Tired Days Tell the Truth

I almost skipped this morning. I have reached the exhaustion I suspect all successful founders hit. The body cries no mas. It begs for rest. But the brain turns back on the moment it has any modicum of time not keeping the body moving. It never fully shuts off. Sleep comes in fragments. The mind wakes before the alarm. This is the pattern now.

Part of me wanted permission to fall behind. Then I caught myself doing exactly what I teach players not to do. Making decisions from fatigue instead of principle. Letting the feeling become the fact.

So I sat down.

Something happens when you study while tired. The noise quiets. The mind lacks the energy to perform or chase cleverness. It reaches for what is essential. What sits beneath everything else. Today became that kind of day. Not a performance day. A perception day.

The study material focused on five thinkers I had never read together. Herbert Simon on bounded rationality. Donald Schön on the reflective practitioner. James March on the balance between exploration and exploitation. Karl Weick on sensemaking. Gary Klein on intuition as pattern retrieval under pressure.

Their claims are not sacred. Their patterns are useful. What struck me was the lineage running between them. They were connected. They were circling the same question from different angles. How do humans make decisions when the information exceeds their capacity to process it. How does judgment form when certainty is impossible. How does someone learn to read the world instead of drown in it.

That question landed differently today because I had nothing left to hide behind.

The Flaw Nobody Talks About

There is something broken in how we approach knowledge in this country. This is not a critique of intelligence or ambition. It is a critique of accumulation.

Somewhere along the way we began believing that more information always leads to better decisions. That knowing everything is the path to wisdom. I used to believe some version of this. It feels responsible. It feels rigorous. The problem is that it does not work.

William James wrote about experience being the thing that forms reality. Simon spent his career warning us that the human mind collapses when it tries to take in too much. Schön described professionals who know more than they can say. March cautioned that exploration without boundaries becomes self-destructive. I do not know if all of that holds up under scrutiny. What I know is that it matches what I have observed.

I have watched this collapse in tennis for decades. Parents gather instruction, advice, research, and opinion until they have more than they can possibly apply. Then they feel paralyzed. They try to make decisions on top of a mountain of noise. The mind cannot operate that way. It was not built for it.

The same thing happens in early stage entrepreneurship. Founders gather frameworks, podcasts, books, newsletters, and advice from people with impressive titles. They gather so much theory they forget how to read their own environment. They lose the ability to sense what is true right in front of them.

My work has never been about more information. It has always been about attention. It has always been about building judgment through experience and reflection. It has always been about creating a system where the person can organize themselves rather than carry the impossible load of knowing everything.

That realization settled something I did not know was unsettled.

The Loop I Did Not Notice I Was Running

A few days ago I said something that surprised me. I said that what I am doing with this startup feels like I am living inside an IEDE loop. Not teaching it. Not illustrating it. Living it.

Today that idea finished forming.

IEDE stands for intention, experience, debrief, evolution. It describes the way people learn through action and reflection. It is the cognitive machinery I have been using for decades without naming it. What I saw today is that I have been running the same loop on the act of building this company.

Every day I set an intention for what I think I will learn. Then I move into the day and let the world teach me. Then I sit down and reflect on what happened, what shifted, what surprised me, what opened. Then I adjust. That is IEDE. That is the system. I am the first subject.

This is not dogfooding. Dogfooding is when a company forces itself to use its own software to find bugs. This is different. I am building a company that helps people understand how they think and learn. The first place that work is happening is inside me.

The founder journey and the product journey have fused. I am not standing outside the framework. I am subject to it. Shaped by it. Refined through it.

This feels like something teachers used to do when teaching was a vocation rather than a job. They taught from inquiry, not repetition. They let their own learning lead the way. They carried their students inside the same questions they carried themselves.

Collins at the Level of the Person

I wondered if what I am doing is some version of Jim Collins' idea. Preserve the core while stimulating progress. He wrote about companies that protect their identity while evolving their methods. The thought felt close but not exact.

Then I understood why.

Collins wrote about organizations. I am dealing with people. I am working at the level of cognition, attention, identity, and development. This is not corporate evolution. This is human evolution.

The core in my system is the person. Their sense of self. Their values. Their internal coherence. That is what needs to be preserved. The progress is the expansion of cognitive models, new patterns of seeing, new levels of awareness under pressure.

Court 4 stimulates progress. Founders' Room preserves the core. Communiplasticity integrates them. Together they form a learning architecture that helps a person grow without losing themselves.

When Collins wrote about this in companies, it felt like strategy. When I saw how it applies to people, it felt like truth.

The Line That Changed Everything

The biggest insight of the day arrived in a single sentence.

If the system is built around human cognitive evolution, then the real users are always the individuals whose attention and insight are changed.

Not the academy. Not the program. Not the institution. Not the organization.

The user is the human being inside the environment.

I have been struggling with the question of B2B versus B2C for weeks. I kept thinking I had to choose. Today I saw that I do not. The work will reach both. But the transformation always occurs in the individual.

Businesses may be customers. Parents may be customers. Academies may be customers. But the users will always be the players, the coaches, the parents, the founders who encounter the system and feel something reorganize inside them.

This line explained something I could not explain before. It explained why my writing has been generating so much resonance. I am not writing for institutions. I am writing for people. People feel themselves shift when they read it. They recognize truth. They recognize themselves. They recognize a path that has been sitting under their experience for years but had no name.

CrossFit spread this way. Gym to gym through individuals who had been changed by the work. Montessori spread this way. Reggio Emilia spread this way. Overtime Elite spread this way. Peloton and Headspace spread this way. They sold to institutions only after they changed individuals. The pressure came from people, not organizations.

My system is a B2C transformation delivered through a B2B channel. It is an ecosystem product. The ecosystem grows because the individuals change.

Build for the individual. Let the individual pull in the institution.

That sentence now sits on my wall.

What Day 14 Actually Taught Me

By the end of the morning I saw the architecture more clearly than at any point in this process. Court 4 measures what people do under pressure. Founders' Room helps them understand what those patterns mean. Communiplasticity helps them adapt their communication and cognition to the environment they are in. IEDE holds the cycle together.

The most surprising part is that I have been living inside this system as I build it. The study has become my Court 4. Reflection has become my Founders' Room. The work itself has been teaching me how to navigate ambiguity and tension. I have been evolving alongside the system.

This is not the way most founders build. They separate themselves from the thing they make. They try to hold the product at arm's length. I cannot do that here. The work is too personal. The subject is too close to my own experience. The system is too deeply connected to how I think and teach and understand the world.

I am the first user. I am the prototype.

This does not feel like ego. It feels like alignment. You cannot teach reflection from outside reflection. You cannot teach attention from distraction. You cannot teach growth from stasis. You have to live inside the thing you create.

Today I did not expect clarity. I expected to go through the motions. Instead I found the clearest view of the work I have had since this study began.

That is the real lesson. The days where you have the least energy often reveal the most truth. They remove the noise. What remains is the core.

And the core is where the work lives.

If this work aligns with where your organization is heading, I’m open to serious conversations about partnership and collaboration.

Performance Architect | Founder, Communiplasticity Solutions
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