It’s useless worrying about your business.
Worse, it’s counterproductive.
Founders and CEOs are some of the most talented worriers I’ve ever met. We think about our businesses constantly. We obsess. We mull thoughts over and over through the night. We replay conversations, and write imaginary futures in our heads. Over time, this state of mind becomes a personality. “I can’t switch off” stops being a problem and starts becoming a badge of honour. The sleepless nights, the 3am Slack messages, the 7am emails on a Sunday morning… this inability to let go becomes who you are.
It’s a form of addiction. Addiction to worry, to work, to being needed. Co-dependency dressed up as hustle. It’s not healthy; not for you, not for the people around you, nor for your company.
Here’s the bigger problem: when you stew on problems too long, you stop seeing reality. You spin up stories in your head. You write scripts for other people’s behaviour.
“He always does that.”
“We need to do this.”
“I’m not good at that.”
None of it is tested. None of it is grounded in data. And yet, the more you think it, the truer it feels. Rumination becomes story, story becomes belief, belief becomes reality. That’s dangerous. In an agile environment where everything must be tested, rumination is the worst form of time spent.
People problems
The most obvious example of this is around people. Founders get frustrated at employees, in their head. “They’re not doing their job properly, because of X, Y or Z.” The founder has fictitious arguments and discussions with the employee all in their mind. When they finally bring it up in an honest conversation, they find out that the employee is having problems at home. The team member feels unable to do their job well because of a product problem you didn’t know about.
I remember we had an ops person who I thought was lazy, I thought they weren’t doing much. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t fixing problems and sorting processes out. I was making all sorts of stories up in my head. Turns out they were drowning in customer service requests all day, because of some fundamental issues in our booking system and contract between users and third-party contractors.
Of course, some worry is useful. Worry is just fear, and fear is a radar for risk. Every good founder has it. But what we do with it matters.
Being afraid feels vulnerable. And founders hate vulnerability, because we spend our life dressing up vulnerability as potential, reframing problems to opportunities. So instead, we try to out-think our fear. We chew it over endlessly, hoping logic will beat it down. But it never does. It just multiplies.
Here’s the truth: insight and intuition are powerful. But worry, rolled around in your head for weeks, is toxic. It damages your health and clouds your judgment.
Next steps
So what’s the alternative? Express it. Quickly, honestly, in the right forum.
- Concerned about acquisition costs? Share it with your marketing lead.
- Frustrated that your sales manager is logging in late? Tell them now, not after more thinking.
- Scared your company might not make it? That’s for a coach, a mentor, or your board. Not a town hall.
The first step is simple: notice what worries keep looping in your head. Second: ask yourself, ‘Who is the right person to share this with now? What can I do about this?’ And then do it, quickly.
Unspoken worry festers. Spoken fear gets solved.
Worrying isn’t leadership. It’s a bad habit. One that’s bad for you, and bad for business.
