The Trap of Pushing Harder

A startup founder recounts how detaching from outcomes while maintaining full effort led to success after a failed startup and pivot to machine learning. After a Series A collapse during COVID, the founder's mobile app failed, but later acceptance of uncertainty resulted in a principal PM role.

Every crossroads came with the same two instructions: act now or do nothing. When I was younger I always reached for action. Move first, think later. But the older I got the more mentors would tell me to wait. Let things play out. It felt wrong. Doing nothing felt like losing. But I tried it and it kept working. Then I went further. Spent a month in an ashram learning to meditate. Not just sitting still. Learning to watch my mind reach for control and choosing not to grab. I brought that back to my startup. When our Series A fell apart during covid, our lead investor backed out at the last minute. I told myself I’d accepted it. But I hadn’t. We had no money for hardware anymore, so we pivoted to what we could still do: machine learning. We launched a mobile app and spent months obsessing over downloads, rankings, and retention curves. I was pushing, not letting go. Four months later we shut it down. No startup. No money. What next? People said go back to school. People said start something new. I did all of it. Studied for the GMAT. Started a side project. Applied to jobs. My parents were stressed about the outcomes. I wasn’t. This time I actually let go. I put in the effort and let the results take care of themselves. The side project went nowhere. But I got into a few programs and landed a job in Austin. Soon I was at UT Austin, splitting time between school and work. After graduation I set a goal: principal PM. I put in the hours. Took on the visible projects. Tried to operate at a level beyond the role I had. But I detached from the outcome. My goal was to operate at a principal level, not to get the title. I did everything to position myself for it but didn’t worry about whether it arrived. Then it arrived. The real choice was never pushing or waiting. It was whether I could give full effort without becoming owned by the result. Every time I tried to control the outcome, I lost. Every time I controlled only the input, something worked.