Issue #100 • September 20th, 2026

Hi Reader,

This is issue #100. I wasn't planning to make a thing of it, but sitting down to write this one on a Sunday while my kids are swimming in the pool, it felt worth a beat of acknowledgment before jumping in. Fair warning, this one runs longer than usual.

A hundred of these, most weeks pulled straight from whatever actually happened that week, a client call, a podcast, a dinner, a hard conversation with myself. Thank you for reading this far with me. On to the usual.

He called me on a Tuesday, and before he even finished the sentence I could hear it in his voice. His supplier can't meet Q4 demand. For a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brand, Q4 isn't just a good quarter, it's the quarter, the one that carries the other three. He wasn't going to hit his growth number. Worse, he was staring down a cash crunch at the exact moment of year he could least afford one.

He didn't want to talk strategy first. He wanted to talk about what he should have done differently. He should have caught it sooner. He should never have trusted that supplier. He should have had a backup lined up months ago.

I asked him one question.

No, he said. He'd help them figure out what to do next.

Then why was he doing the opposite to himself.

That question is the whole idea I want to hand you this week. A phrase surfaced for me in 2022, sitting in a meditation not long after my divorce, running a company doing over $100 million a year and asking myself a simple question I didn't have an answer for yet: why am I doing what I'm doing. The phrase was the reverse golden rule. Not the familiar version, treat others as you'd like to be treated. The other direction.

Once you start running it, you find it everywhere. Here's where else it showed up this week.

The decision I keep hearing dressed up as patience

On a podcast Clarity for Freedom with Bhadresh on Wednesday, I was asked what I'd tell someone thinking about leaving a corporate job to start something of their own. I brought up the longest-running study Harvard has ever done. Long-term, people don't regret the mistakes they made. They regret the chances they didn't take.

Here's the version of that I hear constantly in coaching calls, dressed up in more reasonable language. Not fear, just "not the right time yet." Not avoidance, just "waiting for more clarity." If a friend gave you that explanation for the third year running, you wouldn't buy it, and you'd say so. Worth asking whether you'd let yourself off as easily as you're letting yourself off right now.

The night I'd have handed over the keys

At a mentor dinner with founders this week, someone asked me what I'd do differently if I could go back. I told them the truth. In 2018, if someone had walked through the door and put a check on the table, any number, I would have handed them my keys and walked away. It was that hard.

I didn't say that to be dramatic. I said it because most of what gets talked about publicly is the win, the merger, the revenue milestone, and almost nobody talks about the year they were quietly ready to give it all up. If a friend told you they'd reached that point, you wouldn't tell them they were weak. You'd tell them that's what carrying too much alone, for too long, actually looks like, and that it doesn't mean they're failing. I wasn't always willing to say that to myself back then. I built a business people admired while quietly breaking the reverse golden rule on myself almost every week, and for a long time I did it entirely alone.

What actually pulled me out of that year wasn't a mindset shift I arrived at by myself. It was letting other people in. A coach. A group of people a few steps ahead of me who'd already been through their own version of that year and knew exactly what I wasn't saying out loud. That's the part nobody puts on the highlight reel, that almost every founder who makes it through a stretch like that had someone else in the room with them, even if just once a month. Not someone to fix it for them. Someone to say the hard thing they weren't saying to themselves.

That's really the same lesson as the reverse golden rule, just wearing a different outfit. You wouldn't expect a friend to carry something that heavy without anyone to talk to. You shouldn't expect it of yourself either.

Being your own best friend is my best advice for you today

Here's what I've learned actually works, not as a nice idea but as something you do on the specific days you don't feel like doing it.

Notice the tone before you notice the content. It's rarely what you're saying to yourself that's the problem, it's how you're saying it. "I missed that" is information. "I can't believe I missed that, what's wrong with me" is something else entirely. Catch the second one in the moment it happens, not after.

Give yourself the benefit of the doubt you'd automatically give someone else. If a friend made a call that didn't work out, your first assumption is that they were doing their best with what they knew at the time. Extend yourself that same assumption before you extend yourself blame.

Let good weeks count as much as bad ones do. Most people track their failures in detail and wave off their wins as luck or timing. A good friend would stop you and make you sit in the win for a second. Do that for yourself on purpose, especially when it feels unnecessary.

Ask what a friend would actually say, out loud if you have to. Not what would sound wise. What a real person who liked you would actually say if they were standing in front of you right now. Most of the time it's simpler and kinder than what you were about to tell yourself.

None of this is about lowering your standards. It's about applying the same ones you already use for everyone else you care about.

Run it yourself this week

When something goes wrong that's genuinely outside your control, like a supplier falling through in the one quarter you can't afford it, do you spend more energy fixing it or punishing yourself for not preventing it?

What's the decision you've been calling "not the right time" that a good friend would call fear wearing a nicer outfit?

What's one thing you'd say to yourself this week if you were talking to your best friend instead of yourself?

Be your best friend. You deserve it.

Mathias Ihlenfeld | Entrepreneur | Coach | Advisor

P.S. If you're circling any of this alone right now, groups like Birthing of Giants exist for exactly this reason. Worth looking into, worth reaching out.

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