And overnight, all of that disappeared. Well, kind of. A hundred years is nothing from a behavioral standpoint. We simply don’t evolve that fast. Our instincts and wiring haven't caught up — and they won't anytime soon.

So, looking at where technology has gotten us today, it feels like we live in a world no longer within reach. The speed of change has kept us preoccupied.

Our default tendency is to slip into the romance of the old days, hoping that the safety of our old behavior will save us. And when that doesn’t work, we crumble under the weight of overwhelm. Then discouragement. And ultimately get so stuck that we do nothing. Instead of gaining traction, we keep falling behind. And it becomes so easy to blame technology for it all because the alternative is more difficult to admit.

Yet, after 20 years of building digital ecosystems, whether by hand or transforming organizations to do so, the pattern is always the same. Technology is not the complex system in this equation. Human behavior is.

Our resistance, our fear, our psychological defaults under pressure — that's where the real obstacle lives. And until we're honest about that, no amount of better tools will close the gap.

How to capitalize on it?

Optimizing for human behavior is where the real competitive advantage lives. As AI accelerates the commoditization of tools and capabilities, three investments remain durable regardless of what technology does next.

1. Onboarding is the golden bridge.

Every time something new is introduced, a behavioral gap opens that is rarely addressed. It presents as poor adoption or resistance to change, yet most often it is poor onboarding or, in most cases, no onboarding at all. The integration stage becomes a bottleneck as real-world needs clash with the ambitious solutions. This dissonance is where the investment stalls and the transformation loses momentum.

2. Relationships for derisking.

Most risk lies in the multitude of variables you cannot control. No technology or capital can help you there, because the biggest variable is always human. By investing in relationships, you activate deeply human instincts — the sense of obligation, the willingness to share information selectively, and the tendency to prioritize those within your circle when things get difficult. Build that capital before you need it, because when volatility hits, it is the most underleveraged derisking strategy available.

3. Adaptable culture is the engine.

Technology can be replicated. With AI, sometimes within months. What cannot be replicated at the same speed is the behavioral infrastructure of an organization — how it absorbs change, makes decisions under pressure, and onboards new realities without losing cohesion. The delta between how long a transition was supposed to take and how long it actually took is your culture tax. Invest in that infrastructure, because it is the only competitive advantage that gets stronger the more disruption you absorb.

Why does it work?

Because focusing on the least volatile component in the system is a long-term strategy that compounds. It sounds absurd that the slowest cog wheel, our human behavior, becomes what sets the foundation to handle the speed of everything else.

Technology moves fast, which means any advantage it creates is, by definition, temporary. Once established, human behavioral patterns are sticky and hard to replicate.

As every tool becomes a legacy system. Every competitive advantage enabled by technology gets commoditized. Every market shifts. What does not depreciate at the same rate is the behavioral muscle.

Thus, proper onboarding increases adoption rates while simultaneously improving stickiness — not through lock-in tactics, but through genuine integration into how people work.

The trust infrastructure built through the right relationships grows over time, opening more doors and opportunities, reducing exposure to risk.

And a system where humans are well-oriented behaviorally can absorb new tools and disruptions more easily, because the underlying operating logic stays intact even as the surface-level technology changes.

What cannot keep pace with the speed of technology is precisely what keeps it in check.

Understanding the system is the easy part. Living inside it is another thing entirely. And the best part is that all you need, you already know — the only problem is that in that moment, it will feel as if you are behind, have no control, and are ready to spiral back into overwhelm. Holding steady while living inside the disruption becomes essential.

What to expect and how to hold through it?

Leaning into the human, this is going to sound poetic and doesn’t have answers. Instead of resolving the dissonance, we will embrace it and rely on old behaviors not as a romanticized fantasy of what’s old is better but as a recalibration mechanism that forces us back into what’s real and close.

1. Walk to reach your destination. Every time you feel overwhelmed, slow down and find your footing. What is the next step I can take? Where am I? Can I do this alone? — Focus on the onboarding.

2. Hear only what’s within your vicinity. Anchor back into what influences you. Who/What is around me? Who/What to remove or add? When I move what stays close, what shifts? — Focus on the relationships.

3. See the horizon in front of your eyes. You can handle only what you can see. What behaviors and constraints are shaping my reality (good or bad)? Where do I feel more comfortable and supported? Where can I find what excites me? Focus on the culture.

The Behaviors in Action

We came to believe that logic and analytical rigor are where our answers live — and so we reach for them first, especially when disoriented. Yet what we overlook is that our emotional and philosophical capacities are no less potent in shaping our reality — and require as much, if not more, tending to keep moving.

That is the aliveness adaptive behavior creates. Instead of playing catch-up to every trend and shiny new thing that comes your way, you are proactively shaping the foundations to handle any disruption.

Technology won’t slow down.
The behaviors will lag behind.
But now whatever comes next is within reach.

That’s The Founders Truth: Ambiguity, Absurdity, Aliveness.

And you can experience it today. What feels most out of reach right now?

Have a great day,
Carlo Mahfouz

P.S. I had a great conversation with Dave Van Bennekum about how we communicate differently when the environment shifts — and why that's harder than it sounds. Listen!​

P.P.S. Struggling to Make Decisions When Bandwidth Is Scarce — I wrote about it last week. Read.

P.P.P.S. On Saturday, March 7th, and I are hosting a workshop on Digital Presence by Design. Sign up here.

Every choice feels like survival. You know the pressure, even if what's at stake for you is different. It's easy to get overwhelmed. To burn out. To freeze and become unable to move. And through it all, the question that holds us hostage is whether we are doing the right thing.

But what high-pressure environments often reveal are the constraints we ignore:

1. Decision-making is a cognitively taxing activity

2. Under pressure, we don’t have the luxury to invest the energy or even the bandwidth to undertake such an endeavor.

Yet instead of conserving our capacity to operate, we keep burning it by trying to perfect each decision, when reality demands a different approach.

So today, we focus on optimizing a different type of capital: the energy and bandwidth to keep moving. And it starts with something my dad, who lived through the civil war, still repeats to this day. One I internalized without even realizing it. For years, I thought it was just a survival mechanism, and in some way it probably was.

But as I look back at it now, it was so much more. Three words that outline a simple strategy holding the key to the right decisions without needing them to be right.

“Move Between The Dots”

The constraints you face are real — whatever they are. Given limited bandwidth and cognitive load, this approach prioritizes momentum over perfect decisions. It's always in motion.

Three components:

Move

Movement doesn’t come from feeling ready—it comes from leveraging whatever energy is present. Fear, anxiety, urgency, excitement—all of it creates momentum. It flows continuously because it isn’t an event you prepare for and recover from.

Between

You’re always in transit, moving through the space between decision points. There’s no “before” or “after”—only during. No right or wrong, even. You’re staying open to multiple interpretations and accepting decisions that aren't fully understood or justified.

The Dots

No “major” versus “minor” decision points. Career move, capital allocation, market entry, partnership pivot—just dots. This flattens the pressure. When there’s no inflection point, no single moment that defines everything, paralysis loses its grip. Each dot is one node in the network, not a fork that splits in two.

Why does it work?

Because you stop assuming that any decision is inherently righteous. You stop separating yourself from the flow of events, trying to stand outside them and choose “correctly.”

Control is fleeting. What feels right today becomes wrong tomorrow—and vice versa. The landscape shifts faster than your analysis can keep up.

When you stop trying to optimize each decision, you reclaim bandwidth. The pressure doesn't disappear—it redistributes. Instead of crushing you at every decision point, it flows through you as momentum. The absurdity is that we waste energy optimizing for outcomes we can't control, instead of embracing a fluid reality.

When it’s working, decisions keep happening—but decision-making disappears.

You’re not trying to nail the perfect choice. You're accepting that what you deem the wrong choice today might be exactly what you need tomorrow. And that some of the justification or rationalization you might not fully capture in that moment.

With that realization, decisions no longer feel like endings. They become openings—regenerative rather than terminal. Where each dot is a world of options, not a single inflection point.

How to maintain momentum?

The constraint is cognitive bandwidth. The question isn't just "how do I move?"—it's "what's stopping me from moving?"

These practices are diagnostic; think of them as reality checks. Each reveals where your energy drains and where your tolerance for ambiguity breaks. They help you find the aliveness in motion itself: not making the right decisions to survive, but maintaining the energy to thrive.

1. Do Nothing to Move.

Do nothing, that includes trying not to do anything. Which means you will most likely be doing something. Don’t fight it. The purpose is not to capture time to do more, but to observe where your attention drifts. Understand what’s occupying your cognitive and emotional capacity. It is a practice to almost empty yourself from “the doing” to reclaim your energy. Allow thoughts to come and go.

What it reveals: Where your energy is actually going versus where you think it's going. The gap is your leak.

2. Read or Write Poetry to Understand The Between

Living in the between means engaging with ambiguity and unclear meaning. Poetry trains you to sit with ambiguity without resolving it. It includes processing emotions faster—not by avoiding them, but by feeling them fully without needing absolute answers. If you can’t sit with that, you won’t have energy for movement.

What it reveals: Your tolerance for multiple, unresolved interpretations. If you feel compelled to find the "right" meaning or extract one definitive answer, you're still seeking certainty instead of embracing movement.

3. Zoom Out to See The Dots.

The closer you are to each decision, the more massive it feels. Zoom out. Make it a dot in a field, not THE DOT. Let go of control over how it resolves. This doesn't diminish its importance — it strips away its power to paralyze you. The pattern of moving between dots defines your trajectory, not any single decision. Don't map outcomes. Observe the dot's size relative to all others.

What it reveals: Which decisions you're unconsciously inflating. If you can't zoom out, the decision has captured too much bandwidth—you're trying to control outcomes rather than maintain momentum.

The Movement in Action

In the long term, enduring enterprises and unconventional paths compound from sustained momentum, not perfect decisions.

A friend who’s known me for almost 20 years said recently, “Your energy in keeping pushing through is commendable.” She’s witnessed my journey across oceans, multiple domain shifts, countless decisions—some that worked, many that didn’t.

And it made me realize: this is the right metric for making the right decisions. Not the outcomes. The sustained energy to maintain momentum.

Instead of being paralyzed, you're pivoting underconstraints and moving through more decisions, not fewer.

The pressure won't disappear.
The cognitive load won't lighten.
But the decisions no longer hold you hostage.

That’s The Founders Truth: Ambiguity, Absurdity, Aliveness.

And you can experience it today. What's stopping you from moving?

Have a great Sunday,
Carlo Mahfouz

P.S. Looking for poetry/prose to read? “Let the wind carry you” is my latest.

P.P.S. Struggling to know how to start — I wrote about it last week. Read.

P.P.P.S. Exploring the Self: Technology’s Role in Our Reality: I had a great conversation about this with Vjera Orbanic. Listen!​

And it's rarely a problem of not knowing what to say or not having ideas, but a resistance to putting something out there that feels safe. Our fight or flight response is still active as if we were living in caves. So, how do you go up against built-in programming?

The answer requires some imagination.

Imagine there were two tracks. One I'm going to call the mind track, and another the real track.

~ On the mind track, you need control; thus, habits, systems, and anything that provides security. (Most got this one down)

~ On the real track, you have no control. Uncertain territory filled with ambiguity. You can observe it, but you cannot change it; yet it’s where everything happens, including starting.

You cannot change the built-in programming, but you don’t need to dismiss the real track either. In holding both truths, you are no longer hostage to either.

Let’s play the dance between both tracks…

Start with a number. Like this #001.

When engaging with uncertainty, the first thing the mind seeks is certainty. And while the ambiguity is the predicament, it can be contained rather than dismissed. A number satisfies one track without requiring the other to resolve first.

It signals:

1. A starting point, even if you don’t know where to start.

2. Continuity, even when you have no clue what the steps are.

3. A pull for the next number that’s hard to explain but undeniable.

Why does it work?

Because numbering lets you operate on both tracks simultaneously, but only if you recognize it. That might sound like a small shift, but it is a key one.

Mind track gets: Constraint through commitment. A schema. Structure that bypasses "the right first step" because you're not claiming rightness—just sequence. The certainty it craves.

Real track stays: Messy. Uncertain. Free to emerge. You're not forcing it to crystallize before it's ready. Let it!

You’re not resolving the ambiguity — you’re containing it.

Most people make the mistake of waiting for the real track to become clear before engaging the mind track. They treat ambiguity as a blocker to everything, when it's only blocking one track.

The absurd part is that the ambiguity is necessary. It signals you are still on the real track. If you lose it, you are operating in the spiraling mind and will never start.

Because what we usually dismiss is that we work in a one-dimensional world, but the reality is that we operate in a multi-dimensional space. As absurd as it might sound:

In one dimension, you can be completely clueless. In another, you can be absolutely certain. And neither negates the other, nor is a substitute.

You can move forward with absolute confidence while being absolutely confused. Both states are real. Both are happening simultaneously. And frankly, you know people who represent this, and you smirk at their ability to pull it off every time you see it.

So stop trying to optimize a single track. Stop waiting for all the ambiguity to resolve before you act. Leverage the dimensions you actually live in—the certain and the uncertain.

All of that sounds great, and yet something is missing.

You understand the two tracks. You have your numbering system. The intellectual prison doors are loosening. And yet you're still not moving.

What actually enables you to dance between both tracks?

This is the hardest part to accept because it requires something outside of you. The aliveness born from connection.

In other words, you need help. Three bridges between the tracks:

1. AI, your content generator on steroids.

This is the most passive and artificial, but for some, it is enough. Don’t seek it for answers but for discovery. The mind track loves processing. Give it a recorded meeting or an idea, and ask it to extrapolate and help you understand it; from that, learn. In learning, you create a stronger connection to what you seek, thus helping your mind track make sense of what’s emerging on the real track, creating momentum between them.

2. Voices through podcasts and books.

Listen to others share their lived experiences to inspire reflection and, in turn, create space for new thinking. Don’t look for answers but inspiration. These provide the mind track with patterns to recognize, while the real track mirrors and reflects. The connection happens in the resonance.

3. Reach out to People.

Ask for help publicly, privately, or even paid support from coaches or experts. This is the most direct bridge. Another human being creates aliveness that exists on the real track but energizes action on the mind track. Within that space, ingenuity flourishes.

The Dance in Action

Do all three— give the mind track its system containing the ambiguity rather than dismissing it, embrace the absurdity of moving while confused honoring the real track's uncertainty, tap into aliveness through connection—and before you know it, you will look back and see that somewhere around #043, you notice you’ve been creating value for weeks, and people are asking how to pay you.

That’s when you discover: You already started a business. And “how to start” disappeared in the flow of the dance.

The mind track is still seeking control.
The real track is still uncertain.
But now you're dancing between them.

That's The Founders Truth: Ambiguity, Absurdity, Aliveness.

And you can experience it today. So what’s #001?

Have a great Sunday,
Carlo Mahfouz

P.S. This is #001 of a reboot — my 5th attempt at keeping this weekly newsletter alive. If this resonated, I'd love to hear what your #001 is. Just hit reply.

P.P.S. Beyond the self-made founder and the Power of an Ecosystem: I had a great conversation about this with Vjera Orbanic. Listen!​

P.P.P.S. Want my help in a 1:1 call? I’m on Intro, where people book my time for quick consulting calls. Let’s talk!

Spotify:

Or on YouTube. You can find all episodes and links to the podcast platform on podcast.thefounderstruth.com

Happy Listening,
Carlo

As for what’s coming next year:

📚 Book Trilogy announcement

🎙️Podcast Announcement

💬 New socials for The Founders Truth to follow:

• LinkedIn

• TikTok

• YouTube

• Instagram

And last but not least, early reveal of new cover for the second edition of Reality Check which I would love to hear your thoughts on 👇

HAPPY NEW YEAR 🎊🥳🤗

In this short trailer, Youri Hermes teases out all the remarkable facets the podcast will introduce for aspiring and established founders, exploring themes of ambiguity, absurdity, and aliveness, not just success stories.

The podcast complements the book trilogy by offering dynamic discussions. If you are interested in joining an episode, please let me know. We will also have some episodes open to community members.

Some Takeaways:

• No founder is truly self-made; support systems are crucial.

• Understanding the harsh realities of entrepreneurship can reduce stress.

• Engaging in conversations about team dynamics in ambiguous situations is essential.

That’s why with the second edition of Reality Check, it is all about being more explicit and getting you there as fast as possible.

The original edition was already structured around three pathways: analytical (the first three chapters), creative (the middle three), and spiritual (the final three). But many readers didn’t realize it, so the new edition changes that.

It opens by clearly defining these personas so you can immediately identify your starting point. This is you? Start here.

In addition to that, each section will now include a map that helps you locate where you are now and how you’re moving. Not because mapping will get you there, but because it creates the right environment. The right mindset. The right space for you to visualize the process.

And the best part, you can do all the latter by reading one chapter.

If you could only read one chapter to get unstuck right now, would you know which one to choose?

P.S. If you already have the book, the new mapping tools will be shared in a separate workbook, and I will announce here how to get your hands on it.

Book One: "Reality Check” focuses on the individual founder — removing distractions, sitting with ambiguity, and finding clarity in that paradoxical space. It’s about the internal work that precedes everything else.

Book Two: “Relativity Has Lost Its Purpose,” shifts to teams. No founder succeeds alone, and this book examines team dynamics through the lens of cultural behaviors rather than performance metrics.

Book Three: “The Culture of Why & The Rise of AI” explores how technology can actually remove disconnection. It examines how we’ll collapse timelines, identity, and environmental constraints, creating a space for our humanity to flourish.

The trilogy aims to give founders a complete journey while cutting through the conventional wisdom that often misleads us about technology, teams, and ourselves.

Which book excites you the most, and what questions arise for you that you’d like to see answered?

Today, a trilogy is born.

Because once you find yourself, you still have to lead teams trapped in the rigor of optimization. And even great teams can’t escape systems designed for a world that no longer exists.

Self → Teams → Society.

Three books that move through the layers where transformation gets stuck and reveal what becomes possible when we stop pretending we have it figured out.

The Founders Truth Trilogy begins in March 2026 with a founder-focused relaunch of Reality Check.

This newsletter documents the patterns in real time. I invite you to join us on this journey for founders who refuse to optimize away their humanity.

Subscribe now