If you played in the NBA and ran yourself the way you’ve run yourself through this year of board meetings, launches and AI panic, they’d bench you.
In a company, you can run yourself that way for years and get praised for it. They put you on a stage and ask how you do it.
At Joany, I was the fastest fix in the company. I wore the exhaustion like a badge. It took a concussion to finally bench me.
But the mistake started long before I got hurt. The company had grown, and I was still measuring my contribution by how much work I could get through.
Early on, that made sense. When you start a company, your hours really are the business. You close the first customers, build the first version and fix whatever breaks. There’s a direct relationship between how much you do and how far the company gets.
Then you build a team. You hire people who can do the work, many of them better than you can. The company becomes capable of doing more than you could ever accomplish yourself.
At that point, the most valuable thing you give it changes.
Your team can bring you the numbers. They can build the product and run the operation. What they need from you is the ability to see what those things mean together. To recognize the opportunity before it’s obvious. To sense that something is wrong with a deal everyone else wants you to sign.
Your most valuable output becomes your insight, instinct and intuition.
Insight lets you see something in the business that other people haven’t connected yet. Your experience gives you an instinct for where to move. Sometimes your intuition tells you to pause before you can fully explain why.
You still need evidence. You still need people who challenge you. But you’re responsible for making the call, often before the information is complete.
That’s a different job from getting through the longest list in the company. It requires you to show up differently.
And it’s remarkably easy to keep working in a way that makes you worse at it.
Right now, the AI industry is handing out badges for working around the clock. Some startups hire on 996: nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week. The argument underneath it is that there’s a short window to win your market, and you can recover when it closes.
Even if you don’t run an AI company, you feel that pressure. You might be having the best year you’ve ever had, and you still walk out of rooms feeling behind.
So you add more hours. You stay close to everything. You fill the little time you have left with another call, another podcast, another person’s view of what you should be doing.
Meanwhile, the things the company most needs from you get harder to hear.
You don’t necessarily notice, because so much else still works. You can answer email when you’re exhausted. You can run the all-hands on adrenaline. There’s still plenty to point to at the end of the day.
But when did you last have enough room in your head to notice something nobody had asked you to look at?
When did you last leave a conversation knowing what you thought, instead of carrying everyone else’s urgency into the next one?
A friend who runs a bigger company tells you over dinner that you’ve already missed your window. They’re human, with their own pressures and their own fear of being wrong.
Rested, you can consider what they said. You can hear the useful part and ask whether it applies to your business.
Exhausted, it’s harder to separate any of it. Their fear walks in and sits down as if it were yours. By Monday, you’re asking the team to change direction, though nothing in your company changed over the weekend.
Your instincts haven’t disappeared. You’ve made it harder to hear them over everything else.
Once the concussion limited me to twenty hours a week, I couldn’t keep being the fastest fix. If I pushed past those hours, my vision blurred and my words came out wrong.
I was devastated. I didn’t feel like anyone needed me anymore, and I was sure it was all going to fall to the ground.
It didn’t. We flourished.
I protected those hours fiercely and spent nearly all of them thinking. The company had needed my thinking more than my hours for a long time. I’d been too busy to see it.
I wouldn’t choose the way I learned that. But I build my businesses differently because of it.
This is why I think CEOs need to see themselves as athletes.
A professional athlete’s job includes much more than the minutes they play. They train. They study their performance. They work with coaches who can see what they can’t see themselves. They take nutrition and recovery seriously because they expect to be able to perform again.
Nobody looks at that preparation and asks why they aren’t playing another game instead.
We understand that an athlete can be completely committed to winning and still need to leave the court. We expect them to give everything when it counts. We also expect them to prepare for that effort and recover from it.
Then we run a company as if every available hour should be game time.
Everyone loves the flu game, me included. Michael Jordan, sick as a dog, helping win a Finals game. We remember what he managed under extraordinary conditions.
But it was one game, in the Finals.
You’re running the flu game every Tuesday.
There will be stretches when your company needs everything you have. A difficult negotiation. A launch. A crisis you couldn’t have planned for. I want you capable of meeting those moments fully.
That means protecting the capacity you’ll need before they arrive. If you’ve spent all of it getting through an ordinary week, what do you bring when the game actually demands more?
Once your company depends on your insight, instinct and intuition, rest becomes part of keeping the business operational. It belongs in the same category of seriousness as having money in the bank.
You wouldn’t spend your cash down to nothing every week and assume you’d somehow find more when it mattered. Yet plenty of CEOs run themselves that way.
Recovery is always scheduled for after the next milestone. Then the milestone arrives, another one appears, and recovery gets pushed again.
The athlete’s approach gives you a different way to organize the job.
Start with the moments when the company needs you at your best. Look at what’s coming: the pricing decision, the negotiation, the conversation with someone you can’t afford to misunderstand. Prepare for those moments deliberately. Protect the night before. Leave room to think before you walk into the room.
Then protect time when you’re recovering from the effort. A trip where you work the entire time doesn’t do that. Neither does an evening with your family while you keep one eye on Slack.
One founder told me about a trip where they tried to do both. The trip was bad and the work was bad. The only time they truly put the phone down was on long runs, and that was where their best ideas showed up.
You probably know something about the conditions in which you hear yourself clearly. Give those conditions a place in your working life. They can’t depend on having finished everything.
Training needs a place, too. Time to examine a decision after you’ve seen the consequences. To understand why you missed something. To develop a skill the next stage of the company will demand from you.
An athlete reviews the game. A CEO often moves straight into the next meeting.
Choose a consequential decision from the past month. What did you see correctly? What did you dismiss? Where did you know something was off and talk yourself out of paying attention?
That’s how experience becomes more useful. You give yourself time to learn from it.
And build support around the person doing this job. A coach who challenges your reasoning. Advisors whose experience helps you see further. The people who help you take care of your body and recover properly.
Their role is to help you arrive capable of making your own calls. You still have to play.
Your company needs an arrangement that makes this possible. People need authority to act while you’re unavailable. You need an agreement about what deserves an interruption. If every routine decision still requires you, protecting your capacity has to become part of how you design the business.
I love to work. I want to do great work for a long time. I’ve also hired CEOs, and I’ve never looked for the exhausted one to bet my business on.
I want the person who’s on their game. Someone who can see what’s happening, trust what their experience is telling them, and stay open enough to notice when they’re wrong.
That’s what I owe the people who depend on me, too.
You built the company by giving it everything you had. As it grows, you have to get more precise about what it needs from you.
There’s a point when another hour of your effort is worth less than the insight you’re too tired to have.
What helps you hear your own instincts again—and how long has it been since you gave yourself that? Reply and tell me. I read every one.
—Christine
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