If a patient walks in with a fractured bone and you strap a plaster over it, the photo looks fine. The patient looks treated. Everyone in the room gets to tell themselves something was done. And the fracture goes right on being a fracture underneath — quietly getting worse — until the day it announces itself in a way nobody can ignore.
I spent a stretch of my career being asked to run a business that way.
Not in the clinic; we’d never do that to a patient. In the books. The decisions weren’t mine to make in that season — I operated inside someone else’s rules and someone else’s timeline. And the pressure, relentlessly, was for results now. Any results. Something to put in the report this month.
Here’s the example that still sits with me.
Therapy businesses have seasons. EVERY BUSINESS HAS SEASONS. Every December, patients travel, therapists take leave, consumption naturally drops. It isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a tide that goes out and comes back in, and a well-built business plans around it instead of panicking at it. I’d explained the seasonality plainly. And every December the instruction came down anyway: discount, push, chase the number — so the report would look better.
Discount the work so a monthly figure looked healthier than the business actually was. Present a picture tidier than the truth. I’d raise the objection — out loud, and in writing — and be overruled anyway. More than once I was pushed into things I’d put on record as disagreeing with, and did them, because the vote wasn’t mine.
That’s the plaster over the fracture.
The number looks managed. The underlying thing — a business that should be understood and built, not flattered — stays exactly as unbuilt as before. Short-term thinking doesn’t fail because it’s wicked. It fails because it produces short-term value: things that don’t last, because they never touched the real problem.
I understand the other side of it.
Long-term decisions are slow. The work I believed in took six, twelve, eighteen months to bear fruit, and the people above me couldn’t wait that long — they needed something to show before the next quarterly review…or better still, the next pony-and-dance show. So you reach for the tactic, the discount, the plaster. I get the gravity of it. It’s just that gravity pulls you somewhere you don’t want to end up.
For a long time I told myself the thing I hated about that season was that I had no control. No choice.
Trapped.
When I finally examined it honestly, that wasn’t quite true. I always had agency. I could push back — I did. I could speak plainly — I did. I could put my dissent in writing — I did that too. What I actually couldn’t stand wasn’t the absence of agency. It was operating in a place where the deciding vote was never mine — where I could be right, on the record, and overruled regardless. The cage wasn’t that I couldn’t act. It was that I couldn’t decide.
So I built the opposite.
Deliberately…by design, as the premise and point.
The businesses I run now are built on the things that season taught me to protect by showing me their absence.
Long-term systems over short-term tactics. Structures designed to work whether or not I’m in the room. Numbers that tell the truth even when the truth is a slow month — because a December that dips on schedule isn’t a fire to put out, it’s a season you already accounted for. And the deciding vote, on anything that touches the values the business runs on, stays mine.
People think the lesson of a bad season is the grievance. It isn’t. The grievance fades. The lesson is the blueprint it hands you — the precise, detailed specification of what not to build, paid for in the only currency that buys it: having had to live inside it. I didn’t enjoy being made to plaster over fractures. But I know exactly what a real repair looks like now — partly because I spent so long being told to fake one.
Build the thing that holds. Even when it’s slower. Especially when it’s slower.
Might as well enjoy the siestas and the holidays, and work hard when it’s time to work hard.