The Heretic of a Founder

Your intuition becomes a liability the moment you become a people manager.

It’s the first, most subtle betrayal of the self you’re asked to make. You trade it, willingly at first, for the modern architecture of leadership: the open forums, the radical transparency, the democratization of thought. Because you do not want to be the heretic.

It all sounds right, enlightened even. You’re no longer a singular force; you’re a facilitator, a nexus for the brilliance of others.

But a strange silence grows in the space you’ve created. The promised novelty, the breakthrough born of collective genius, never quite arrives.

What you get instead is the echo of the safest idea in the room, a regression to the comfortable mean. And in the process of listening to everyone else, you slowly stop listening to yourself.

The muscle you used most, that instinct for the right path, the one that put you in this room in the first place, begins to atrophy from disuse. You forget it was ever your strength.

You even start to believe the story sold to you: that managing the complex, chaotic machinery of people is the ultimate skill, a craft far more sophisticated than a simple, sharp gut feeling. This is a planted thought. A dangerous one. It replaces your core competency with a generic, uninspired process.

Here is the counter belief, then. The antidote is not to better manage the chaos, but to quiet it with a clear, unwavering signal. Your conviction is that signal. Your intuition is its source. To lead, truly lead, is to hone that intuition to a razor's edge and protect it from the dilution of consensus.

This isn’t about tyranny. It’s about clarity of roles. Your role is to see the destination through the fog, to feel the pull of the right direction when all maps are useless. Your team’s role is to execute against that vision with relentless precision. Guide them, yes. Empower them, absolutely, but empower them to build the road, not to debate its destination. Let them master the how once you have set the what and the why.

Because that weight on your shoulders, the one that comes with titles like founder or captain, isn’t from the workload. It’s the psychic burden of a diluted vision. It’s the hollow feeling of leading a company toward a goal you no longer feel in your bones.

That’s what keeps you from sleeping peacefully. Not the work, but the terrifying silence where your conviction used to be.