One Year Later

A year does not feel like a long time when you are inside it. Then you stop, turn around, and the distance is surprising.

What I got wrong

I started the year with a set of beliefs about how things worked — in business, in relationships, in the process of building something — that I was confident enough in to act on without much interrogation. Most of them held up. Some of them were wrong in ways I could not see until I had accumulated enough evidence.

I got the pacing wrong. I moved too fast on decisions that deserved more deliberation, and too slowly on decisions that would have benefited from speed. The hard part is that I did not know which was which at the time. The categories are only visible in retrospect, which is genuinely unhelpful for making the decisions in the moment. What I can do is update the heuristic: I now expect to move faster on questions of execution and slower on questions of people.

I underestimated how much energy the non-work parts of building take. Not the late nights or the difficult calls — those I expected. The cognitive overhead of uncertainty: the part of your mind that is always running a background process evaluating whether the direction is right, whether the key bets are the right ones, whether you are seeing clearly or seeing what you want to see. That overhead is real, and it compounds. The people who build sustainably are the ones who have found ways to give that background process somewhere to go — conversations, writing, structured reflection — rather than letting it run unmanaged.

What I learned that I did not expect to learn

The most valuable things I learned this year were not the ones I went looking for.

I learned more about what I actually value — as opposed to what I said I valued — from watching what I protected when things got difficult. When time was scarce and choices had to be made, what I consistently kept was the work itself: the client relationships, the thinking, the process of building the thing. What I sacrificed more readily was rest, social time, the version of myself that was not at work. Whether this is a good ratio is a separate question. But it told me something real about what I was optimizing for.

I learned that most of the advice I received, no matter how well-intentioned, reflected other people's risk tolerance rather than mine. Other people's advice is a projection of how they would navigate your situation. Most people are more risk-averse than founders need to be, which means the social pressure on early-stage building is almost always in the direction of caution. Filtering for this — taking the input seriously without letting it substitute for your own judgment — is a skill that I am developing, unevenly.

I learned that the relationships that sustain building are qualitatively different from the relationships that result from building. The people who were there before the proof — who believed in the direction without the evidence — those relationships have a texture that newer relationships built on demonstrated success do not have. Both are valuable. They are not the same.

What I am carrying forward

The beliefs I am carrying into the next period are more tested than the ones I started with, which means I hold them with a different quality of confidence — not more confident about the content, but more confident that they have survived contact with reality.

I am carrying forward the conviction that the work itself is the answer to most of the uncertainty. When I do not know what to do, going back to the actual work — the client problem, the product decision, the essay that is not quite right — almost always produces more clarity than the alternative, which is thinking about thinking about the work.

I am carrying forward a more honest accounting of what the year actually cost: the people who absorbed the instability on my behalf, the version of myself that was unavailable, the things I said mattered that I did not protect adequately. Not as guilt but as information. The next year will be shaped partly by what this accounting requires.

And I am carrying forward the stubbornness that got me through the moments when the evidence for continuing was not obvious. Not indiscriminate stubbornness — the kind that refuses to update. But the stubborn belief that the thing being built matters, that the problem being solved is real, and that the right response to difficulty in service of something meaningful is to keep going.

That belief is tested more often than I expected. It is also, so far, consistently the right one.