Bootstrapping a Unicorn: Day 15

The Long Preparation

I sat at my desk with the readings spread across the screen and felt the particular fatigue that arrives at the middle of something. Fourteen days behind me. Fifteen ahead. The curriculum expected me to study organizational architecture. Simon on complex systems. Christensen on structural limits. Grove on managerial leverage. March on the tension between exploration and exploitation. Important thinkers, all of them. I read the excerpts. I took notes. None of it explained the feeling in my chest. Then something unexpected pulled me backward instead of forward.

A phrase in the readings triggered it. Something about a company outgrowing its founder. The words sat wrong in my chest. I felt my breathing shallow before I understood why. Not because the phrase was untrue. Because it revealed an assumption I had never examined. The assumption that a founder is something you become when you start a company. That the identity emerges from the act of building.

I do not think that is how it works. Not for me. Not today.

The midpoint of this study did not ask me what kind of company I want to build. It asked me what kind of person had been forming long before I knew the word founder applied to me.

So I followed the thread.

It led me back to Barnes and Noble. Not the company. The memory. Decades ago, I would stand in the audiobook aisle with a yellow legal pad, scanning titles, pulling biographies off the shelves. I was not browsing. I was hunting. The feeling was specific. A kind of alertness that made the rest of the store disappear. I listened to stories of people who had built things. Companies. Movements. Ideas. Careers that bent the shape of their industries. I drove between tennis lessons with their voices in my ears. I filled pages with patterns I thought I saw.

At the time I told myself I was doing a real world version of Think and Grow Rich. That book fascinated me because it implied success had a structure underneath it. The promise mattered more than the mythology. Later I learned how much of the book was invented. Fabricated conversations. Imaginary meetings with Carnegie. That should have disillusioned me. Instead it clarified something. A systems thinker does not need the stories to be true. A systems thinker needs the architecture to be real. I was never searching for inspiration. I was searching for architecture. The hidden geometry behind achievement.

The legal pads were my first attempt to map that geometry. I did not have language for what I was doing. I only knew that patterns repeated across lives that seemed unconnected on the surface.

Only now do I see it clearly. This was my earliest version of the IEDE loop. Intention in the aisle. Experience through the headphones. Debrief on the legal pad. Evolution in the next week of coaching. I was running the cycle before I had a name for it.

The thread kept pulling.

Around 2007, someone handed me a book that reframed everything. Wendi Le gave me The Fountainhead. She was not handing me a novel. She was handing me a mirror. Her LinkedIn profile tells the story of who she was when she made that choice. A systems thinker. A COO. A founder. She understood how organizations work and why they fail. She had watched me operate inside junior tennis, inside a sport that rewarded conformity above almost everything else. She saw something I had not fully recognized in myself. A builder. A man more interested in internal structure than external approval. A person who would not bend the work to fit the template.

I did not understand why she gave it to me then. I understand now. She saw the identity I was growing toward before I could see it myself.

Returning to Rand now brings different clarity. I am no longer the coach reading about Roark without a name for the tension he lives inside. I am the person building systems that must hold their shape against pressure. The lessons land differently. Integrity of form. Cost of compromise. The moral weight of creation.

Day 15 asked me to trace the lineage.

The books I consumed during that era tell the story. Good to Great. Built to Last. The First Billion Is the Hardest. Biographies of Einstein. Jack Welch on leadership. Sun Tzu on strategy. Reginald Lewis on breaking through ceilings that were supposed to be permanent. Season of Life on the moral weight of coaching. Maxwell on relational geometry. Who Moved My Cheese on adaptability. Larry Ellison on intensity. Tom Peters on excellence.

My father handed me In Search of Excellence decades before all of it. He was not giving me a business book. He was handing me a philosophy. Excellence as a standard. Excellence as a daily practice. Excellence as a form of integrity. I did not have the vocabulary then to explain why it moved something inside me. It oriented me toward craft. Toward precision. Toward the invisible forces underneath performance. That gift explains my intolerance for intellectual fog. It explains why I have always been drawn to people who hold themselves to a standard the world did not ask them to meet. That was the first seed of the founder mind.

Thirty five years of preparation. That is what Day 15 revealed.

These books did not shape me. They revealed me. They revealed the person who would later build learning environments instead of running traditional programs. The person who saw attention as the real currency of performance. The person who spent decades watching how communication lands differently depending on how tuned the receiver is. The person now constructing Communiplasticity, Court 4, and the Founders Room.

The early shape decides everything that comes after. The architecture was forming long before I knew what I was building. The legal pads in Barnes and Noble. The audiobooks between lessons. The copy of The Fountainhead from someone who saw what I could not yet see in myself. The philosophy of excellence passed down from my father.

The work I do today sits on top of all of it.

Day 15 is not a checkpoint. It is a recognition. The founder I am building into has been forming in pieces for decades. The study did not teach me something new today. It showed me the long line of moments that made this work possible.

The second half of the journey begins here. I do not yet know what it will ask of me.

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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