Sunday is where I try to tell the truth.

Not the inspirational truth. The real one.

The kind of truth that makes you a little uncomfortable, but also a little lighter, because you stop pretending.

This week I learned three things. All three are about scaling without sacrificing your sanity.

This one hit me because it looks like a virtue.

You want to be helpful. You want to be available. You want to be the leader people can count on.

So you respond quickly. You solve problems. You jump in.

And over time, your kindness becomes a training program.

You train the business to come to you first.

Not because your team is lazy. Because you are efficient.

That’s the trap.

Being the “helpful founder” feels good in the moment. It also creates dependency.

This week I caught myself doing it in small ways:

It felt like leadership. It was actually maintenance.

So here’s what I learned:

Nice founders create bottlenecks when they confuse kindness with rescue.

Real kindness is building a company where people can think, act, and grow.

Rescue is solving problems so you can feel needed.

If you felt that in your chest, you’re not alone.

The fix I’m practicing is simple.

When someone asks, “What should I do?” I respond with:

Not because I’m trying to be difficult. Because I’m trying to build adults, not dependents.

That’s leadership.

This week I had a small moment that exposed a big pattern.

Someone on the team asked me a question that I’ve answered a hundred times.

My first instinct was to answer fast and move on.

Instead, I paused and asked myself:

Why are they asking?

And the answer was obvious.

I never defined the rule. I never wrote down the standard. I never gave the decision boundaries.

So they did what any responsible person would do.

They escalated.

That’s not their weakness. That’s my missing structure.

Here’s what I learned:

If you don’t define “good,” you will be asked to approve everything.

So I started rewriting how I delegate.

Not “Can you handle this?” But:

It takes longer the first time. And then it saves you forever.

This is where founders mess up. They want delegation to create relief immediately.

It rarely does. Not at first.

At first, delegation creates friction because you are transferring clarity that used to live in your head. And your head is not a scalable place to store a business.

I also learned to stop delegating tasks and start delegating outcomes.

Tasks: “Post this.” Outcome: “Increase qualified inbound with three posts a week that hit these points, written in this voice, measured by these signals.”

Tasks create robots. Outcomes create owners.

If you want to stop being the bottleneck, you need owners.

This week I noticed something that I should have learned years ago.

When my personal life is unstructured, I seek control in business.

I respond faster. I approve more. I micromanage. I stay “on” because I’m trying to create stability.

But it’s backward.

If you want a stable business, you need a stable founder. And stable founders don’t happen by accident.

They happen by routine, rhythm, and tracking what matters.

This is why I’ve tracked my days for the last ten years.

Not because I’m obsessed with productivity.

Because I’m obsessed with staying honest.

When I track my day, I can’t lie about where my time went. When I journal, I can’t lie about what I’m avoiding.

That’s the real value.

So this week reinforced something I keep coming back to:

Your life needs a dashboard.

Not a fancy one. A functional one.

Something that answers:

When you have that, your business decisions get cleaner.

You stop reacting. You start choosing.

And that is the difference between scaling and spiraling.

If you want one simple habit that improves business and life, try this for the next 7 days:

Every night, write:

It takes five minutes.

But it creates a feedback loop, and feedback loops are how you get better without turning your life into a self-improvement hobby.

I’ve learned that founders don’t burn out because they work hard.

They burn out because everything depends on them.

And dependency feels like responsibility until it becomes suffocation.

So if you’re feeling that squeeze, don’t just try to tough it out.

Build one layer of clarity this week.

Write the rule. Define the standard. Delegate the outcome. Stop adopting monkeys that are not yours.

You don’t need to build a perfect business.

You need to build a business that doesn’t require you to be perfect.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.