The only way to stand

I was sitting with my coffee in the morning a few days ago… a few browser tabs open in front of me. My own YouTube channel I've been playing with. A queue of videos about how creators grow their audience. The feed itself, where I drift to see what's actually working for other people. Half research, half learning. But the feed felt different that day. AI shifting another industry, new tariffs somewhere, sanctions being added and lifted in the same week, a war I hadn't been following, crypto rules being rewritten, bank policy shifting, another conflict somewhere else. A relentless wall of things I couldn't control.

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And I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen this somewhere before. Like I'd sat in this exact emotional spot before. Different chair. Different decade. Same weight on my chest.

I knew exactly when.

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Donetsk, 2014.

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We'd moved into a new office a few months earlier. A real business center, floor-to-ceiling windows, open space — the kind of office I'd been dreaming about through twelve years of agency work. Two previous crises survived. A sister agency building. Finally, the office I'd wanted. That afternoon, I was sitting in it almost alone. Just me and our accountant on the whole floor. Middle of the workday. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass — not the buzz of a big city, but a ringing silence. Broken only, every now and then, by the distant rattle of automatic gunfire on the edge of town.

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It sounded like the opening of a post-apocalyptic film. It was just my life that week.

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I had an email open on my screen. A half-written note to clients about possible delays, about force majeure, about reasons I couldn't fully explain yet. I'd already told the team to evacuate. The office around me was empty for the first time since we'd moved in. And my head wasn't really there. I have a daughter, and family in that same city. I kept catching myself going back and forth: stay and fight to save what we'd built, or close the laptop, grab the kids, throw them in the car, and just go. (How we eventually evacuated everything — equipment, servers, the people who hadn't already left — through a frontline, in stages, is a story for another time. Maybe never, honestly. Some stories don't belong in public.)

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The least free person in the room

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There's this idea about founders being "free." That we build a business so we can do what we want, when we want. In a moment like that one, I learned that the founder is the least free person in the room. Lease contracts, documents you're legally required to keep, tax obligations, vendor agreements, equipment you can't just abandon, people depending on you for next month's salary — you don't get to shrug and walk away from any of it.

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I felt that again a decade later, in 2024, when I finally exited the agency. Even after the decision was made, it still took half a year to close legal entities and resolve tax matters across different jurisdictions. The wind-down has its own weight. You don't get to put it down quickly.

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So back in that empty office in 2014, I did the only thing that made the panic step back a little. I finished the email to clients. Sent it. Then I opened a blank document and started laying out options — scenarios for staying, scenarios for leaving, what I could control, what I couldn't, what "stay and fight" actually meant, what "leave" actually cost, who needed to know what and in what order.

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It didn't bring calm, for sure. But it brought movement. Which, in that moment, was close enough. And here's the part I've only really understood with distance: I could do that only because something was holding underneath me.

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The brick that held everything

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It wasn't a real system yet. The proper structure — owners on every workflow, real processes, weekly reviews everyone respected — that came years later. In 2014, I just had a few Google sheets and a Friday rhythm.

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I watched the finances myself. That was the one thing I wouldn't hand off. Yet. Pipeline and team utilization, our managers tracked, because I was being torn apart by everything else — family decisions, lawyers in several countries trying to set up new entities so we could keep working, paperwork I'd never planned to deal with. I couldn't be in every spreadsheet. And honestly, even then — I didn't always look at the sheets on time. Some weeks I'd open Friday's updates on a Tuesday. Some weeks I'd skim. The thing that mattered wasn't that I was a perfect dashboard reader.

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It was the rhythm.

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Every Friday, department leads sent updates. They wrote what they'd decided inside their own zones of responsibility. They flagged what they couldn't decide alone. I could reply with a yes, a redirect, or just a "got it." Decisions kept moving whether I was fully present or not. That habit — regularity and ownership — turned out to be the most important brick in every system we built later. Not the polished dashboard. Not the perfect framework. Just the weekly drumbeat and a clear line of who owned what.

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So when the world outside the windows went silent and strange, I wasn't reaching into a fog to figure out the state of my business. I knew where we stood on cash. I knew where we stood on the team. I knew which clients were exposed and which weren't. That clarity didn't fix the war. But it gave me space to think about the war.

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The two anxieties

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What took me a long time to figure out is that my anxiety as a founder was never one thing. It was two — and I kept mixing them up. One was external. The market. Geopolitics. AI. The news cycle. Things I could only react to. The hard part about external pressure is that it's usually the biggest source of weight, because the world is so much larger than you and your business will ever be. The other was internal. And when I finally stripped it down, it came out as a single sentence: I don't actually know what's happening in my own business right now.

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For years, I carried both at the same time without separating them. I'd think I was stressed about the world. But underneath that, I was also stressed about the fog inside my own walls — and the fog was what was actually leaving me paralyzed.

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You can't do much about the external. But the internal? You can clear it completely. And once I cleared it, the external didn't go away, but it stopped paralyzing me. I had room to think. To plan. To respond. Instead of refreshing the feed for the tenth time, hoping the next headline would finally be the one that calmed me down. That thing we do — the scrolling, the checking, the staying informed — it isn't control. It's anxiety dressed up as something useful. Knowing without the ability to act isn't control. It's a ritual, like worry beads, like prayer. We are not getting answers. We are getting the illusion of "at least I know."

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The world has always been this way

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There's one more reframe I keep coming back to. We — millennials, boomers, a chunk of Gen X — caught the world at one of its calmest stretches. The post-global-war decades. The long peace. Steady growth. Predictable career paths. That was the exception, not the rule.

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1918 — pandemic. 1929 — depression. 1939–45 — war. 1970s — stagflation.

And not so long ago, it felt like those crises were the end of everything. Not a war, of course, but it definitely seemed like the world would never be the same again.

2001 — dotcom crash. 2008 — financial crisis. 2020 — pandemic again.

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And now… whatever this is.

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The pattern isn't "stability sometimes interrupted by crisis." It's "instability sometimes interrupted by short stretches of calm." The question I've been sitting with: What if this is the new normal? What if uncertainty isn't a temporary state we're passing through on the way back to "the good times"? (Which, honestly, was probably never the default anyway.)

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Then what?

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You don't lie down and die. You don't sell everything and run. You treat it as another layer of risk to plan for. Another reason to build a real safety cushion. Another reason to think about an emergency policy — what happens if a key client disappears, if a tool gets banned, if the market shifts in ninety days. But to do any of that thinking — to plan, to prepare, to actually move — you need space. Mental space. Decision space. Time-and-attention space. And you don't have it when the inside of your business is a fog. That's the whole point.

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Something you can do this week:

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A dashboard doesn't predict the future. It shows the present. And knowing the present — really knowing it — is most of the calm I'm ever going to get.

Three bricks. They sound boring on purpose.

• A scorecard you actually look at. Doesn't have to be perfect. Doesn't have to be every week. Real enough that you'd notice when something shifted before it became a crisis.
• Clear ownership. For me, that meant not "someone's helping with that" but one person owning it — with the authority to make calls inside their zone, and the responsibility when something broke.
• A weekly rhythm. Friday updates from the leads. A drumbeat that runs whether I'm at full capacity or barely holding it together. The rhythm matters more than the perfection of any single update.

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That's it. That's the foundation. Everything else stacks on top.

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So here's what I'd ask yourself this week: how much of the weight you're carrying right now is actually about the world — and how much is about not knowing what's happening inside your own business?

The world part you can't fix. The fog part you can. And that's where I'd start. Hit reply and tell me what you find. I read every response.

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P.S. I think we're back to the baseline of world order. And once I accepted that, my question stopped being when will the world calm down so I can build? It became: how do I build when the world won't?