Is this any good? Maybe. We’ll see.
Why neutral thinking and runway matter more than optimism in entrepreneurship.
Hi,
A man’s son gets kicked off a horse and breaks his leg. People tell him that’s terrible. He says, “Maybe. We’ll see.”
Later, a war breaks out. All the young men are drafted except his son. People tell him that’s great. He says, “Maybe. We’ll see.”
It continues like that, each iteration bringing what looks like ruin or salvation, but the farmer refuses to do the thing most of us do automatically, which is decide what something means the moment it happens.
Entrepreneurs get into trouble with this all the time.
Something goes wrong and we immediately treat it like a verdict. A launch doesn’t land. Revenue dips. A platform changes something with no warning. Before we’ve even had time to look at the numbers, our brain has already decided the story: this is bad, this is dangerous, this is the beginning of the end.
Sometimes the opposite happens. Something works. A post pops. A campaign overperforms. Suddenly it’s good. Finally. Proof that we’re doing the right thing.
Both reactions do the same damage when they push us to react before the situation has finished unfolding.
Entrepreneurship doesn’t move in clean arcs. What happens today often doesn’t make sense until much later, and sometimes it never makes sense at all.
When you decide too early, you don’t just get it wrong emotionally. You get it wrong operationally.
You make changes you didn’t need to make. You abandon things that would have worked if you’d given them more time. You double down on things that looked good in the moment and turned out to be fragile. You speed up when you should slow down and panic when nothing is actually broken.
The problem isn’t that bad things happen. It’s treating every event like it’s the conclusion instead of just another data point in a system that’s still moving.
Neutral thinking starts with letting things exist without immediately grading them. Something happened. That’s it. No gold stars. No red flags. Just information.
Things fail for reasons that have nothing to do with effort or intelligence. You can do the right thing and still get wrecked. You can do the wrong thing and get rewarded for a while.
Positivity doesn’t handle that well.
When you’re trained to expect things to get better, every setback feels like a violation. When improvement doesn’t arrive on schedule, it destabilizes your foundation. You start scanning for what you did wrong. You look for hidden flaws. You assume you missed something obvious when it’s just one data point.
Neutral thinking doesn’t promise things will improve. It doesn’t warn that they’ll get worse. It refuses to pretend you know the ending before enough time has passed to see it.
Something happens in your business. You notice it. You don’t decorate it. You don’t interrogate it. You don’t turn it into a story about who you are or where this is going.
You say: that happened.
Sales dropped this month.
An email underperformed.
A platform throttled reach.
A reader unsubscribed.
That happened. It’s not amazing and terrible. It simply exists as a data point. This is where neutral thinking is a powerful it. It forces you to stop there, at least for a moment.
Most people skip that pause and jump straight to interpretation. They decide it’s a sign, a warning, or proof they’re falling behind. By the time they sit down to analyze, they’re already trying to confirm a story their nervous system wrote for them.
Neutral thinking keeps the order intact.
First: acknowledge the event.
Second: stabilize.
Third: decide what, if anything, needs to change.
Not everything that happens requires a response. Not everything that feels urgent actually needs attention. Some things resolve on their own. Some things repeat and become patterns. Some things look dramatic and turn out to be noise.
You can’t tell which is which if you react to all of them the same way.
Neutral thinking lets you separate “this is uncomfortable” from “this is dangerous.”
That distinction matters.
Entrepreneurship creates constant low-grade discomfort. If you respond to discomfort as if it’s a threat, you’ll exhaust yourself chasing phantom emergencies. If you ignore real threats because you’re numb, you’ll miss the moment to intervene.
Neutral thinking sits in the middle.
It doesn’t deny what’s happening, but it doesn’t rush to fix it either. It gives you enough space to decide whether this is something to observe, something to mitigate, or something to change.
If you decide something is a failure too soon, you abandon it before it has time to work. If you decide something is a breakthrough too soon, you build your future on a shaky foundation.
“Maybe” isn’t indecision. It’s refusing to pretend the story has finished when it hasn’t.
Neutral thinking only works if you have time.
If you’re on the edge, every event feels existential. You don’t get to say “maybe” when the answer determines whether you eat next month. You react because you have to.
That’s why runway matters.
Runway is the amount of time and tolerance you have before a single problem forces a bad decision. Runway is what turns emergencies into problems. Problems can be worked. Emergencies force bad decisions.
Most people think of runway as money, but money is only one part of it.
There’s financial runway.
There’s operational runway.
There’s emotional and physical runway.
The shortest one dictates how reactive you are.
If you’re exhausted, everything feels louder.
If you’re overleveraged, every dip feels fatal.
If your systems are brittle, small shocks do real damage.
Money matters, obviously, but it’s rarely the first thing that runs out. You can have cash in the bank and still be operating on zero runway if your systems are fragile or your health is shot. You can be broke and still have runway if your costs are low, your expectations are sane, and your business can survive small hits without collapsing.
If you want to think more neutrally, you start by extending your runway.
This is the same lens I use to think about growth, platforms, launches, and sustainability: reduce fragility first, then decide what anything means.
Most entrepreneurs are running businesses that are too brittle. When that one thing wobbles, the whole system shakes. Of course it feels catastrophic…
…because it is.
You need enough runway to wait, enough restraint to not decide too early, and enough redundancy that no single event gets to define you.
Most things don’t mean what you think they mean yet. Success can destabilize you just as easily as failure can save you. You don’t know which is which until enough time has passed and you’ve collected enough data.
In a chaotic system, “Maybe. We’ll see.” isn’t always avoidance. It’s often how you stay upright long enough to make the next decision without panicking.
