediocre, and they don’t really know what to do with someone like you. So they make sure your dreams feel exactly like that…dreams. They make you think getting into YC is a distant dream or getting a celebrity as an investor doesn’t happen to normal people. Personally, people made sure I know that it was impossible to build billion dollar companies.

Mediocrity is like a virus. If you entertain it long enough, you’ll start to get infected until one day, you’re the one that’s telling someone else that their visions aren’t attainable.

It’s imperative as a startup founder to have a consistent beat of self confidence that allows you brush off the small players so you can play big. They’ll wear you down but if you stay strong, at some point they will stop. To them, you’ll be a little crazy or nutty. Maybe a little out of your mind. But most importantly, you’ll have the reputation of being stuck in your ways and you won’t have to deal with the threat of mediocrity anymore.

It is at this point you have survived one of the hardest challenges that a pre-seed founder needs to get past to have a chance - the zone of mediocrity. Once you get past the zone of mediocrity, everything you do from this point on only pulls people up. You are only able to do this because you refused to be pulled down. Now go and change the world 👊