In Q1 2026, the non-traded BDC market hit $20.8B in redemption requests — most investors received roughly half of what they asked for. Moody's revised the U.S. BDC sector outlook to Negative. Investors who thought they owned liquid private credit found out their fund manager decided whether they could get out.

On Percent's marketplace that same quarter: new issuances, scheduled payments, and a 0.44% lifetime net loss rate on asset-based deals that's held since inception.†

The difference is structural. BDCs often own concentrated corporate loans with quarterly redemption windows that close at the manager's discretion. Percent finances specialty lenders against pools of performing receivables — diversified, overcollateralized, short duration.

Track record through 3/31/26:†

See what private credit built for individual investors looks like.

^{Alternative investments are speculative. No assurance can be given that investors will receive a return of their capital. Secondary market transactions are subject to availability and issuer approval; liquidity is not guaranteed. †Past performance is not indicative of future results. Terms apply.}

Saturday morning. Coffee is on. The week is behind me and I have not yet started looking at next week, which means I get a couple of hours to actually sit with what just happened. This is one of the practices I have built into the rebuild. Saturdays do not get traded away. Saturdays are for catching up with myself.

Here are the three things I have been turning over this week.

One. There is a difference between carrying something and being weighed down by it.

I have been listening to the Jelly Roll song My Cross all week, and a particular line keeps catching me sideways. The song is about carrying what is yours and refusing to put it down. Not because you are noble. Not because you are tough. Because it is yours, and there is no honest version of your life where you walk around without it.

I have spent a lot of my adult life trying to figure out which of my burdens were mine to carry and which ones I had picked up by accident. Or worse, which ones I had picked up because I wanted to be the kind of person who could carry them. There is a particular flavor of male ego that confuses being burdened with being significant. I have had a long relationship with that ego.

This year I have been doing the work of distinguishing between the two. Some of the things I have been carrying are not mine. Other people's expectations. Other people's disappointments. Versions of myself that other people needed me to be that never actually fit who I am. Those have been getting set down, one by one, and the practice of setting them down has been one of the harder things I have ever done.

But there are other things I am carrying that are mine. The consequences of decisions I made. The relationships I am responsible for. The work I have signed up to do. The version of myself I am building toward, with all the discipline and inconvenience that requires. Those things are mine to carry. They are not optional. And the more honest I get about which ones are mine, the lighter the carrying actually feels.

Here is what I have been noticing. When I try to put down a burden that is genuinely mine, I get heavier, not lighter. The act of pretending it is not there does not make it disappear. It just makes the weight diffuse into every other corner of my life until I do not know why I am exhausted all the time. The weight is going to be there either way. The only question is whether I am holding it cleanly or whether it is leaking everywhere.

The thing I am still figuring out is how to tell the difference in real time. When something feels heavy, my first instinct is to assume it is not mine and try to put it down. Sometimes that is exactly right. Sometimes that is exactly wrong. The difference matters more than I knew.

I do not have a clean formula for this. What I have is a question I have been asking myself when something feels heavy. Is this weight a consequence of something I chose, am choosing, or want to choose? If the answer is yes to any of those three, the weight is mine and I need to hold it cleanly instead of resenting it. If the answer is no across the board, the weight is somebody else's and I am not actually helping anyone by carrying it for them.

That question has changed more weeks than I can count.

Two. Most of the work that matters does not look like work.

I wrote about this in Tuesday's newsletter and I have been thinking about it all week. The hours that produce the most value in my business are almost never the hours that look impressive. They are the hours where I sit with a hard problem long enough to actually see it. The hours where I read a client's situation slowly instead of rushing to give them a framework. The hours where I sit with my own resistance to something I know I need to do, and let it be there until I understand what it is trying to tell me.

None of that looks like work. None of that produces a Slack message. None of that goes on the calendar. But all of it is the actual job.

I have been pushing back on the part of myself that needs to look busy to feel productive. That part of me has been driving a lot of decisions for a long time, and it is responsible for some of the worst hours I have ever spent. Hours of activity that produced nothing because they were never about producing anything. They were about generating the appearance of effort so I could feel like I was earning my keep.

Earning my keep is a real thing. I am not against effort. But effort that is performed for an audience, even an audience of one, is not actually the same thing as effort that moves a piece of work forward. The first is a kind of theater. The second is the actual work. Most operators I know spend a lot of time confusing the two.

The shift I am trying to make is to stop checking whether I look busy and start checking whether I am moving the actual pieces. The questions are different. The internal sensations are different. The output is dramatically different over a month.

This week I tested it. I cut my visible work hours by about a third. I added more thinking time. More sitting and reading. More walking with the dog while I worked through a problem in my head. The result was that I closed two deals I had been stuck on for weeks, both of them because I finally took the time to actually understand what the client was wrestling with instead of leading with what I had to sell them.

The work was thinking. The work was listening. The work was letting things take the time they needed to take. None of it looked like work. All of it was.

I do not think I am going to keep this exact ratio long term. Some weeks require a lot of visible activity. But the experiment was useful because it broke the assumption that the visible activity is what produces the result. The result comes from the thinking. The activity comes from the thinking. The order matters.

There is a version of this I have started building into the week intentionally. Tuesday mornings for system audits, which I wrote about earlier this week. Wednesday mornings for what I call client thinking, where I just sit and consider what each active client actually needs from me that they have not asked for yet. Friday afternoons for what I call honest reflection, which sounds more pretentious than it is. I just sit with the question of what I would tell a friend who was running my business this week. The answer is almost always something I have been avoiding. Then I do it.

None of those blocks produce a deliverable. None of them are billable. None of them would make sense to a casual observer. All of them have moved my business and my life more than any of the visible work I do around them.

I am starting to believe that the operators who burn out are the ones who never build in the unseen work. The operators who last are the ones who guard it like it is the actual job. Because for the people doing the real version of this, it is.

Three. The version of me that shows up when nobody is watching is the version that determines everything else.

I have been watching myself this week. Not in a self-flagellating way. Just observing. Who shows up at 6 AM when nobody would notice if I slept in? Who shows up at 2 PM when nobody is checking whether I am actually working? Who shows up at 9 PM when the day was long and the temptation is to phone in the last hour?

The honest answer is that the version of me that shows up in those moments is the version that is actually running my life. The version that shows up in meetings and on podcasts and in well-lit kitchens is downstream. He inherits whatever the unwatched version has built or failed to build.

This has been an uncomfortable thing to sit with. I have spent a lot of energy over my life curating the version of myself that other people see. I have spent comparatively little energy on the version that shows up when nobody is looking, because that version did not seem to have an audience and therefore did not seem to matter as much. But all the leverage is there. All the compounding is there. Everything I want to build downstream depends on what that version chooses, every day, without applause.

The savage mindset Jocko was talking about on that podcast I shared in the Roundup is exactly this. It is not about being aggressive or extreme. It is about deciding, in advance, that the version of you who shows up when nobody is watching is going to be the same version that shows up when everybody is. No drop-off. No hidden compromises. No quiet deals you make with yourself when the door closes.

The closer I get to that standard, the less my life feels like a performance and the more it feels like a structure. Performance is exhausting because you are always two seconds away from being seen for who you actually are. Structure is steady because there is no gap between the public version and the private one. The work is the work whether someone is watching or not. The discipline is the discipline. The standard is the standard.

I am not at that standard yet. I do not know if I will ever be all the way there. But I can see the direction now in a way I could not see it a year ago, and I can feel the difference in the weeks where I am closer to it. Those weeks are quieter. There is less internal noise. There is less fatigue. There is more of me available for the people who actually matter, because I am not spending half my energy maintaining the gap between who I am and who I am pretending to be.

Closing that gap is the work. Closing that gap is the whole game.

That is what I have been carrying around with me this week.

Three things. None of them brand new. All of them old questions in new clothes. That is mostly how it works for me now. The questions do not really change. The relationship to them keeps deepening. The pretending keeps getting harder. The honesty keeps getting easier.

If any of this met you where you are this week, I am glad. If none of it did, that is fine too. Saturdays are for thinking out loud, not for selling anything.

I will see you tomorrow with the lessons.

Until then.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.

Dan

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