Serial Entrepreneur and host of one of Europe's top business podcasts, Secret Leaders with over 50M downloads & angel investor in 85+ startups - here to share stories and studies breaking down the science of success - turning it from probability to predictability.
You Already Know. You're Just Waiting For Someone Else To Say It.
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You Already Know. You're Just Waiting For Someone Else To Say It. Read time: 6 minutes Hey, welcome back. Last week, I talked about why the most important things in my life all came from chasing something else entirely, and the obliquity principle You can read that (and all past issues, here) Before we dive into the letter. I'm writing from week one of a two week staycation because with weather like this, why get on a plane with kids? Other than a few tantrums from the 5 year old and the kamikaze 1 year old going from walking to running towards anything sharp or deadly, our choice to drive all over the UK is proving a good idea so far. Up from London to the Lake District and back, with lots of stops in National Trust buildings and pretty villages along the way. Hello today from Chester Zoo where we watched the eclipse last night and stayed over at the Giraffe enclosure. Pretty cool. Turns out England is pretty nice. Who knew?! Anyway, on to today's topic. I want to talk about the most expensive habit nobody calls a habit. A Tweet With 300K Views I saw this from @thedulab recently: "Friend says 'hey she told me she thinks you're cute' and suddenly you walk up to her like God sent you. But without that confirmation you're timid as can be. Hiring manager says 'fyi the team loved you' and your next interview is pure flow state. But zero feedback and now you're stumbling over your words. If you believe you're the man then you simply are and the world will mirror your own self love back to you. You become unstoppable once you no longer need permission to be the best version of yourself." 300K views because everyone reading it recognised themselves in it. You've Done This You've walked into a meeting knowing your idea was good and pitched it like you were apologising for taking up space. Then someone senior said "that's actually brilliant" and suddenly you were articulate, sharp, full of energy. Same idea. Same you. The only thing that changed was that someone gave you permission to believe what you already believed. You've applied for a role knowing you could do it. And then spent the whole process performing uncertainty because nobody had confirmed you were good enough yet. Then you got the offer and within a week you were doing the job like you'd been there for months. Because you always could. You were just waiting for someone to say so. You've sat on a business idea for months. Maybe years. You've thought about it in the shower. You've scribbled notes. You've researched the market. You know it could work. And you're still waiting. For a mentor to tell you it's viable. A friend to say it's a good idea. An investor to show interest. Some external signal that gives you permission to take your own instinct seriously. That wait is costing you more than you realise. I Know Because I've Paid That Cost For six months, I knew something was wrong with me. I wasn't sleeping. I was anxious. I was falling apart. And I kept waiting for something external to tell me what the problem was. Therapy didn't name it. Sleep apps didn't fix it. The doctor offered sleeping pills but that didn't feel like an answer either. It took a friend mentioning brain nutrition over dinner, then booking an NHS dietitian, for someone to finally confirm what my body had been telling me for half a year. Your brain is starving. She diagnosed me in about sixty seconds. I already knew something was seriously wrong. I'd known for months. I just didn't have permission to act on it because no one had put a name on it yet. Six months of my life spent waiting for confirmation of something I could feel in my bones every single day. The Permission Gap There's a version of you that operates when you know someone believes in you. You've met that version. After the compliment. After the good review. After the investor said yes. After someone you respect told you that you're onto something. That version of you is confident, decisive, creative. Moves fast. Backs themselves. And then there's the version that shows up when nobody's said anything. When the inbox is quiet. When you're making decisions in silence without anyone confirming you're on the right track. That version hesitates. Hedges. Sends the email and then rewrites it three times after hitting send. Second guesses the pricing. Softens the pitch. Adds qualifiers to everything. "I think this could maybe work" instead of "this works." Same person. Same brain. Same ability. The only variable is whether someone else gave you a green light. A few weeks ago I got my blood results back from CoreVitals and my Heights supplement stack was validated across the board. I felt relieved. And then almost immediately I felt embarrassed for feeling relieved. Because I already knew. I've been formulating and taking these products for years. I know the science. I know the ingredients. I know our team tests everything rigorously. The blood panel didn't teach me a single new thing. It just gave me permission to fully believe what I already had every reason to trust. If I'm still doing this after everything I've been through, you probably are too. What Waiting Actually Costs Every week you spend waiting for someone to validate your idea is a week your competitor is building it. Every pitch you soften because nobody told you it was strong enough is a deal that goes to the person who walked in without needing permission. Every piece of content you don't publish because you're not sure it's good enough is a connection you'll never make with someone who needed to hear it. The cost of waiting for validation is invisible because it shows up as things that never happened. The business you never started. The conversation you never had. The version of yourself you never became because you were waiting for someone to call your number. I've invested in over 100 startups now. The clearest pattern I see is the difference between founders who wait for validation and founders who move without it. The ones who wait are always looking for signals. They need the investor's enthusiasm, the advisor's approval, the market data. Every piece of negative feedback lands harder than it should because their belief in what they're building depends on what the last person said about it. The founders who move without waiting are different to be around. They listen, they adjust, they're open to feedback. But underneath all of that there's a steadiness that doesn't shift based on whether the last meeting went well. That steadiness is magnetic. Investors feel it. Customers feel it. Teams feel it. Nobody Is Coming Nobody is going to tap you on the shoulder and tell you you're ready. Nobody is going to send an email saying "now is the time." Nobody is going to review your life and confirm that you've earned the right to go after the thing you want. You're waiting for a moment that doesn't exist. The people you admire, the ones who seem to move with certainty, don't have access to information you don't have. They decided to trust their own judgment before anyone else confirmed it. That's the whole difference. They act and then the confirmation follows. You're trying to do it the other way around and it doesn't work that way. When Joel and I started writing our newsletter, nobody was reading it. For months it felt like we were sending emails into the void. We could have waited until we had enough subscribers to prove the concept before committing to it properly. Instead we showed up every Sunday and published something useful because we believed it was worth doing regardless of whether the numbers confirmed it yet. It took over a year to reach 45,000 subscribers. It's now read by over 250,000 people. The confirmation came. It just came a long time after the belief did. This Week Whatever you're sitting on right now, the idea, the decision, the conversation, the career move, the thing you keep turning over in your head, ask yourself one question. Do you already know the answer? If you're being honest, you probably do. You've known for a while. You're just waiting for someone else to say it first so it feels safer. It will never feel safe. Move anyway. The confirmation will come after you've already started. It always does. To not waiting, Dan P.S. Think about the last time someone gave you a compliment or a piece of positive feedback that made you suddenly perform at a different level. You didn't get smarter in that moment. You got permission. Now imagine operating like that all the time without needing it from anyone else. |
Dan Murray
Serial Entrepreneur and host of one of Europe's top business podcasts, Secret Leaders with over 50M downloads & angel investor in 85+ startups - here to share stories and studies breaking down the science of success - turning it from probability to predictability.
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