Every Scar tells the Same Story

I’ve learned the hard way that I don’t need to know how everything works, I need to know how it behaves when I feed it something. You hire someone, you never know their wiring. They might talk like killers in the interview, look like they’ll run through walls. You don’t know if they break down at the first rejection or get drunk on the first big win. You’ll never know! What you do is you give them an environment, a pipeline, a set of targets. You watch the outputs. If they produce, you keep feeding the system. If they don’t, you change the inputs or you replace the system. I used to waste time trying to crack the insides.. “what motivates them, what do they care about, what’s their philosophy?” But people are black boxes. All that matters is whether the system runs.

The market is the same. You never decode it. You throw in a new feature, some marketing, or a pricing tweak. You sit there waiting like someone in front of a slot machine. Did it move? Did the customer care? Did the noise turn into money? The cruel part is you can never be sure which lever caused the movement. You learn to live with fuzziness. You stop asking for certainty. You only care about direction. Are the outputs trending upward or downward? Are they stabilizing or collapsing?

Investors are bigger black boxes than the rest. You give them your deck, your narrative, your “hockey stick,” and then wait. Sometimes the same pitch lands like fire with one and dies with another. Their intern, their mood that day, the last call they had.. it all distorts the system. You’ll never unpack their insides. All you can do is keep feeding inputs until the output gets wired to yes.

And then there’s the moment you realize you’re inside the damn box yourself. You’re not an external controller pulling levers on some neutral machine. The company gets shaped by how you show up. If you’re tired, brittle, insecure, the team’s energy decays. If you’re sharp, relentless, confident, the atmosphere shifts. You thought you were observing the system, but your observation is part of the system. That’s when the paranoia starts creeping in. You notice the ripple effect of every facial expression, every rushed message, every moment you checked out instead of leaning in. You realize the box amplifies you.

And it goes both ways. The company rewires you. The constant weight of payroll rewires your nervous system. The customer rejection rewires your courage. Every investor “no” carves new grooves in your brain. You can’t pretend you’re untouched, standing outside. The company is inside you. Circular causality. You move it, it moves you.

Ashby’s law is merciless. Only variety can absorb variety. The world throws disturbances at you—regulators, competitors, global shocks. If you can only play three cards.. raise money, cut costs, push harder.. you’ll hit one day a disturbance those cards can’t solve. I’ve seen founders with no move set beyond fundraising; when capital dries up, they implode. I’ve seen founders who only know hustle; when the market requires patience, they burn out. I’ve seen myself in those same traps. It’s not enough to be good at one or two responses. You have to become a system with range. Sometimes you counter chaos with speed. Sometimes with silence. Sometimes with reinvention. Sometimes with killing your own favorite thing. Survival is about repertoire, not genius.

And here’s the cruelest part: you will never know how your own company works. You’ll have theories, you’ll spin narratives, you’ll convince yourself it’s all because of culture or product or timing. But it’s bullshit. The inside interactions are too messy.. ego, politics, accidents, random strokes of luck. The machine is opaque. The only thing you control is the rhythm of testing, observing, adjusting. You can never see the whole map, so you rely on signals. Dashboards, customer calls, team check-ins, gut feel. You stop pretending you can decode it, and you train yourself to be the fastest at reading and responding. You build senses instead of fantasies.

Even you, the supposed master of this box, are a black box yourself. Half of what drives you gets buried under layers you’ll never uncover. You think you’re rational, but your habits, your fears, your buried scripts are making decisions for you before you even realize it. I’ve stopped trying to analyze myself. I experiment. I change the inputs.. better sleep, different people, brutal honesty in my circle.. and I observe the outputs. Am I clearer? Am I bolder? Am I still stuck in the same loop? You can’t see into yourself. You can only observe yourself through your own behavior.

The black box is reality. First you think you’re the scientist, tweaking levers. Then you realize you’re inside the experiment, feeding it as much as it feeds you. And if you want to scale.. if you want to survive.. you stop seeking perfect knowledge and you start designing feedback loops. You expand your range of responses. You accept opacity as the price of growth. You keep the black box alive not by decoding it, but by dancing with it.