When the Work Piles Up: Notes from Year Two of Building Brave New Path

Last Friday, I cried on a client call.

Not sobbing, more like that moment when your eyes go watery and your throat tightens and you hope the other person doesn't notice. She noticed.

Here's what the week actually looked like: mock interview on Wednesday, another mock interview Thursday, a call Tuesday where she needed to talk and I listened, then another mock interview Friday when she got her second round. We kept pivoting to whatever felt most urgent. And the CMF Hypothesis session, the thing that would have anchored everything, the work that would have helped her see her own progress, kept getting pushed.

She felt like she wasn't moving forward, while I felt like I'd been showing up every day. We were both right, and we were both talking about different things.

That's on me to manage. I’m the coach, I know. I'm the one who needs to protect the important from the urgent, to set expectations clearly, to make sure clients feel the progress even when the plan shifts. I know that. I'm learning it in real time, which is another way of saying: I haven't fully figured it out yet.

But I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt.

I'm writing this because of something Paul Mederos wrote about building in public. He warned that the movement has a dark side. That, just like Instagram highlights warp perception, building in public can do the same, and with devastating effects on others.

He quoted someone on Hacker News who wrote:

I’m writing this post because I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. After three failed attempts at building a successful startup and spending time institutionalized, I’m giving up on my entrepreneurship dreams.

Ouch.

If you read my weekly updates, it might seem like everything is going quite well. Sure, I miss some stuff, but on the whole, I'm making money, I have too much demand, I'm having to turn down business, clients are getting jobs. I'm so fucking perfect.

So it might seem like I have it all figured out. But I don't. And I wanted to share what's happening in real life. Nothing too dramatic, but stressful all the same.

So here's what March 15, 2026, Year Two, actually looks like.

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I Have More Clients Than My Systems Were Built For

I have more clients than my systems were built for. I'm behind on a CMF Hypothesis I promised to deliver. Another client landed an interview for Tuesday, and the only slot on my calendar for a mock interview is Monday at 5pm. For a third client who just started, I said I'd send CV notes. I'm not yet behind, but when things aren't this hectic, I always deliver within 24 hours, if not the same day.

I can already feel the tightness in my shoulders and traps, which is where my stress likes to make itself felt. And I'm tempted: I'll work nights and weekends just to finish it.

But that just turns a systems problem into a personal one. It's like borrowing money to get through the month. It works once, then you need to borrow again. And each time the hole gets a little deeper. Because the root cause, more expenses than income, never got fixed.

The other thing that comes up — and I want to be clear this is not an option — is to just say: I'm sorry, let's cancel, I'll give you a refund. Younger me would have been tempted. I actually did this with a copywriting client, when I tried self-employment for the first time as a 22-year old freelancer.

It's like when you fuck up at work and think: I can just resign. I don't need this job. But it doesn't solve the root cause. My client doesn't want her money back, she want my help getting a job. So I stay, I apologize, I show up. It's not about avoiding mistakes, although we try. It's about what we do after. I've written about this before.

What keeps me going is that I've seen this play out enough times to trust the process even when I can't see the end of it.

• Aly got an offer, it got rescinded, then we got it reversed.
• Viktoria was certain there were no English-language jobs in her field and her German wasn't good enough for client-facing roles... She landed an offer on her first real attempt.
• Cindy was so sure the Friday call was going to be a rejection that she was already mentally packing her bags to head back to California... it was an offer.
• Guly had almost no time to job search while working in gastronomy. We turned her gastronomy experience into a corporate marketing story. She started her new job last month.

Things never go as planned. They go sideways. But they almost always come right, as long as we don't quit.

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Balance Is a Mathematical Illusion

Here's what I believe: balance, in business, is a mathematical illusion. I'm open to being wrong about this, but here’s how I think about it.

It's like being "on time" to meet a friend at a restaurant. There is exactly one point — let's say 19:00:00 — where you are precisely on time. Everything before it is early. Everything after, whether 7:01pm or 7:30pm, is late. You are probably, and I mean this not as a judgment on your punctuality, but statistically, almost always either too early or too late.

Building a business is the same. I would love to develop my product, my marketing, and my operations in perfect sequence, each one optimized before the next begins. But it's almost impossible. Either you grow faster than your operations can handle, or you build operations before you have clients to justify them. The timing is almost always off in one direction or the other.

I've watched this exact cycle repeat in every tech company I've worked in. Marketing floods the funnel. Operations buckles under the load. The CEO hounds customer success. Everyone drops what they're doing to fix support. Then product hasn't shipped anything in three months, and the cycle starts again. I used to think this meant the CEO is an idiot. Now I think it's just what building looks like from the inside.

So the real choice isn't how do I avoid this, although we should try. It's: Do you pay with stress, or do you pay with money? Slack costs money — extra capacity, buffer, people hired slightly ahead of need. Most early-stage founders can't afford that. So we pay with stress instead.

Right now, I'm paying with stress, because I have more time than money. But I'm working toward being able to pay with money. I've written that I actually want to leave money on the table.

Knowing this helps. It doesn't prevent the stress, but it does help me not beat myself up about the fact that this stressful thing is happening.

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You Are Here. This Is It.

The lesson I keep coming back to is a post-it note I stuck on my monitor. It says:

You are here. This is it.

Not: this is what building a business is like.

But: This IS building a business.

The overload, the watery eyes on a client call... This isn't the cost of admission. This is the thing itself.

Look, don't get me wrong. Eighty percent of the time, I'm having the most fun I've had working in my life. I'm doing my best work, I'm not trading my time for money, and for the first time I'm building something that is both meaningful right now and an investment in my future. That's rare.

It’s the thing I’ve been wanting, dreaming of, working towards, my whole career - 14 years so far. I’m so, so grateful, and I don't take it lightly.

But there's the other twenty percent. And that twenty percent is exactly right. That's not something to push through and then be done with. It just is.

There's a saying in cycling: It never gets easier, you just get faster. I think that's true here too. If you’ve done your research, if you have a good plan, and it still feels hard… That's not a sign something is wrong, that's just what this feels like from the inside.

This is what the middle looks like. We can do this. Keep going.