I doubt my abilities. Not sometimes. Regularly. Before big decisions, during them, sometimes after ones I thought went well. I know I am capable of doing whatever I set my mind to. I believe that. And I still doubt. Both things are true at the same time and I spent a long time not understanding how.
The conversation around doubt in founder circles is almost always about getting rid of it. Work on your mindset. Build your confidence. Surround yourself with the right people. Which is all true and also misses the point. Because the doubt does not go away. It changes. It finds new territory. The bigger the bet, the louder it gets. So if your whole strategy is elimination, you are going to be waiting for a long time.
There is something nobody says honestly enough: doubt scales with stakes. The founder who feels nothing when making a hard call is not more capable or more confident. They are either less aware of the risk or they do not care enough about the outcome. Both are worse than doubt.
When I am in the middle of it, I notice two instincts. The first is to perform my way out. Pump up the team. Post the confident take. Say "we've got this" so many times that maybe I start believing it. This works for a while. Then it just gets exhausting, and the people around you start to sense the gap between the story and the reality. They cannot always name it. But they feel it.
The second instinct is to wait. To stay in the uncertainty until it passes. Do more research. Run one more scenario. Talk to one more person. Convince myself I am being thorough when actually I am just not moving.
Both of these are attempts to avoid sitting with the doubt itself. Neither of them works.
What I have come to think is that doubt is mostly about specificity. Vague doubt is the worst kind. It sits like a fog over everything and does not tell you anything useful. When I force myself to actually name what I am doubting, it almost always becomes smaller. Is it the idea? The timing? My own ability in one specific area? The person I hired for this thing? The answer is almost never "everything." It is something. And something is manageable.
70% of people experience imposter syndrome at some point. Among founders the number is almost certainly higher, because the people you are comparing yourself to are not your peers. They are the handful who made it out the other side and then got written about. The comparison is impossible and the doubt it produces is proportional to the impossibility of the comparison.
There is a Fortune piece from this month making the case that AI changed imposter syndrome in a meaningful way. The old reassurance was: the gap you feel is not real. Now the gap is real for almost everyone. The pace at which things are changing means nobody is fully current, nobody has fully figured this out, and the comfort of "you are not actually behind" does not quite apply anymore. Which is uncomfortable, but also clarifying. If the doubt is universal, the question is not how to get rid of it. It is what to do with it.
What I try to do now is treat it as information. If I am doubting the market, I need more conversations with people in it. If I am doubting a hire, I need to either address it or stop waiting for it to resolve on its own. If I am doubting myself in a specific area, I need to either develop that skill or find someone who has it. The doubt is pointing at something. Getting specific about what that is turns a feeling into a task.
Confidence is not the prerequisite to action. It is the output. You build it by doing the hard things and coming out the other side. Not by thinking about doing them. Not by reading about them. By doing them, badly at first, and then better. The evidence accumulates. The doubt gets more specific and more manageable. It does not disappear.
I still doubt my abilities. I probably always will. And I am becoming more okay with that, because the alternative is not confidence. It is either not caring enough or not paying enough attention. Neither of those sounds better.
The doubt is not evidence against you. It is evidence that what you are doing actually matters to you. That is worth something.