Mindset
The case for a great little business
Why a great little business can beat a great big one: the inherited scale story, what deliberate smallness looks like, how bureaucracy creeps in, and knowing what enough means.
Category
Mindset
Focus, doubt, energy, and decision-making. The internal work behind building a company.
14 articles
Articles in Mindset
Mindset
The comfortable lie that kills companies
How companies drift into failure through comfortable lies, the specific ones founders tell, and a weekly truth-telling habit that surfaces hard facts before they become a crisis.
Mindset
The founder who cannot let go
Why founders struggle to delegate: how the founding trait becomes the ceiling, the fear underneath the excuses, and learning to let go without losing standards.
Mindset
Why some founders quit Twitter / X
Founders who quit Twitter successfully replace it with newsletters, RSS, private Slacks, and Mastodon — tools that restore agency over attention and audience.
Mindset
Burnout Signals You'll Miss the First Time
Burnout is a clinically defined syndrome with three specific dimensions. Here is why founders mistake cynicism for pragmatism and reduced efficacy for market conditions.
Mindset
The 90-minute morning ritual
Morning routine content promises productivity gains, but only two findings survive scrutiny: circadian light exposure and the cost of phone-first mornings.
Mindset
The walk: what the research actually says about thinking on your feet
Walking reliably boosts divergent thinking and does little for convergent problem-solving. The founder accounts line up with the data better than most productivity claims.
Mindset
Always-available founders: the cost
Founder availability reads as commitment. The research on attention, after-hours work, and the founder bottleneck says it teaches the team to stop deciding.
Mindset
Imposter syndrome at year five
Imposter syndrome at year five is not the year-one version aged. It is the gap between what you built and what people assume you built. Here is why that distinction matters.
Mindset
The discipline of shipping ugly
Ship ugly does not mean ship broken. Linear, Basecamp, and Reid Hoffman all point to the same narrow target: minimum aesthetic, maximum function.
Mindset
Founder advice that aged worst
Five iconic pieces of founder advice that failed to generalize when capital got scarce, users got picky, and remote work got real.
Mindset
The script for saying no
Derek Sivers, Tim Ferriss, and Warren Buffett all have famous scripts for saying no. Each works in its domain. None works everywhere.