The CXC Experience · May Arc · Week 2
The Call You Can’t Make
What pressure actually does to your judgment — and the system I built after pressure cost me years.
9:47 at night. I’m sitting in my car in the driveway. Engine off. House lights on inside. I haven’t gone in yet, because I can’t make the call I have to make tomorrow.
The loneliest part of building isn’t failure. Failure has company — everybody has a failure story. The loneliest part is the call you can’t make. The one where there’s no good answer, the clock is running, and the only person who can pull the trigger is you.
I’ve been an operator for 30 years. I’ve raised over a billion dollars in capital and served more than 30,000 investors. I’m not telling you that to impress you. I’m telling you so you understand the next sentence isn’t theory.
Most of what you’ve read about decision-making was written by people who never had real downside. Books from quants. Frameworks from consultants. Clean models that have never once survived 9:47 in the driveway. This is the opposite of that.
The Four Lies Pressure Tells You
Pressure isn’t neutral. It doesn’t just make a decision harder — it actively lies to you while you’re making it. Here are the four lies, and the counter-move for each.
Lie 01
“Decide now.”
Pressure manufactures false urgency. Ninety-five percent of the decisions framed as urgent aren’t. An LP demands a same-day answer on a term sheet — but that deadline was theirs, not the deal’s.
Counter-move: Ask out loud — what actually breaks if I answer tomorrow? Usually nothing breaks. The urgency was someone else’s leverage, and you just handed it back.
Lie 02
“The team will solve this for you.”
In a good market, sometimes they do. In a downturn, you’re on your own — and that part isn’t the lie. That’s the truth. The lie is the comfort that tells you otherwise. A team built for a rising market is not the same team you need when the market turns. Some of them are. Some of them aren’t. You find out under load.
Counter-move: Ask the real question — what do I delegate, and what do I have to own myself? Then a harder one — is this team built for the market I’m actually in, or the one I had two years ago? Pressure is a free stress test on your roster. Use it.
Lie 03
“If you don’t act, it gets worse.”
Pressure mistakes motion for progress. It rewards activity that feels like control. The email you sent at 11:47 because the silence felt unbearable — and then thirty days cleaning up after that one send.
Counter-move: Block the white noise. Make the call that actually has to be made. The skill is telling the two apart — which pressure is real, and which is just noise demanding you do something so you feel in charge.
Lie 04
“You’ll feel better once it’s done.”
Pressure promises relief on the other side of a bad decision. The relief is a lie. The bad decision is permanent. The deal you closed just to stop thinking about it — the version of you that closed it is gone, but the deal is still on the books.
Counter-move: Name the feeling for what it is — exhaustion, not clarity. Sleep. Decide rested.
The Decisions That Cost Me Years
I’m not going to give you the LinkedIn version of this. The decisions that cost me the most weren’t the dramatic ones. They were the tired ones. Late, alone, with a feeling in my chest I mistook for instinct. It wasn’t instinct. It was exhaustion wearing instinct’s clothes.
Every one of them followed the same pattern. A decision that should have sat overnight got made at night. A thing I should have owned, I delegated — because owning it felt heavy and I was already empty. A thing I should have delegated, I clutched — because letting go felt like losing control I didn’t actually have.
The thirty-day cost was always visible. The twelve-month cost was the one that kept compounding quietly while I told myself it was handled.
The System I Built Against It
So I stopped trusting myself in the moment. Not as a confidence problem — as an engineering one. You don’t build a bridge that only holds when the weather is good. Here are the five practices. You can install three of them by Friday.
The 24-hour rule
Any decision over a defined dollar threshold sits overnight. The threshold gets set when you’re rested. It never moves when you’re tired.
Delegate or own — pick one
Two questions before every hard call: what do I delegate, what do I have to own. Most operators get this backwards under pressure — they delegate what they should own and own what they should delegate. Stop doing both.
Physical baseline as infrastructure
Sleep, training, food. Not vanity — decision quality. Eight years of CrossFit at Invictus isn’t a hobby. It’s load testing for the brain.
Wednesday film discipline
One day a week, you watch your own tape. Decisions made. Decisions skipped. Decisions still pending. The clarity isn’t optional.
The 11pm list — and how short it actually is
The truth is the list is short. Most entrepreneurs don’t have ten people they can call at eleven. They have one or two. The job isn’t pretending the list is longer. It’s knowing who the one or two are, protecting those relationships, and not wasting them on noise.
What I Tell My Daughters
My daughters don’t care about the money. They don’t care about the followers. They care if I’m at dinner. And the version of me they need is the same one the investors need — there’s no separate man for work.
What I want them to inherit isn’t the money. It’s the operating principle: pressure is a tax on bad systems, and the work of a lifetime is building systems that hold. Pressure doesn’t reveal character. Pressure distorts it. The work is building a system that holds when you can’t.
The discipline I’m trying to build in them is the same one I’m still trying to finish building in myself.
Questions Operators Ask
Does pressure reveal your true character?
No. Pressure distorts character — it doesn’t reveal it. Under load, judgment degrades the same way reaction time degrades when you’re exhausted. The work is building a system that holds when you can’t, so your decisions don’t depend on how you happen to feel at 9:47 at night.
What are the lies pressure tells you when making a decision?
Four. “Decide now” — most urgency is manufactured. “The team will solve this” — in a downturn you find out who was built for the market you’re actually in. “If you don’t act it gets worse” — pressure mistakes motion for progress. “You’ll feel better once it’s done” — relief on the far side of a bad decision is a lie, and the bad decision is permanent.
How do you make better decisions under pressure?
Build a system that doesn’t rely on willpower: a 24-hour rule on threshold decisions, a clear split between what you delegate and what you own, sleep and training as decision-quality infrastructure, a weekly review of your own calls, and knowing the two or three people you can actually reach at eleven at night.
What is the 24-hour rule for decision making?
Any decision above a defined dollar threshold sits overnight before you commit. The threshold gets set when you’re rested and never moves when you’re tired. It strips false urgency out and forces the question: what actually breaks if I answer tomorrow?
If any of this hit, you’re who it was written for.
This is one piece of a larger operating system — the one I built after pressure cost me years. If you’re running something serious and you want the rest of it, that’s what The CXC Experience is for.