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Notes on building something of your own: customers, pricing, decisions, avoidance, ambition, identity, and all the places where business and psychology start getting mixed together.
What Went Wrong — Ep. 04: Avoidance
Why the smartest founders are exceptional at avoiding the work that matters — and how to spot avoidance that looks exactly like hard work.
What Went Wrong — Ep. 03: Body & Therapy
Why talk therapy only goes so far — and what happens when you stop thinking your way through it and start feeling it in the body instead.
What Went Wrong — Ep. 02: Happiness
Why chasing happiness backfires, and what has to happen first before it can show up.
What Went Wrong — Ep. 01: Productivity
Aggelos Mouzakitis and Manuel Mendez unpack the shame cycle behind procrastination — why 'just do the work' rarely works, and what actually restores motivation, flow and follow-through.
When the drive to succeed is really just the fear of falling behind
Minuttia founder George Chasiotis gets honest about fear-driven ambition, burning out inside a business he built, and the difference between surviving and truly living.
When founder builds a company around his life - not the other way around
MentorCruise founder Dominic Monn on avoiding burnout, the loneliness of running a business, and why he stopped chasing the last 10%.
The turtle and the shell
What happens to your identity when the job stops answering the question.
You took the vacation. You came back feeling the same way.
Why rest doesn't fix it, and what the flatness and Sunday dread are actually pointing to.
High-functioning burnout pandemic
And it's not caused by what 99% of the content online will tell you.
What 'lost purpose' actually means for many high performers
Not what you are expecting.
Therapy has a branding problem
And high performers are paying for it.
Why do high performers keep winning and still feel stuck?
How early conditioning keeps ambitious people optimising for the wrong things.
The parent archetypes creating high performers with chronic self-doubt
How early approval patterns wire achievement to anxiety.
What doubt is actually protecting you from
How high performers mistake emotional avoidance with the need for a better plan.
High performance as a way to get accepted by your family
The child that wants to be seen by mum and dad that lives inside many high performers.
The loneliness and emotional pressure that founders experience
There's a specific isolation that shows up in founders that's distinct from regular loneliness.
Why hard work alone doesn't advance you
A misunderstanding of how advancement works past a certain level.
Who are you if you are not "crushing" it?
When your identity is enmeshed with the concept of constant success.
Self-analysis as a meta way to maintain control
How smart, analytical people stay stuck for years by asking their biased brain to analyse their biased brain.
Is it "post-holiday anxiety" or just clarity?
Why going back to work feels like a threat.
The elaborate performance of "trying to change"
The complex, multilevel, almost artistic mechanisms of avoidance people build.
We've turned ADHD diagnosis into a trend
And that helps no one.
The high cost of endless pondering
And why it's causing the opposite of what you want to achieve.
The coaching industry's credibility problem (and why it should matter to you)
A polite call-out to all coaches and coaching programs out there.
You're creating the exact problem you're trying to avoid
Why your checked-out attitude at work might bring what you're afraid of.
You're just trading one type of friction for another
Why the grass is not greener on the other side of the corporate/startup fence.
Shared accountability, leading without authority, and other funny corporate myths
What "we're all in this together" actually means when things go wrong.