A founder called me last week and the first thing she said was that she thought she was the only one.

Not the only one building a company. The only one making bad calls. She had overbought inventory on a demand forecast that never materialized, and now she was sitting on cash she couldn’t touch and a warehouse bill she hadn’t planned for. She wasn’t calling to ask what to do about the inventory. She already had a plan for that. She was calling because she couldn’t stop replaying the decision, wondering what it said about her.

That second part is the one that gets people. Not the mistake itself.

You cannot scale a business without making hard calls, and you cannot make hard calls without occasionally making the wrong one. You will overbuild inventory. You will hire someone who looks perfect on paper and turns out to be the wrong fit. You will say yes to a deal that seemed smart in the room and looks foolish three months later. This is not a personal failing. It is the tax you pay for being the kind of person who moves instead of waiting for certainty that never comes.

There is a concept from Buddhist teaching I come back to often in this work. The first arrow is the event itself. The bad call, the missed number, the hire that didn’t work out. You cannot avoid that arrow. It is going to find you if you are actually building something.

The second arrow is the one you shoot yourself with afterward. The story about what the mistake means. That you lack judgment. That you are not cut out for this. That everyone else is making better decisions than you are. That arrow is optional, and it does more damage than the first one ever could.

I watch founders lay down the first arrow and then spend weeks shooting themselves with the second one, over and over.

Almost every one of them tells me some version of the same thing this founder told me last week. They feel like they are the only one struggling with cash, the only one who missed a margin target, the only one who made a hiring call they now regret. Meanwhile they are scrolling LinkedIn watching everyone else announce raises and record quarters and effortless growth.

Here is what I have noticed in the founders who move through this well. When something goes wrong, they do not sit with it alone. They bring it to their team, their advisors, their board. Not to assign blame. To find the best of the available bad outcomes. They debate the options honestly, they decide, and then they act. The speed of that cycle matters more than the fact that a bad call happened in the first place. Founders who recover fast are not the ones who avoid mistakes. They are the ones who shorten the distance between the mistake and the next decision.

I have the benefit of sitting across from dozens of founders a week, and I can tell you what none of them can see from inside their own company. You are not alone in this. What you are doing is hard, and hard things produce mistakes as a matter of course, not as a verdict on your ability.

I sometimes wish there was a place where founders posted the real version. The bad call, the number that missed, the hire that did not work, and what they did about it. Not as confession. Just as the truth of what building something actually looks like.

Until that exists, this will have to do. You are not the only one. You never were.