Working harder to compensate.

Hi Reader

Most founders & business leaders I meet believe two things about their own performance.

The first is that working harder produces more output.

The second is that when the output starts to drop, the answer is to work harder still.

Neither belief is examined and both are the operating assumptions underneath most daily and weekly calendars.

Both are wrong.

Not partially wrong. They’re wrong in a specific way that turns effort into an active force against performance rather than a source of it.

The framework I use to explain this to founders is deliberately simple. You’ve heard it before.

Capability multiplied by Ability equals Performance.

Ability is what most founders think they're trading in. Skill, experience, intelligence, judgement. The stuff on the CV. The stuff they hire other people for. The stuff that gets talked about in board meetings.

Capability is what allows Ability to actually happen and land. Whether the founder has slept enough this week to make the decision the business needs them to make on Thursday afternoon. Whether they have the physical and cognitive room to hold the difficult conversation the sales team has been avoiding for a month. Whether they can walk into a room and be present in it rather than partially there with three other conversations in their head.

Ability without Capability is not a reduced version of Performance; in fact it's the illusion of Performance; the founder still knows what to do but they just cannot execute it at the level the moment requires.

Multiply anything by zero and you get zero. It doesn't matter how large the first number is.

This is where this piece gets uncomfortable.

Most founders under pressure respond to declining Performance by increasing Ability inputs. Longer hours. More meetings. Deeper involvement in things they should have delegated. More content consumed on the commute. More frameworks & emails read at night.

None of that changes the multiplier. The multiplier is Capability, and Capability is being spent, not built, by every additional hour of work past a specific threshold that varies by person but exists in all of them.

The founder ends up in a situation that is arithmetically unusual and psychologically devastating. Their effective Performance is dropping. Their subjective effort is climbing. The gap between the two is what they misread as needing to work harder. And so they do. Which drops Performance further. Which increases the perceived need for more effort.

The name for that curve, mathematically, is a doom loop. The name for it in a founder's life is roughly two years of feeling permanently behind while working the hardest they've ever worked.

I've watched enough of these to know what they look like from the outside. The founder is forty and looks fifty-five. Their energy in the room is manic rather than sharp. They tell you they've never felt better. They mean it, in the sense that they have lost the reference point for what better would feel like.

I've also watched it from the inside, some years ago, in a different workspace.

That's the only sentence about that I'll write. It was expensive and it took a long time to unwind. It taught me the specific thing this piece is about.

The move is not to work less. The move is to stop confusing Ability inputs with Performance outputs. Those are two different levers, and one of them is currently broken.

Capability is the multiplier. It cannot be borrowed against forever. It can be built, but only through the specific things you already know build it, all of which feel like doing nothing to a brain that has been rewarded for the last five years for doing everything.

Which is why the founders who need this most are the least able to hear it.

Most founders are one degree away from working out that effort is not the same thing as output.

The years that went are gone.

The question is what the next ones get to be.

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By Beth, an expert in leading through layers and building strong teams

Leadership can be exhilarating and isolating--sometimes in the same hour! Twice a week, I share practical insights and real-world stories to help you tackle challenges with clarity, strengthen your team, and grow into the leader you want to be.