Hey Reader,
You don’t have infinite time. You have until Friday.
I hope I sound repetitive. I’d say it every week, because little else matters. No one cares about your horizontal fluff work. What matters is whether the business is moving exponentially forward in the right direction. Right now. Clock speed. The speed at which you release, get feedback, learn, iterate, release again. Clock speed. The fastest team to learn wins. Clock speed. Getting in traffic and proving what you believe to be true.
The Memo. The Memo. The Memo. This isn’t about panic, it’s acceleration, it's you being able to prove to me why I am wrong.
Founders live in this always on, incremental improvement, opportunity-is-infinite delusion. It’s not that you lose urgency or have some misunderstanding about what's at stake. It’s that, by mistake, over time, you stop prioritizing ruthlessly because tomorrow exists.
You confuse motion for progress - and all of that progress is reasonable, rational, expected, and fair - no one would argue with the work you are doing. Cleaner dashboards, add integrations, tweak flows, add features, add analytics, build better onboarding, write documentation, do more sales, create more funnels, scrape more emails, pray to more gods.
But with the chaos, the fires, the mayhem, the magic, the good, and the bad that make up a founders week, it’s hard to commit to the one thing hard enough that it could end - and by end we mean there is some logical conclusion. (Kill Chain)....
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The fear of commitment to the thing, the urgency, is probably not laziness or procrastination or being afraid of the work, it's prob more aligned to self-preservation. Doing the thing to the end, means there is an outcome, and with that outcome is the fear of failure - it's worse than the slow death of horizontal fluff because its easier to choose the delusion of infinite tomorrow over the risk of finding the answer today.
Time is endless/infinite is not me saying you have all the time in the world, or endless runway, patience, or stamina - it's way simpler, because tomorrow exists, your sense of purpose over time naturally dulls. That's it.
The constraint should always be... You have until Friday.
What would you cut, ship, sell, execute, operate, whatever, if this were the last week that mattered?
Let's rephrase, the VC says i'll give you $1m in 30 days if you show enough momentum, growth, leadership, capability, hustle, competency, whatever. I would assume you would show all of us what velocity looks like. You would fight like hell to show speed in the right direction. Results that matter.
If you only had until Friday, on Monday morning you’d take the deals in your funnel that aren’t moving. You would stop sending “are we there yet?” emails and phone them. On the phone. The actual phone. Not the phone that looks like an email. You would work out how to remove every single friction point to get a yes.
If you only had until Friday, you’d move out the employee that’s not a fit. The one everyone knows isn’t a fit.
If you only had until Friday, you would say no to the customer who is having difficulty understanding boundaries.
If you only had until Friday, you would think hard about the meetings, moments, and people who can take time and energy out of your day.
If you only had until Friday, (your turn...)
You’d watch those PostHog recordings, go through your own onboarding, focus on what’s in the sprint that's going to make the move/impact you need, but most of all, the week would matter. And by matter, not to use my fave phrase again, I don’t mean more horizontal fluff. I mean real real movement.
For most of us. Last week looks like this week. You do your demo calls, move your leads to the right, publish the newsletter, meet with engineering, answer support, put out some fires. Do the thing. This is not about predictability, or rhythm or having a process, we want that. This is about what happens in that time, because if this week looks like last week, how can you expect to make the progress you need?
So maybe going into this week, the question is what are you not going to do?
What are you going to actively choose not to do in order to do the thing you need to do stronger, better, clearer, faster? Not the "not to do" because you think you are above it, the "not to do" because you cannot afford to do it.
It doesn’t mean ignore the long term. I’m not arguing against ITB (invest in the business) versus RTB (run the business). I’m not arguing against long-term vision. Things take time. Not everything is a one-week thing, sure. This is more explicit. What the f happens now?
It’s Sunday night. Write me the email of what will have happened by this Friday at 5 p.m. Tell me. What are you going to absolutely do this week like your business depends on it, because it kinda does.
If you are going to write the email, for yourself, for me, that email needs to have depth. There has to be a real chance of failure. Without it, there’s no success. Without the chance of failure, there’s no story. You need deadlines, something to be at stake.
Sometimes, working out what you need to get done is the hard part. It's not prioritization, laziness, fear, or any other bullshit insult. Sometimes you just don't know what the right thing looks like, and working out the right thing IS the hard part. You are a bit wrong on your solution, a bit wrong on your go to market, a bit wrong on your pricing model, a bit wrong on a few things, but it's impossible to see in the fishbowl. I accept that. I hear you. This. Go back to the beginning. Start there. The original thesis.
Still stuck. Do the Hotshot Challenge. If the Dropbox CEO parachuted into your company to take your job, what would they fix by Friday? What would they ignore? What black magic would they pull off that you haven't? Do that. Call it whatever you want, but it’s urgency.
Maybe... You don’t need more time. You need a deadline.
Hurry up.
If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.
LFG.
- James
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