What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the crazy ones. This is Alex and I am coming to you with a founder journal style episode where I monologue for anywhere between five and 15 minutes about a topic that is very present in my day today of running different businesses today, I'm going to be talking about why the grass isn't always greener and I'm going to start with the story so let's hop into it.

What's up everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman. You know, this is Jesse Pooji and this is the crazy ones.

For the majority of Morning Brew's history, and we've been around now for eight years, I would say at various points, I was jealous of my co-founder and I drew a lot of comparison to my co-founder.

It's almost like there's the saying of it doesn't matter how much money you have. If your brother-in-law has a dollar more or a house that's worth a dollar more, you're not going to feel satisfied because you're always drawing comparison. That similar type of mentality plagued me while running Morning Brew.

I've talked a lot about in the past how I feel so grateful for my partner Austin and I do and also how he has been so vital to the business we complimented each other so incredibly well in terms of our skill sets.

But I think as a function honestly of my own experiences when I was younger growing up not feeling worthy enough not feeling like a part of the group.

I have found myself to be plagued by comparison throughout my life and while in the last year I think I have grown a lot in trying to be more driven by intrinsic motivation.

I think external comparison still creeps into my life. So I just wanted to describe kind of what some of these thoughts have been throughout the course of Morning Brew's journey.

And my goal in doing this is one for you to realize whether you're running a business, starting a business, have co-founders that it is okay to have thoughts that you don't feel great about or you don't feel proud about it.

And it's more what you choose to do with those thoughts that's most important. And yeah, so hopefully this resonates with you.

I would say over the course of Morning Brew's history, I felt very confident about a few abilities of mine.

I felt very confident about my ability to build great relationships with people with employees, with investors, with potential advertisers.

I felt great about my ability to story tell and sell. I truly believed that if you put me in a room with a CMO or some new ran marketing at a business, if they were interested in getting in front of the audience that Morning Brew had, I had almost an irrational amount of confidence that I would be able to close a deal.

I also had a ton of confidence around my taste for content and being able to train great content writers.

And my ability to organically grow an audience, like I always leaned on my creative brain to come up with smart and high leverage ways to grow an audience without paying a dollar for it.

The interesting thing though is while I feel confident about all of those things, the majority of my brain space at times in the history of Morning Brew was plagued by comparison to my co-founder Austin about the things that he had and things that I felt like I didn't have.

I always felt that Austin was more analytical.

I always felt like Austin was more focused. I always felt like Austin was better at prioritizing the most important things and being able to take a ton of noise and different things going on in the business and condense them and synthesize them into truly what was most important.

I always felt like Austin was better at thinking strategically and I had this kind of ego for a while of like I had to be very involved in strategy because I had my own insecurity around am I strategic.

And when I thought to myself, oh I'm not strategic enough, that felt like a really icky bad thing because I felt like I was like the salesman or the sales guy at Morning Brew who wasn't thoughtful or couldn't critically think well.

Obviously all of this is very ironic because it was such a beautiful thing that Austin and I partnered together because the things that he was exceptional at, like I said, like being laser focused, being deeply analytical, being a truly unemotional and objective decision maker, my strong suits, my zone of genius storytelling, creative thinking, seeing the best in people, those are totally different things.

Yet my brain would fixate at times on the things that I didn't have. And so this just brings me to a broader principle that can be expanded far outside of just managing a business with a co-founder but really any part of our professional or personal careers.

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