The Corner You Can Reach
I don't remember when I started putting the towel under the door. I know I was little. Light and noise were coming in from the rest of the house and I couldn't sleep. But I had to sleep before school in the morning. So I rolled up a towel and shut the room off from the rest of it.
I was still too young to change the house or how we lived. But I could make my bed and keep my room quiet. Even while everything else stayed unfixable, I could control my corner.
That's the operating system I use to run my companies.
Underneath every framework and system, that's the impulse: fix the corner you can reach. When I sit down to work, I don't scan the whole. I never map out thirty steps. I ask one question: what is the smallest single thing I can do right now, without needing to know what comes after?
And then I do that.
Last week, I was working with a founder on a strategy session. She wanted to use a template to map out her next quarter. She'd already pulled the numbers she needed, but had tried and failed two days in a row to write the roadmap. When we talked, on day three, her overwhelm turned into physical nausea.
Afterward, she tried to call her response procrastination. It absolutely was not.
Like me, this founder grew up regulating chaos. She learned early on that you fix what you can, because trying to fix the whole was impossible. Even just looking at the big picture led to shutdown. So she learned to look at the small things she could control and move on those.
She built her company on that instinct. She's built it to eight figures working like that. Then, along the way, she was told that the only way to the next chapter was a thirty-step plan. No matter how she tried, she couldn't make that plan.
Most productivity advice is written for people whose nervous systems find planning regulating. For them, a roadmap is a calming thing. They write the plan and their shoulders drop.
If your shoulders go up when you sit down to plan, if you start to spin, get ill, avoid the complicated plan despite your own urgency around it, you're not procrastinating. You're refusing a planning style that your body cannot run. Those are different problems, and they have different fixes.
The fix for procrastination is discipline. The fix for the wrong operating system is the right operating system.
For anyone who freezes when they try to hold the entire picture at once, the right operating system is "step-one-only thinking." You don't sit down to plan the quarter. You sit down and ask one question: what is the first thing? You find the first thing you can do right now, in the next twenty minutes, without needing to know what comes after it.
Working this way keeps your feet on the ground. When you ask, "what's the smallest thing I can do right now," you have to look around you. You have to consider where you are, where you're blocked, and where movement is possible.
When you do that one thing — it could be sending an email, opening a doc, making a call — you let the next move reveal itself. The second step is almost always visible once you've made the first. And the third once the second is done.
Founders get stuck on the most consequential decisions. Which hire, which market, which strategic bet all feel too big to make with the information they have. But the smallest move will usually produce the information that makes the bigger decision obvious.
You're not walking the whole staircase in the dark. You're lighting one step at a time. The whole staircase gets walked. It just doesn't get seen at the start.
For a long time, I felt like a fraud for working like this. I was surrounded by people who could open a plan and see six moves ahead in one sitting. I couldn't do what they did. I still can't. I thought of this as my defect. It wasn't a defect. It was a different operating system, and it worked.
I built seven companies working this way. Three of them to two hundred million in combined revenue. I raised thirty million dollars in venture walking one step at a time. My way gave me an edge. A business that runs on the roadmap depends on the world staying legible, the plan holding, and you staying steady. Eventually one of those will fail. Step-one-only kept me nimble. I could move without a map. I could hear my gut and learn to trust it.
But more than anything, my way worked because it was my way. Even during the times I felt bad about it, I ran the operating system that I could actually execute, not the one I'd been told a real CEO uses.
If a strategy has beaten you every time you've tried it, despite real effort and understanding, the strategy is the problem. Sometimes it's okay to just work how you work. Stop trying to run someone else's operating system and go find yours.
Reply and tell me the strategy you've been trying to force. The one everyone says works but you can't run. I read every message that comes in.
Christine 👑
If You Want To Go Deeper...
Here's where to start:
⚫️ Private Coaching: for early and growth-stage entrepreneurs who want to lead with more clarity while increasing their resiliency. See if we're a good fit here.
⚫️ The 20 Hour CEO Self-Paced Course:The frameworks, systems, and playbooks to stop being the bottleneck — on your schedule.
⚫️ The 20 Hour CEO Live Cohort: 3 weeks, 6 live sessions. Bring your actual business, rebuild how it runs, and leave with systems already in motion.
