Some of the most productive founders you'll meet are also the most avoidant — they avoid brilliantly. This episode of What Went Wrong looks at the version of avoidance that doesn't look like avoidance at all: 14-hour days spent perfecting positioning instead of doing sales, endless research that stands in for action, polished psychological explanations that keep the real work at arm's length.
If you've ever felt stuck, worked hard without moving forward, or quietly suspected you're afraid of the very success you say you want, this conversation is aimed squarely at you.
Aggelos and co-host Manuel Mendez take avoidance apart from both the coach's chair and their own lived experience as operators. What sets this apart from the usual "just be disciplined" take is that it refuses the easy answer. Aggelos draws on years of working with founders — and on his own patterns — to show why powering through often backfires and where the line between doing the hard thing and harming yourself truly sits.
Tune in to hear about:
- The type of avoidance that masks as productivity — and why being "badass" at the wrong task is the most convincing disguise of all
- Why so many ambitious people are secretly protecting themselves from success, and what that has to do with responsibility
- What Aggelos hears when a client asks him to "help with accountability" — and the clarifying question he asks back before agreeing
- How hiring a coach can itself become a sophisticated form of hiding
- Where the "just do it, power through" advice is genuinely appropriate — and the specific moment it tips over into being harmful
- How things you avoided as a child may have quietly built the identity, career and company you have today
Full transcript
Aggelos: So we are here to discuss avoidance in solopreneurs and founders. And I was telling you right before hitting the record button that I am the king of that pattern. It's one of the most fascinating topics for me, because it's funny. And what's funny to me is what smart people come up with when they really want to avoid doing something. I would love to hear any stories you have of avoidance. What do you avoid typically? What did you manage to stop avoiding?
Manuel: I'd like to first break down avoidance as a behavior, because it's escapism from something. You're effectively trying to escape something. And as an entrepreneur, usually if you're what people call type A or perfectionist, it's that you're afraid of whatever outcome you're headed towards. And often we don't realize that a lot of us are afraid of success. Or afraid of what if people realize that I have imposter syndrome. So to me avoidance came in the form of perfectionism. It still comes in the form of researching the best possible approach before I actually implement it. If you ask me to research something, I will happily spend five, six, eight weeks researching it before I actually implement.
When I started my Facebook agency, it wasn't about running the ads, it was about finding the best strategy to run ads. And the reality is you get good at running ads by running ads, not by researching the strategy. It's the difference between someone who reads a lot of books about how to be a great football player and someone who actually plays football every day. The learning is in the practice. But entrepreneurs are usually very smart people. And the problem with intelligent people is we'll find ways to escape doing the things that we feel resistance to. If you're an overthinker, you can gain a lot from just doing the thing, no matter what your brain tells you about the resistance.
Aggelos: I related to a lot of that. To me it chronically shows up as productivity towards the wrong direction. Every time I have to do something that I really don't want to do, I persuade myself that I must perfect my positioning. I must chase this great idea. I must perfect the SEO, the LLM discoverability. So it's not that I'm not doing things that are important — it's that I'm doing things that are way less important for what I actually want to achieve. I want to do sales, but I don't want to go out and do sales. So I will try to perfect a way for people to find me themselves so that I don't go out and find them myself. And I'm pretty badass on it. Because otherwise the whole excuse collapses. I might spend 14 hours on it. So at the end of the day, I feel that I worked very hard — and I did work very hard. I just didn't work on something that will produce the results.
And I had that since I was a child, because I'm an official entrepreneur since the age of eight. When I had to study, I was taking the newspaper — I'm that old — and going through the ads. People were selling and buying stuff, and I was making handmade spreadsheets, listing all of my toys. I would apply weird algorithms mixing up factors like how much I like it, its value, its demand. And I would sort my products according to which I must sell first and at what price. A very analytical process — because I didn't want to study.
And then when I got into university, I started my first startup, because I didn't want to study. My first startup was a marketplace where you would get matched with a university student who was very good at one of the lessons, and he could teach you how to pass it for a very small fee. So literally my avoidance of study made me build a startup to fix the problem that I didn't want to study. And that startup worked. But my biggest avoidance is sales. I'm thirty-eight years old. I have been a great closer, but I have never done cold sales outreach. I feel very awkward.
Manuel: Your journey is super cool, but there's one important thing to touch on: sometimes avoidance can be the path that leads us somewhere. For you, you didn't want to study, so you did something else — and that something else actually built other skills. This is what I would call healthy avoidance, because we're actually building skills. For me, as a kid, the way I would avoid studying is I would play a lot of video games — World of Warcraft. I was obsessed with being the best player. And at a certain point I thought, what if I apply this thing of trying to become the best character in the game into my own life? That was the shift that led me into entrepreneurship. So the avoidance led me to a good place.
The problem is when avoidance becomes mental masturbation for its own sake. It's like someone who has problems in their relationship and reads five books about attachment theory, but doesn't implement any of them. Self-development is the biggest one — reading seven self-development books but not changing your habits. Cool, I have the knowledge. And that gives you this kind of reward.
My stories come more with realizations. Have you heard a concept called retard maxing? There's this trend on the internet where people started going against the current of overthinking and planning, where you don't think of the consequences, you just do the thing. It's a bit of a heavy name, but for overthinkers, I think it really works. Let's take the journey of a regular entrepreneur. One of the reasons I got tired of the startup scene was you'd go to these events and meet so many people who had ideas, and the next year they'd still be there. How's your idea going? Still perfecting it. Next year, still there. Form of avoidance. They're almost waiting for permission to do a certain thing — when I have the affirmation that someone else is interested, then I can take the action. But that in itself is a form of avoidance.
One of my favorite questions in psychology: when we have a behavior, I like to ask, how is this serving me? If I go, how is this never-ending research serving me? The answer is, it's keeping me from doing the thing that I really need. And then the question becomes, am I afraid of doing the thing I really need? Usually the answer is yes. Then, why? A lot of people want to be successful. Most are scared of it without actually knowing it. Because success is effectively responsibility. The more successful you become, the more responsibility you have. And especially in men — most modern men have this adverse reaction to responsibility. So if you have an adverse reaction to becoming responsible, you will naturally have an adverse reaction to success. The way we stop avoiding is through the integration of that component we're afraid of. Can I take responsibility in some places of my life? How does that feel? And slowly making our way.
Aggelos: Avoidance is an umbrella term. I might be avoiding doing something, avoiding feeling something, avoiding a realization. At the end of the day, it all boils down to avoiding feeling something. Because when I'm avoiding doing something, it's because I'm avoiding the emotions attached to that something. It takes a lot of different forms. A very typical thing behind the avoidance of success is that it comes with some learned helplessness — which is also a form of intellectual avoidance. And this is what amazes me behind avoidance: it's extremely smart. The smarter the person, the smarter the avoidance.
There are a lot of founders that can get you into a psychological conversation about their imposter syndrome and their inability to achieve something. And you realize, after you've been hoovered inside that over-psychologization, that they're tricking you and tricking themselves, because they're just avoiding something. They've wrapped it around some learned helplessness, and they've even hired you as a way of decentralizing accountability — so you are part of their avoidance too. The next step of the wellness industry: I will hire an expert to help me overcome some bad habits. Or that very typical thing I hear: I want you to help me with accountability. My first thought is, what does that mean for you? Because it's different to say I'm hiring you so you help me be accountable, versus I'm hiring you because just meeting you every week and having to show progress creates a manufactured pressure. The first one is intellectual avoidance. The second is a manufactured way to build a habit — but even that can hide avoidance, because you're using extrinsic help to build intrinsic motivation.
When it comes to avoiding realities, cognitive dissonance is a way to avoid — when I alter my beliefs in order to be aligned with my actions. You might have a guy driving, talking about how all Greeks are uncivilized, and at the same time throwing his cigarette out of the car. If you confront him, he'll be like, is it my cigarette that will solve the problem? He's avoiding the reality that he's part of the problem. Another way to avoid is to confront the person who is mirroring you. If you show me something I don't want to face, I might attack you. Because if I villainize you, then I can keep avoiding.
So what is the solution? First, awareness. Actual genuine awareness. I'm trying to avoid that. Why don't I want to do it? What are the emotions attached to it? The second thing is not trying to power through. Very common among founders is that they try to discipline themselves, to whip themselves, to stop avoiding. They come with a very polished understanding of why they're avoiding — I'm avoiding that because of trauma, because of imposter syndrome — and they try to put their discipline into that. And this is another form of meta-avoidance. Because you're seeking control, putting nice words that soothe you, and then using powering-through as a coping mechanism, which you'll most probably fail, because your nervous system will react back. And third, get used to it. We have to build tolerance towards the feeling of avoidance and keep moving despite it. Talking with an expert or reading wellness or trying to over-explain everything will only make you more intellectual on why you are not achieving.
Manuel: That was very concise, from meta-avoidance to how we get rid of the avoidance loop. A lot of people will get stuck in the first phase, because when you sit down to write what am I avoiding, that requires self-awareness. But the second question — what emotions are attached to that — that's when the level of self-work you've done in the past comes in. A lot of guys will be like, well, no, there's no emotions here. So that often reflects back into a deeper journey. And someone told me a company is often the reflection of its CEO. If you see that a CEO has an integrated psyche — not necessarily enlightened, but do they have the parts of the psyche that allow them to do the work the business needs?
Around midway into my entrepreneurship journey, I used to say entrepreneurship was the greatest spiritual journey, because it reflects so much of what Carl Jung would call the shadow. If things are not happening, you can't blame anyone. It's on you. And if you are blaming someone, then you're externalizing your chance at success — and that in itself is avoidance. If I get a co-founder and I'm like, it's not me, it's the co-founder that's not doing the work, then I'm avoiding the process of building my own project. When you work in a big corporation, you go into a meeting and there's eight people, and it's easy to say it's because Alex didn't do the report. Things that should take one day take four weeks because there's no accountability and everyone's doing their own form of avoidance.
If I had to conclude, it would be to apply a no-bullshit approach to yourself. Really sit down, see yourself in the third person. If you were talking to a friend, and you know they waste two hours on breakfast watching the news and then tell you they don't have enough time to work — really have a direct conversation about what do you want to achieve, and are your actions leading to that? Because oftentimes we say we want to achieve something, but we don't really want it. We might want the dopamine hit that comes with saying we want to achieve it. The more truthful we can be with ourselves, the better lives we'll lead. It comes down to one of the psychological principles I love: as above, so below. Our internal reality will reflect our external reality. Your desire of avoiding pain can be way bigger than your desire of actually succeeding. And afraid is not a bad word. As men especially, it's easy to hear the word afraid and go, I'm not afraid, I fear no man. But you are multiple aspects of the same person living inside the same psyche. And one or more aspects — this is where we talk about the inner child — could be afraid of certain emotions.
Aggelos: On a macro level, avoidance is ultimately the experiences we've had in our life that formed what we perceive as a positive versus a negative emotion. What emotions we have attached to certain things lead us to certain decisions. And these decisions, when they pile up, build you the way you are today. It's avoiding certain things and not avoiding certain other things that make you who you are. The problem starts when you have built a very robust identity based on what you have avoided so far.
Even now I pride myself for being straightforward. But if you look behind my straightforwardness, you'll find that I cannot tolerate uncertainty in relationships. So to deal with that feeling, I've developed an identity of being straightforward. You might find people who are always cool, composed — and behind that, avoiding expressing their real feelings. Or avoidance of conflict. Founders are leading that. I remember one I worked with as head of growth — he was constantly agreeing with me, and I was happy because I thought we were aligned. Then I realized he was also agreeing with the head of UX, who had totally different opinions. We ended up almost fighting, because we had a founder who was avoiding conflict — so to avoid the conflict, he was agreeing with everyone, even conflicting ideas. Probably it came from people-pleasing tendencies built in childhood, a child that built a defense mechanism to pretend alignment towards a caregiver in order to avoid conflict. So experiences you had as a little kid might impact the nature of the business you're building, the career you'll have, the identity you have today.
You made the point about achieving something we might not actually want. That's super frequent in the people I work with, and it was to me when I was a solopreneur. The goal I set was a goal I set through comparison with other people, or with an idealised version of myself. Intellectually, my shame would tell me, you must be that, you must be better than him. But in the process, I wasn't enjoying the journey. It took me years to realize that the reason I avoid is because the thing I want to achieve, I don't actually want. The reason I want it is because I want to prove something. So looking at what you're avoiding might give you important data on whether you're making the right decisions.
And the last thing — group avoidance is the next level. When multiple people happen to want to avoid the same thing, they end up agreeing on something irrational. You might be one individual against a group of people who all want to support an idea because they're hiding. So you might be gaslit that what you're thinking is wrong just because many people want to avoid the same thing. As a closing remark: someone said the source of evil is not bad people, it's people who think they're always right. So by avoiding the difficult road and taking the comfortable road, that is the road to become not a good person. Every time you notice yourself wanting to avoid something, exactly that is the time to ask, why am I avoiding that? And sometimes — when what you're avoiding is the ethical, the good thing — you just have to do it anyway, and power through a little bit.
Manuel: This was great. Evil reigns free when good men go silent. The military aspect can be really useful — do the hard thing, especially when it's hard. But for the male psychology, there's such a thing as treating yourself like a horse in a carriage and just whipping until you get somewhere — and eventually the horse will stop, no matter how much you whip. Yes, there are times you should just do the thing, but you should also be aware of the level of pain you're experiencing when you do it. If you tell a kid to go into the cold ocean, once you get in, you'll adapt. But if you throw a kid who's never done public speaking out there, a micro-trauma can happen if there are no steps. My grandma had this habit of grabbing my brother and throwing him into the ocean so he'd lose his fear of cold water. And for the longest time he didn't want to go into the ocean because of that. So often, the path we take is just as important as the fear we're trying to solve.
Aggelos: Totally agree. It seemed like I was contradicting myself when I mentioned the military road. And this is exactly the subjectivity that makes avoidance such a complicated thing — it's not one thing. It really depends on why you are avoiding, what it is that you're avoiding, and what the stakes are. Let's close it here, because it's enough.