Your anxiety is a clarity problem (not a stress problem)

Two of my co-founders quit. Three weeks before our funding round.

Post-Covid. Cash running low. I was suddenly alone — handling sales, operations, and investor relations. All at once. While trying to convince our board that ForkOn still had a future.

I didn't sleep well for weeks. My mind kept racing through everything that could go wrong. The funding might fall through. The team might leave. We might not make it to next month.

But here's what I realized: My anxiety wasn't about the problems themselves. It was about not knowing exactly what the problems were.

"Anxiety is a mile wide and an inch deep. It looks like an ocean you are going to step into and drown. But, you step in, and it's not that deep..."

I was worried about "everything." And "everything" is impossible to solve.

The moment I sat down and wrote out exactly what I was afraid of, something shifted. Instead of a cloud of dread, I had a list. A messy, uncomfortable list — but a list I could work through.

That's when it clicked. The anxiety wasn't about the problems. It was about not knowing what they actually were.

When you're anxious about "the business," you're paralyzed. When you're anxious about "we need €50k by March 15th or we miss payroll" — that's a problem you can solve.

Here's what I do now whenever anxiety creeps in. I stole the core idea from Tim Ferriss years ago, but I've beaten it into something that actually works at 2am when your brain won't stop:

Define the fear. I write down exactly what I'm afraid of. Not "things might go wrong" but "I'm afraid we'll lose Customer X and that's 30% of revenue." The more specific, the less scary it becomes.

Imagine the worst case. What's the absolute worst that could happen? I write it out in detail. Usually, it's not as catastrophic as my brain made it seem at 3am.

Plan for the worst. If that worst case happened — what would I actually do? Having a plan for the bottom removes the fear of falling.

Pick one thing. I identify the single biggest bottleneck. Not five problems. One. Tomorrow, I solve that one thing. The next day, the next one.

The result? The anxiety usually dissolves within 24 hours. Not because the problems disappeared — but because they became concrete. And concrete problems have solutions.

As founders, uncertainty is constant. You'll never eliminate it. But you can get faster at moving from anxiety back to action. The skill isn't avoiding fear. It's making fear specific enough to face.

This week, if you feel overwhelmed:

➡️ Block 30 minutes tomorrow. Close everything. Just you and a blank page.

➡️ Write down exactly what you're afraid of. Be embarrassingly specific.

➡️ Identify the ONE biggest problem. Break it into steps. Start tomorrow.

The fog will lift. It always does when you name what's in it.

All the best,

🌱 Tim