The Corner You Can Reach
I don't remember when I started putting the towel under the door before bed. I know I was quite young. There were late-night parties on the other side of that door most nights, school nights included. The heavy cigarette smoke, blaring music, and noise from all of the people came into the room where the four of us slept.
I couldn't make it stop. So I rolled up a towel and shut my room off from the rest of the house.
I couldn't fix the house, but I could make my bed and keep my corner. Everything else stayed unfixable. My corner stayed mine.
That's still the operating system I run my companies on. Fix the corner you can reach.
This isn't a story about what I can't do. I can see six steps ahead. Foresight is my superpower. I'm a software engineer. I build systems that run without me, and I can hold a five-year product map in my head and tell you where it bends. Seeing far has never been my problem.
When I built Joany, my health insurance company, the vision was enormous on purpose. We were going to simplify health insurance for the American consumer. That meant becoming brokers for every insurer in every state. It meant housing data on every consumer health plan in the country: drug formularies that changed constantly, ten years of claims history for the entire US, and the financials of every carrier. Massive data. Massive product map. Massive ambition. I could see exactly where I wanted us to end up.
Underneath that vision sat questions that could have ended me before we started, if I'd let them. How will we ever get claims data for all our customers? How do we become brokers in all fifty states? How do we convert consumers to a platform for something nobody wants to think about?
Notice what those questions have in common. Not one of them could be answered from where I stood.
So much of that business sat outside my control. The market. How every insurer would react when we started selling directly to their customers and, many times, recommending a competitor. I knew they would come after us. I was right. What I couldn't know was what it would look like, or whether any single move I made was the right one.
That's the part of the job nobody gets to skip. Founders work in ambiguity. Every real decision is a bet, and a bet can be wrong. But watch what the pressure to be right actually does. It doesn't make you more careful. It keeps you from ever starting.
So I start small. I always start small. I pick one tiny move, and I focus on it like a beast. Nothing else gets in. People think I move fast, and I do, but I'm never thinking about speed. I'm thinking about the one move in front of me. Speed is what falls out when the move is small enough to actually make.
It's also why I build systems everywhere I go. I'm very good at controlled chaos, but only when I can see the pieces. The system lays the whole board out in front of me so I can choose where to make the first dent. Then I make it.
The overwhelm still finds me when someone demands the ending first. We're building a house here in Oaxaca, and in one of our first meetings the architect asked me one floor or two, where on the land my office would go, which view I wanted, what finishes I had in mind. I left with a migraine that took a day to lift. Her questions weren't unreasonable. They were in an impossible order, and my body answered before my mind did. That reaction isn't a flaw. It's an accurate report: the certainty being demanded doesn't exist yet.
If your shoulders go up when you sit down to write the annual plan, if you keep circling the roadmap you actually want and never writing it, look closer before you call it procrastination. Procrastination is avoiding work you know how to do. This is something else. This is the pressure to make the exact right move on a board you don't control. The fix for procrastination is discipline. The fix for the pressure to be right is a move small enough that being wrong is cheap.
A founder I coach has never been able to use folders or labels. Every organizing system she builds dies within a week, and she's spent years calling it a mental block. It isn't a block. To set up the system, she has to pick the right structure before she's used it once. Picking wrong feels unsafe. So her brain won't settle and choose. She isn't disorganized. She's trying to predict safety: get the ending right before you start.
The rule I run instead: decide only what the next step requires. What's the tiniest thing I can do right now, without having to know the whole thing? The second step is almost always visible once you've taken the first.
The decisions that stall founders longest, which hire, which market, which bet, feel too big to make with the information at hand because they are. The smallest real move produces the information that makes the big one obvious. That isn't the absence of vision. Vision tells you which direction to face. Step one is how you move before the map exists.
The towel never fixed the house. It fixed the night. And enough fixed nights added up to a kid who made it to school in the morning. I've built seven companies on the same trade. Three of them passed $200 million in revenue. I saw six steps ahead the whole time. I only ever acted on the first one.
If the pressure to be right has kept you from starting, the answer isn't a better plan. Shrink the move until being wrong is cheap. Find the corner you can reach, and reach it.
Reply or comment and tell me about the project you haven't started because you can't yet see how to get it right. I read every one.
-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.
