People tell me running four ventures simultaneously sounds chaotic. I get why. From the outside, it probably looks like someone spinning plates until something crashes.
What they’re missing is the operating system underneath it.
I came to Stoicism sideways — not through philosophy class but through a year when things kept breaking in ways that didn’t care about my feelings about them. Health, plans, markets. The Stoics turned out to have useful things to say about that. Not because they were optimists who dressed it up differently, but because they were serious about the one thing you can actually control: how you process what happens to you.
That sounds abstract until you’re in a room with four things pulling at you and you have to decide which one gets your attention in the next two hours.
Here’s how it actually works for me: I’ve separated what I can move from what I can’t. That’s not fatalism — it’s a filing system. When something goes sideways, I have maybe thirty seconds of reaction before I’m sorting it: is this mine to fix, or is this weather? Weather gets acknowledged and moved past. The fixable stuff gets worked.
Most founders burn energy on weather. The deal that fell through. The competitor move they can’t control. The market sentiment that shifted while they were asleep. None of that is actionable. All of it is magnetic.
Analog Mode, for me, is Stoicism made structural. You remove the inputs you can’t act on. You create the conditions for clear thinking instead of hoping clear thinking shows up.
The philosophy is useless. The practice is everything.