I talk to my business partner Nym almost every day. Last month I told him I’d hit rock bottom.
And I meant it. I’ve been scared this year in a way I haven’t really said out loud. Up in the middle of the night, head in my hands, trying to figure out how I’m going to make payroll. Shutting businesses down. Ending the sprint I’ve been running for five years. It got to a point where I could not picture it getting worse than it was right then, and I told him that. I said I can’t imagine a world where this gets harder than it is right now.
Then last week my wife went on a girls’ trip.
Which she’s way overdue for. She hadn’t taken one in years and she earned it, so no complaints from me. But it meant I had the kids by myself all week. Still carrying all the same business stuff. Still scared about the same things I was scared about last month. And now I was also doing drop-off and pickup and dinner and bedtime, trying to actually be there for them, be patient, be present, while the back of my head is still grinding on payroll.
So it got worse. The exact thing I told Nym I couldn’t imagine, there it was. Harder than last month.
And that’s actually the good news. Because it means the thing I’d been telling myself, that I’m maxed out, that I can’t take any more, wasn’t true. I could take more. I did. There was a whole other gear in there I didn’t know about until the week made me find it.
Why does that matter? Because it’s not the weight that was crushing me. It’s that I’d decided I was already at my limit. Once you’re sure you’ve hit the ceiling, every new thing that lands feels impossible. But you haven’t hit it. You almost never have. The fear isn’t really about how heavy the thing is. It’s about not knowing whether you can carry what’s coming next, and the only way I know to kill that fear is to live through the thing you were scared of and still be standing after.
I don’t want to make this sound cleaner than it is. I’m still in it. I’m still scared about payroll. This isn’t me telling you I cracked the code and now it’s fine. It’s not fine. But I carried more last week than I thought I could a month ago and that did something to me.
And here’s where it goes somewhere you might not expect. I’m not about to tell you to go push harder. I’m doing the opposite. I’m ending the sprint. I’m growing slower from here, more carefully, more methodically. I don’t need the big upside I was chasing.
The week is the whole reason I can say that and mean it. I used to think stopping would mean I hit my limit. Now I know my limit is higher than this, because I found it at 2am with a kid asleep down the hall and payroll still not solved. So when I say I’m choosing to grow slower, it’s not because I can’t take the heat. It’s because I found out I can, and I don’t want to. That’s a different thing. “I can’t do this” and “I don’t want to live like this” feel exactly the same at 2am and they are not the same at all.
Every mentor I’ve got has a version of this story. The middle of the night, the head in the hands, the payroll math. Every single one of them walked through it. You don’t grow a business, or yourself, without going through some version of that fire. You can skip it, but then you grow slow by accident. I’d rather grow slow on purpose.
So if you’re in it right now, here’s the only thing worth doing. Quit asking whether you can handle what’s in front of you. You can. That question is just the fear talking and it lies. Ask the other one instead. Is this the life I actually want, or the one I think I’m supposed to want? Because one of those is fear and the other one is information, and you can’t tell them apart until morning.
