I thought I was fearless. Pitch the client, hire the team, build the product. But inside I was afraid. With clients, I was afraid they wouldn’t stay, or that they’d find out we were figuring things out on the fly. With employees, I was afraid they’d take advantage of me, or make a mistake that

For years, I thought I had to choose: work all the time, or have a life I love. Say yes to the client, or lose the contract.  Do it myself, or it won’t be done right. My brain was trying to reduce complexity by narrowing the choices. The problem is, I stopped seeing the other

I used to think if a little was good, more was better.  That was my philosophy for everything: pizza, wine, ice cream. But also customers, services, opportunities, and ideas. The most expensive word in my business was “yes.” If someone wanted to pay us for something, I wanted to say yes. After all, revenue is

For most of my life freedom was the most important thing to me.  But the way I defined it cost me everything else. I was lonely, tired, and frustrated with almost everything in my life. At the time, I didn’t understand why. Hidden Rules So I took a course called the Internal Map of Reality

Action used to be my middle name. If there was a problem in my business, I wanted to do something about it right away.  Fix the system. Call the client. Talk to the employee. Change the process. Hire the consultant.  And action does matter.  But some actions helped, and others made things worse. It took

For years, I gave my team War and Peace instructions in fortune-cookie form. A whole novel of context got reduced to something like, “Let’s use the same approach as the LAMCO project, but simplify the client meetings and don’t let the scope creep.” Then I’d get frustrated when they didn’t understand what I meant, why it mattered,