As a child, I’d lie down to sleep every night and pray to be tall. This would be followed by the simple-yet-burning question, “Am I the best basketball player?” Before you start to think I was some narcissistic, egotistical kid, let me slow your roll. 

I grew up in a small Indiana town of about 1,000 people where Hoosier Hysteria is no joke. To say basketball was just another sport would be heresy. Our games weren’t just games—they were town events played in gyms larger than most DII and DIII colleges. 

Local kids looked up to the varsity players as mini-celebrities—even crushes. I remember someone asking his nephew, who happened to be a senior on the varsity team, and also a little dreamy, to sign my program for me. 

What I didn’t yet have words for at age 11 was the core belief that what people in my town valued most was a good basketball player. And if I wanted to be one of the lucky ones held in high regard, welp, it was pretty obvious I needed to be one—maybe even the best one. 

What I was doing as a kid in elementary school wasn’t all that different from what a lot of us do as adults. We pick up what the world around us is putting down, and then look to someone else to tell us whether or not we’re okay.

We look for approval or acceptance in the subtle feedback we get after writing a paper or in the quarterly 360 review our boss gives us. In the reviews after our product launches. In the DMs, comments, or followers we have on Instagram. In the advice we get from a friend or family member after telling them we’re thinking about a career change.

But building a life based on somebody else’s expectation of who we ought to be is like building on a foundation of sand. It’s destined to crumble the moment we find ourselves in a high-pressure situation.

Years later in the startup game, I’d pray—not to be tall, but to secure the funding to build out a business. Silently, I’d ask another burning question: “Am I the best CEO?”

What I didn’t know at 11 but understand now is that no matter how much reassurance my parents gave me, it would never be enough to counter what others in my small town thought of me. But those 1,000 people prepared me for what I would face in the business world. 

As it turns out, reassurance won’t save me from others’ opinions or the uncomfortable uncertainty that I’ll experience in life, but letting go of what others think of me will. 

The story I was telling myself about being “the best” never really mattered. What mattered was being the best I could be.