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You're great at fucking around. That's how you got to seven figures.

You're terrible at finding out. That's why you're stuck there.

The drive that got you here doesn't carry you to the next stage. It buries assets in your business and dresses the burials up as good judgment.

A founder I work with was sitting on a graveyard.

There's the app. Fully built by an outside team a couple of years ago….never launched because the polish work was going to take more time than she had.

There's a major book deal. Months of work to negotiate. The final terms were lopsided, so she walked.

There's a free course. Thousands of people on the list. Designed as a funnel into her premium offer. No follow-up. No nurture. No offer.

With no context, you’d think: this founder is undisciplined. Distracted. A squirrel.

You'd be wrong.

When I dug into each of those decisions, they all held up.

The product? The market had shifted under it before launch. The polish work she had left was suddenly in service of a use case that had moved.

The book deal? Lopsided terms. Signing it would've meant handing over equity in the asset she's spent a decade building (her name), for an advance she didn't need.

The course funnel? The conversion infrastructure never got built, because the product it was meant to convert to was never fully taken seriously.

Each decision was defensible. Yet the aggregate of all those defensible decisions was still a graveyard.

Look at when each of those calls got made.

She was tired. She was running the main business. Money was coming in from major brand deals. Shipping meant finding out—finding out the product wasn't good enough, that the deal had been worth taking, that the funnel needed real work.

Every one of those decisions got made under the same conditions. Late at night, alone, after a long day in the business that was actually paying her. With a defensible reason for "no" sitting right there on the table, in a moment where the cost of choosing "yes" was the one thing she didn't have left.

The decisions weren't the problem. The conditions under which she kept making them were.

When I named this, she fell back on a familiar self-description: she gets excited, dives in, gets bored, moves to the next thing.

I told her that wasn't quite right. She wasn't building things she got bored of. She was making every shipping call in a state where shipping was the more expensive option—and the math always came out the same.

She didn't push back. She knew.

I call this the FAFO Founder pattern. Great at fucking around. Never quite gets to finding out.

The $1-2M founder is, almost by definition, someone who fucks around well. They had to. That's how they got here.

Drive + willingness to start plus a high tolerance for ambiguity is the literal job description of the early stage. They've been rewarded for that profile for years.

The trap is that the same profile, applied at the next stage, produces the graveyard pattern. Start the app. Hit a real obstacle. Cut losses. Move on. Start the book. Hit a real obstacle. Cut losses. Move on.

Each cycle is defensible. Each cycle even looks like maturity—I know when to walk away. But you never find out what was on the other side of any of them, because finding out requires stamina beyond raw drive.

This is the exact moment a growth operator like me earns their keep. Not by being smarter about any individual decision (the founder is usually right), but by doing three things the founder structurally can't do for themselves:

1. Hold the whole portfolio in view at the same time.

A founder evaluates decisions one at a time, because they're living the business one day at a time. An operator looks at all the orphaned assets together and sees the pattern that doesn't show up in any single conversation. The aggregate stops hiding behind defensible individual calls.

2. Make the full decision.

Straddling is what FA founders do best. They keep the half-baked thing alive without committing to finishing it or killing it. An operator can name the call that's been hovering for months and refuse to let it drift back into the noise. Decide. Sequence. Move.

3. Point your energy in the right direction.

They find the one thing worth your full conviction...and then protect that thing from the next 10 interesting starts that will try to compete with it.

The energy isn't the problem. The direction is.

Your job is NOT to stop fucking around. It's to pick the thing you'll be all the way in on, and then concentrate your energy on finding out what the other side of that thing looks like.

That's what happened in her case. We didn't try to revive the graveyard. We picked one asset—the one bleeding the most attention—and rebuilt the conditions around it. Six weeks later it was shipping. The product it was meant to feed is being rebuilt now, on the same model.

The orphans didn't all come back to life. One project did. That's the move.

What in your business have you been excited about off-and-on without ever being all the way in?

—Chris Piper

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