Move Like It's Going to Work Out

Running a company is mostly a long stretch of not knowing. You don't know if the product is right, if the client renews, if the cash lasts the quarter. Early on I treated all that uncertainty as a reason to be careful — to hedge, to wait for a little more information before I committed to anything.

It made everything worse. When you move like it might not work out, you hedge. You half-build the feature so it's easy to walk back. You soften the pitch so it can't really fail. You put off the hard conversation. And the hedging is usually the thing that causes the outcome you were afraid of.

So I flipped it. Now I try to move as if it's already going to work out. Not because I'm sure it will — most days I'm not — but because that's the only stance that gets me to do the actual work. You ship the thing. You make the call. You say the number out loud. Acting on the assumption is what forces the steps that make the assumption true.

This isn't optimism. Optimism is a mood, and moods don't show up on the bad days. This is a decision you make especially on the bad days. Some weeks I have no evidence anything is working, and I move like it is anyway, because the alternative — protecting myself from a failure that hasn't happened yet — is a guaranteed way to get nowhere.

Action is what clears the fog. You take a step, reality answers, and the problem that felt impossible last week turns out to have a handle on it somewhere. So assume it works. Then go make that true.