The guy who shot me was already gone. Taillights, then nothing.
It was just past 2 a.m., on that fine line between Saturday night and Sunday morning. I was lying under a streetlight, desperately trying to staunch the flow of blood gushing from my abdomen. He and his accomplice had jumped in a car and sped off.
If you’ve ever heard a gunshot up close, you know how loud it is. Not TV loud. Loud enough to damage your hearing. After the echo of the shot rebounded off my apartment building, I expected lights to flip on, doors to burst open, neighbors to rush out and rescue me.
Unfortunately, back in the Cocaine Cowboys era in Miami, another gunshot on a Saturday night wasn’t notable enough for anyone to bother getting up off the sofa or out of bed.
As I watched the ever-expanding pool of blood around me, I knew one thing with total clarity: if I didn’t rip off my t-shirt, tie it around my body, get up, cross the street, climb a flight of stairs to my apartment, and dial 911…I would die in that street.
Fortunately…as some of you more astute readers have already figured out…I lived.
I rose from that pool of blood because I was stubborn, resilient, determined, and unwilling to quit. Those same four traits that kept me alive were the traits that would later help me build great organizations and companies.
And they’re the same four traits that nearly broke me.
Because the qualities that get you up off the street will also keep you running in a direction you never questioned. Drive does not ask where it is going. It only asks how fast.
Stubborn kept me alive under that streetlight. In business, stubborn meant opening a company with maybe a quarter of the capital it needed and assuming I could bulldoze my way through.
Turns out the Internal Revenue Service has a bigger bulldozer.
Determined meant that when something broke, I worked harder. Longer hours. More hustle. More me. What I never did was build something that didn’t need me.
Resilient meant I could absorb almost any amount of pain. That sounds noble, until you realize it’s exactly why I never fixed the thing causing the pain. Twice I sold all my furniture and slept on the floor. Resilience got me through it. It never asked why I kept ending up there.
Unwilling to quit meant I kept businesses on life support long after they should have been allowed to die. And I never quit doing the jobs I should have handed off years earlier.
I thought I was opening companies. They were really just crappy jobs with overhead and a boss who wouldn’t let me take a vacation. That boss was me.
Later, I built businesses that reached huge levels of success. But they ran on a cult of personality. Mine. Every decision, every relationship, every dollar flowed to me and through me. I was the prisoner, and I was also the warden.
Every business I started starred me as the hero. I was the only one who could talk to the clients, handle the big projects, make the big decisions, close the big deals.
The price? Fifteen years without a real vacation. The friendships I should have been nurturing in my twenties and thirties to last a lifetime, died on the vine. I’m still paying for that today. By thirty-five, I was arguably in worse shape than the average sixty-five-year-old. It took almost a decade to turn that around.
I was winning. But my soul was dying.
Here’s what made it so hard to see: competence is what makes the cage comfortable enough to stay in. From the outside, it all looked like winning. From the inside, too. The revenue was real. The applause was real. But so was the cage.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. Otherwise, you wouldn’t still be reading this.
Hopefully you’re not reading this essay after being left for dead in a pool of blood. But every entrepreneur in the game gets left for dead, metaphorically. Usually, a lot more than once.
The very nature of entrepreneurship requires being a rebel, misfit, or disruptor. And crazy. Of course you’re crazy. You have to be.
Most people misunderstand us. The more you succeed, the more that misunderstanding hardens into suspicion, and sometimes into hate. So you grow a thick skin. And you probably developed the same traits I did: stubborn, resilient, determined, unwilling to quit. You build armor.
Armor keeps the arrows out. It also keeps everyone else out.
There is a time and place for armor. But you also need the insight to know when it starts working against you. When you become the constraint in your business. The bottleneck where everything backs up below you.
Not sure if that’s you? Run a quick check. You’re the constraint if:
- Your team waits for your approval on decisions they could make themselves.
- Your revenue goes up and down with your hours.
- Your phone comes on vacation. Your family has noticed.
- Your best people quit. Not because you’re a bad boss, but because they got bored waiting for you.
- You’re the best salesperson, the best fixer, and the best at pretty much everything — and you’re quietly proud of it.
If you nodded at that last one, pay attention. We’re coming back to it.
Congratulations. You’ve become the superhero. The only one in the city allowed to fly. Every crisis waits for you, every decision lands on your desk, and you call it leadership.
So how good do you look in the cape and tights?
Be honest. You look exhausted. I know, because I wore that outfit for fifteen years. And spandex is unforgiving.
Here’s the good news. The opposite of the bottleneck isn’t a lazier founder. It’s a Sovereign Operator: someone who owns their mind and builds a business that runs without them. A Sovereign Operator runs the machine. They don’t become the machine. That’s who you’re about to become.
But you can’t take off a cape you don’t know you’re wearing. And you won’t take it off until you understand why you put it on in the first place.
If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you didn’t become the constraint by accident. Beliefs about control, worthiness, and what it means to be needed were installed long before you were old enough to refuse them. You didn’t choose that programming. But it is your job to remove it. Because on a level you probably haven’t admitted yet, you secretly love being the bottleneck.
Next time, let’s talk about how to blow that shit up.
Peace,
– RG
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