My cat thinks I'm a fool

Last Saturday, I came home soaking wet. When I walked through the door, my cat gave me a look that I can only describe as deep, personal judgment. The kind that says: and what exactly were you thinking going out in that?

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Water was dripping off me like a broken faucet. I left a trail of puddles across the hallway. The cat watched from a safe distance (he hates water, then again, what else would you expect from a cat?) with the expression of someone watching a completely preventable disaster unfold.

I didn't get caught in the rain on purpose. This time.

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Later, after a shower, I was sitting in my chair with a laptop, going through my notes and plans for the next week. Checked the weather. More rain tomorrow. And the day after. And most of the week after that.

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Here's the thing. Over the past few months, I picked up a habit I didn't expect to love — evening walks. No destination, no podcast, no phone calls. Just walking. I'd heard about this for years. The "thinking walk" technique. Always had something more important to do. Always something demanding my attention. If I'm honest, it sounded like a waste of time. But once I started, I got hooked in a way I didn't see coming. When I skip a walk, I feel it — this nagging sense that something important was left unfinished. Thoughts that jump around all day finally settle. Ideas surface from somewhere I wasn't looking. It's become one of those small things that quietly holds the rest of the week together.

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So sitting in that chair, staring at a forecast full of rain, my first reaction was: well, there go my walks. And then a second thought: wait. What's actually stopping me?

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Put on a raincoat. Pull on boots. Forget what I look like. Go back to being a kid who loved running through puddles. A city in the rain is its own kind of beautiful anyway — empty parks, quiet sidewalks, everything washed clean.

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Decision made. The rain doesn't get to take this from me.

And that's when it hit me. This wasn't just about weather.

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The two kinds of rain

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Every founder faces storms regularly. Market shifts. AI reshuffling industries. Tariffs showing up out of nowhere. Clients disappearing. Key people leaving. And every time, we stand at the same choice: stay inside and wait for it to pass, or put on the raincoat and go anyway. What I've come to see — slowly, through years of getting soaked — is that we really only deal with two kinds of situations.

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The first is genuinely outside our control. Weather. Tariffs. The economy. Someone else's decisions. You can't stop the rain.

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The second is uncomfortable but completely within our reach. Revising prices. Letting go of a bad employee. Saying no to a client who drains more than they pay. Setting boundaries. Defining who owns what.

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The problem is that our brain loves to dress up the second as the first.

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"The market is tough right now." Sure. But have we actually revisited our pricing?

"Clients won't pay on time." OK. But have we set prepayment rules?

"The team won't take responsibility." Maybe. But have we written down who's responsible for what?

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The rain is real. But the raincoat is hanging right there on the hook. We just don't want to put it on — because it's uncomfortable, it looks silly, and we might still get a little wet anyway. So we stay home. And blame the rain. Even though the rain isn't the problem.

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What I forgot I already knew

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I've been in that spot more times than I'd like to count. Crises that froze our bank accounts overnight. A partner who left without warning. Key employees who walked to bigger companies offering double the salary. Every time, the same feeling — trapped, powerless, soaking wet with no umbrella in sight.

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One of the worst stretches was when large international IT companies started vacuuming up developers from the market. They offered salaries our small agency couldn't come close to matching. It felt like a storm we had no chance of surviving. We couldn't control what Google or EPAM were willing to pay.

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But we could control what we did about it.

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We doubled down on our culture — for the people who valued being respected and heard over an extra five hundred dollars a month. We built a small internal academy to grow young talent from scratch instead of competing for senior hires we couldn't afford. We formed partnerships with competitors — yes, competitors — to bring them onto projects where we were short-handed. And we strengthened our systems so that even external contractors worked inside our processes, without any drop in quality, confidentiality, or deadlines.

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None of that stopped the rain. But all of it was a raincoat. Available. Uncomfortable. Ours to put on. And yet, sitting in my chair last Saturday, staring at a weather forecast, my first instinct was the exact same old thing: guess I'll just stay inside this week. I'd forgotten my own lesson. Two decades of agency building, dozens of crises, and my brain still went straight to "I can't control this, so I'll wait."

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That's when I glanced at the hallway and realized why my cat had been giving me that look. The answer was hanging right there on the hook by the door the whole time. In business, the raincoat is always a specific decision. Often uncomfortable. Sometimes ugly. But available. You don't need to control the storm. You just need to decide that the storm isn't a reason to stop.

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Something to try this weekend:

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Think about the one thing you can't control that makes your chest tight right now. The thing that feels like it's raining on everything you're trying to build. Then ask: what's the raincoat? What's the specific, probably uncomfortable decision I could make — not to stop the rain, but to walk through it?

Client doesn't pay on time — set a prepayment policy. Team isn't delivering — write clear roles and expected outcomes. Don't know the real state of your business — build a simple scorecard.

One decision. Made once. Works continuously. That's what a raincoat does.

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(I recently updated my Founder Decision Kit — a collection of exactly these kinds of uncomfortable-but-available decisions. If you haven't seen it, might be worth a look: grab it here)

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So here's my question: what's the raincoat you've been looking at but haven't put on yet? The decision that's available, probably obvious, but easier to ignore than to actually make?

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P.S. I went for that walk on Sunday. Full raincoat, boots, the whole setup. The park was empty, the city was quiet, and somewhere around the third block an idea surfaced that I'd been circling for weeks without catching. My cat gave me the same look when I got back. But this time, I was barely wet. If you don't walk yet — seriously, try it. No music, no phone. Just you and the route. You'd be surprised what shows up when your legs are moving and your head has nowhere else to be.