A couple comments have suggested this is Imposter Syndrome and it might be a little of that, but additionally it's the opposite. Imposter Syndrome is about feel

A couple comments have suggested this is Imposter Syndrome and it might be a little of that, but additionally it's the opposite. Imposter Syndrome is about feeling like your successes are not your own. This article is about not feeling like your successes are significant enough. Imposter syndrome is about your successes being bigger than you are worthy of accepting responsibility for. This article is about your responsibilities being bigger than you're experienced for. That understood, I think a lot of this problem stems from our fascination with survivor bias -- only those companies that have big successes. We think big successful exits are where we should concentrate our learning and if we aren't one of those big exits then the experience we have isn't significant enough to help others. It's like the Don't read TechCrunch article also on the front page right now. Those blogs and even here, we spend a lot of time talking about the exceptional startups. Those with exits (Zynga, GroupOn, Instagram) or those scrappy little dogs fighting the man (AirBnB, Uber), or fighting the 600 LB gorilla (DDG) -- you know, the ones PG would consider "trying to be successful." The reality is, the vast majority of startups out there are building businesses slowly. They've been at it for 5 or 10 years already and you've never heard of them. Some of those will be acquired or get investment next year and you'll think they are overnight successes. All those thousands, maybe tens of thousands of startups who have made it 5 years are already successes. They are run by individuals who have escaped the machine, the rat race, the enslavement to the corporatocracy! YEAH! I say that's a success. I say that takes risk. I say that takes understanding the world and what it values and being able to add enough value to support at least yourself, maybe your family, and even some other families. Every entrepreneur I know with success talks about how they did it all themselves in the beginning. Don't hire until you can't do it all yourself anymore. Wake up, work, go to sleep. Not these tiny population of stories where you get 10 million dollars and then hire someone to do tiny little things that don't really need to be done anyway. I can't imagine paying someone full time to manage a Twitter stream but there are entire companies built around enabling entire teams to work together on a twitter stream! Wow. That kind of stuff seems like a big waste of time and money to a lot of "real" entrepreneurs. A lot of "real" entrepreneurs don't even know what Twitter is. Or even use the web at all. We could all stand to learn a thing or two from them and none of that knowledge is at TechCrunch. We could also stand to share a lot of the knowledge we have gained never having achieved the success we are constantly reminded the startup world appreciates even though our successes are amazingly awesome when compared to those outside the startup world.