The Week Everything Happened at Once
The raw, operational truth of running a lean agency with four kids.
I started that Monday with a clean slate. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.
The weekend had been necessary. Not the fun kind of necessary, where you come back from two days off with a tan and fresh ideas. The survival kind. The kind where your body forces you to stop because your brain already quit three days earlier.
The week before had broken something.
The Letting Go
We let someone go that week. A senior team member. Someone I’d invested in, coached, given feedback to, built plans around.
The call was prepped. I had the business arguments lined up. I’d even reframed it into something that was genuinely true: this was better for everyone. The role wasn’t a fit. The direction had shifted. Continuing would’ve been unfair to both sides.
But then he gave me his feedback.
He told me he’d felt like a fly on the wall. Not in those exact words, but that was the feeling. Like he was just extra help. Not really part of something. Not really seen.
That hit.
Because I see myself as the empathetic guy. The one who keeps an eye on people. The one who cares. The dad of four who’s figured out some things about showing up for others. And here was someone telling me that despite all of that, he felt invisible.
I took it personally. Not because he was wrong. Because he was right.
He was right, and I’d missed it. Not because I didn’t care, but because I was running so fast that the things that really matter to people, the human stuff, got lost in the noise. I was in survival mode. And when you’re in survival mode, your skills disappear. The empathy, the leadership, the presence. It all goes somewhere you can’t reach.
That feedback made me question my role. Not just in the team. In the company.
The Switch
Two days later, I was on a call with a prospect. A big one. A brand doing serious volume, global ambitions, a real opportunity.
And I was electric.
That’s how it works with ADHD. There’s a switch. If I sense excitement, if I feel like my skills are being used, if the person on the other side of the screen actually needs what I bring, I can flip it. Instantly. I become the version of me that people love to be around. Sharp, energetic, strategic, present.
It’s not fake. It IS me. But it’s a specific version of me that requires a specific trigger. And the trigger is never a long meeting where everyone needs to give their opinion. The trigger is urgency, novelty, and the feeling that I’m creating something in real time.
The problem isn’t turning it on. I can turn it on in seconds.
The problem is turning it off.
After those calls, especially the late ones, I’m buzzing. My brain is still running through scenarios, follow-ups, angles, positioning ideas. I need to actively wind down. Breathing exercises. A walk around the block. Meditation. Something, anything, to convince my nervous system that the call is over.
Without that, I stay on until midnight. Building things nobody asked for. Tinkering with tools. Starting new projects because the momentum has nowhere to go. And then I wake up the next morning running on empty again.
The same brain that makes me magnetic in a meeting is the one that won’t let me sleep after.
The Kitchen Table
My wife told me something last week. She said she doesn’t like being around when I have those calls.
Not because she doesn’t support me. She does. She gets excited for me. But she also feels the pressure. She picks up on the energy, and she worries. Will the call go well? Will he come out frustrated or fired up?
She stays away. Gives me space. And when it’s over, we reconnect. I tell her how it went. Sometimes I ask her if we can just sit for a bit so I can talk it through. That helps.
That’s the good version.
The bad version is what she gets after the draining calls. The long meetings that went nowhere. The discussions that should have been decisions. The feedback that felt like criticism at the worst possible moment.
That version walks into the kitchen and is immediately annoyed by noise. Impatient with the kids fighting. Snappy. Sarcastic. Short-fused.
I hate being that person. And I know exactly what causes it. It’s not the kids. It’s not my wife. It’s that I walked in already empty, and the first demand on my remaining energy tips me over.
My wife sees the wired version after good calls. The kids sometimes get the crashed version after bad ones. And they don’t know the difference. They just know dad is grumpy.
The Content Paradox
Here’s the part that’s hard to admit.
Every morning, there’s a LinkedIn post going out. Something about leadership. About showing up. About asking better questions. About being the kind of consultant who sees the whole picture.
And in that same week, I’m not showing up the way I want at home. I’m questioning whether I should even be leading this team. I just heard from someone I managed that they felt invisible on my watch.
Is there tension between the person I write as and the person I actually am?
Yes.
But not in the way you might think.
The tension only exists when I write because I have to, not because I want to. When content becomes a checkbox, the gap between what I’m saying and what I’m living gets obvious. To me, at least. I feel it. I know when a post came from obligation and when it came from something real.
The posts that land, the ones people actually screenshot and send to their teams, those always come from a real situation. A real mistake. A real moment where I saw something most people miss.
The ones that feel hollow are the ones where I’m performing. And the weeks where I’m already performing just to get through the day, adding content performance on top of that is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain.
The Iteration Tax
There’s a pattern that drives me up the wall. And I only recently figured out what’s actually happening.
I move fast. I always have. I get an idea, I run with it, I build something, and I ship it. Most of the time, I know it’s not perfect. I know there are rough edges. That’s the point. I’m iterating.
I’ve coached myself on this. I use AI to challenge my thinking. I review things multiple times before I share them. And then I share them, and people still have opinions.
That’s normal. I know that.
But there’s something that happens when I’m tired that turns normal feedback into something that feels personal. Something that triggers a reaction I can’t always control.
When someone catches a mistake I missed, my first thought isn’t “good catch.” My first thought is: Why did I miss that? Should I not have relied on the AI for this? Am I just not good enough anymore?
And then the thing that annoys me even more: when I sit with the feedback, really look at it, they’re usually right. The adjustment makes sense. The change is reasonable. And now I’m not just annoyed at the feedback. I’m annoyed at myself for not seeing it first.
This is where the snappiness comes from. Not from the feedback itself, but from the gap between how fast I want to move and how much I expect from myself when I’m running on empty.
I need room to fail forward. Ten bad proposals had to happen before the one that closed the deal. The client never saw the ten. They saw the polished version and said yes. But the people around me, my business partner, my team, they see the drafts. The messy ones. The ones with the mistakes.
And sometimes, especially when I’m tired, their feedback on draft number 6 feels like judgment on the whole process. Even when it’s not.
The Reframe
So here’s where I am.
In the same two-week stretch, I closed a major new client. Restructured a full ad account for another. Shipped ten LinkedIn posts. Ran a security audit across our infrastructure. Held a product strategy meeting. Let a team member go with as much grace as I could manage. Did a zero-inbox email cleanup. Imported a new set of professional tools into our operating system.
And I also snapped at my kids. Was impatient with my wife. Doubted my role in my own company. Built things nobody asked for at 11pm because I couldn’t turn my brain off. Got annoyed at my business partner for giving me feedback I knew was correct.
I used to think these two lists were in conflict. That the second one was evidence I wasn’t doing it right. That if I was really performing, the personal stuff wouldn’t slip.
I don’t think that anymore.
I think this is what it actually looks like when you’re doing it. Not the curated version. Not the “CEO morning routine” post. The actual, operational, daily truth of running a lean business with a small team, four kids, a marriage you’re actively protecting, ADHD that gives you superpowers and takes them away in the same afternoon, and a level of ambition that doesn’t fit neatly into a 40-hour week.
It’s messy. It’s contradictory. It’s exhausting.
And you’re still moving forward.
What I’m Learning
I don’t have a tidy conclusion here. That would be dishonest.
But there are things I’m starting to see more clearly.
The switch is a feature, not a bug. I can walk into any room and be the person that room needs. That’s a genuine skill. But it costs energy that has to come from somewhere, and if I don’t actively refill the tank, the people closest to me pay the price.
Running on empty doesn’t make me a bad leader. It makes me a human one. The difference between a bad leader and a tired one is whether you can see the pattern. I can see it now. The question is whether I act on it before the crash, not after.
Feedback feels personal when you’re depleted. When I’m rested and present, I can hear “this needs work” and think “cool, let’s fix it.” When I’m running on fumes, the same words sound like “you’re not good enough.” The feedback didn’t change. My capacity to receive it did.
The “fullest potential” framing is a trap. I’ve let go of the fantasy of selling the agency for millions. That was never really what I was chasing. What I am chasing is showing up well for the people who count on me, doing work that matters, and building something sustainable. Some weeks that looks impressive from the outside. Some weeks it looks like me doing breathing exercises on the couch at 10pm so I don’t snap at my wife. Both are the work.
I need room to iterate in peace. This is the hardest one. The people around me are trying to help. Their feedback makes things better. But I need to get better at saying: “I know this isn’t finished. Give me space to finish it.” Instead of shipping early and then getting defensive when someone points out what I already knew was wrong.
I’m not writing this because I’ve figured it out. I’m writing it because the version of entrepreneurship I see online, the one with the clean offices and the morning routines and the “I was broke now I’m rich” story arcs, has nothing to do with what’s actually happening in my house on a Wednesday night.
This is what it looks like. The week everything happened at once. And somehow, we’re still here.
Still moving.
If this landed, you can find me on LinkedIn.
I write about running an e-commerce ads consultancy, building systems, and trying not to be a terrible dad in the process. No hype. No playbook. Just the work.
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