How NOT to be your own worst boss | 3 things to avoid | The Indie Creator

Ayush Chaturvedi

Published in

The Wisdom Project

4 min readSep 19, 2022

So I didn’t launch a product yesterday and felt guilty about skipping a week in the 25in25 challenge.

I knew I won’t be able to make it since last week, and hated myself for it.

After reflecting for a few days I feel like I’m being too harsh on myself 🙄

I think all solopreneurs feel this way at some point in their journey.

It took me some effort over the last week to get rid of those feelings and start feeling good about myself again.

Today I want to share the 3 ways you can avoid being your own worst boss.

So I’ve shipped 2 products in the last 2 weeks, and both have been very intense pieces of work.

Sucking all the creative energy out of me.

So I decided not to launch a new product this week.

Which made me feel guilty and angry towards myself, for not living up to the 25in25 challenge.

I was turning into my own worst boss. Giving myself a hard time for being lazy, complacent and inadequate.

I was stuck in a mental funk.

But when I journaled and spoke to my wife about this, I realized I was being too hard on myself. If I want to maintain my mental health and give my best creative output then I need to take regular breaks and refuel myself.

Sure my internal boss wasn’t happy with it. He had set a deadline for me with specific targets that I had to meet every week.

So he was obviously pissed at me.

3 mindset shifts that helped me deal with him and find peace with myself —

1. Avoid a scarcity mindset

I need to come from a place of abundance.

If I don’t ship a product this week that isn’t the end of the world. Sure I miss a week in my challenge, but that’s just a short term loss. If I maintain my mental health then I can win over the long term.

If I take a break in this week then I can make my next product really high quality. But if I force myself to stick to the challenge then I might end up shipping a shitty product.

2. Avoid unfair expectations

It’s hard to keep churning out good products week after week. Sure they are info products, and they are scoped down significantly, but they still take time.

I still need to write them, edit them, publish them in multiple formats. Till last year it used to take me a month for the same kind of output.

So I have 4xed my execution, but if I keep running on this treadmill then I risk watering down the value proposition of each product.

Which is again stupid!

3. Avoid becoming a slave to your ego

That if I’ve committed to a crazy challenge then I will live up to it no matter what. After all my reputation is on the line. I am building in public and sharing updates on the challenge every week.

What will people think? What will my Twitter followers think? What the readers of this newsletter think?

That’s the harsh truth.

Everyone has their own challenges, nobody is actively thinking about me. I should stop being so full of myself all the time and take things lightly sometimes.

I ship products
They are high quality
And people want them.

In the grand scheme of things this 6 month period is a tiny blip. It doesn’t matter if I launch 25 products or 20 products or 15 products in this period.

Everything else is optional!

So yea..it took me some time to realize these truths and avoid these limiting mindsets.

But now, here I am writing about it in this newsletter 😀

Do tell me what you think of this? Do you also have such limiting beliefs? Are you your own worst boss? How do you avoid such behaviors? I am extremely interested because I want to learn from you and improve myself.

Please share in the comments.

Thank you for reading 🙏

Read the complete post here —