Why Startup Founders Fail: The Slippery Slope of Doubt

This is where startup founders take that bad deal

Joe Procopio
5 min readMay 1, 2023

Doubt.

I’m going to leave that word there for a minute to get you into the mindset of being truly open to what doubt is, why it happens, and what it can cause.

Because what it can cause, it’s not what you think. It’s much, much worse.

Take a breath, because we’re going to dive into some dark spaces.

What Doubt Is

Doubt is why you fail.

You can believe that or not. I don’t care. I’m just asking you to have an open mind about it.

Why does a professional basketball player miss two straight critical free throws at the end of a game? I mean, on a practice floor, they can make 100 out of 100 free throws. You can’t. I can’t. They can.

The reason they miss is 100 percent pure concentrated doubt. For one brief fraction of a microsecond, they lose the belief that the ball will go in the basket like it does 100 out of 100 times. It’s imperceptible. It impacts one set of muscle movements by a fraction of millimeters.

Miss.

Now. If you believe that, you can believe this next part or not. Again, don’t care. Just have an…

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. NLG pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com & GROWERS. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More at joeprocopio.com