Three issues in. Thank you for still being here.
I want to stay with time once more before we move on — because there is a dimension of it that business planning almost never reaches, and it is the one that, in my experience, costs the most.
The Honest Observation
Most business owners have a plan.
Five years, sometimes ten. Revenue targets, team size, market position. Some version of: "If things go the way I'm working toward, by 2030 we will be here."
The plan is detailed about the business. It is almost entirely silent about the person running it.
It does not ask: what kind of person will I be at the end of this? What will the five years of building this at this pace, with this level of pressure, at this cost to these relationships, have produced in me — not as a business owner, but as a human being?
This is not a question most business planning frameworks ask, because most business planning frameworks are not interested in you. They are interested in the business. Your function in the plan is as the engine of the business's growth, not as a person with a body, a marriage, a faith, and a finite amount of capacity that can be drawn on before it starts drawing on reserves that were not designed for drawing on.
Mortality — your own — is the condition that clarifies this question faster than anything else. And it is the condition that ambitious people are, by temperament, most reluctant to face.
What Death-Awareness Does to a Business Plan
I do not mean this morbidly. I mean it practically.
There is a version of business planning that begins with the question: "What do I want my life to have meant when the business journey is over?" That question, taken seriously, changes the calculus in ways that a five-year revenue projection does not.
Now, pay attention here, because it changes what you are willing to sacrifice and what you are not. It changes the weight you give to the relationships around the business. It changes your relationship with urgency — because death-awareness tends to make some urgencies feel very large and others suddenly very small.
When you look back from the end of your life, how important will that urgency feel — the one that kept you from rest?
The margin that never satisfied, the conversation you kept putting off, the spouse who quietly paid the cost — how do those things look when a life is fully seen at the end?
This is not meant to induce despair. The biblical frame for death-awareness is not despair — it is hope. Specifically, resurrection hope. The business owner who genuinely holds resurrection hope has a different relationship with outcomes than the one who has staked everything on building something that will outlast them. They can build faithfully without needing the business to be their legacy. They can let go of outcomes they can't control — because the God who defeated death holds it better than they do.
That is not passivity. It is the most liberating kind of long-term thinking available — and it produces better businesses than the kind of long-term thinking driven by legacy anxiety.
The Honest Question
"What kind of person do I want to be at the end of the business journey I am currently on — not just what kind of business do I want to have? And is the way I am building it consistent with becoming that person?"
Take your time with that one. It is not a quick answer.
One Thing
This fortnight, write two lists.
List 1: What I want the business to look like in five years — the standard version. Revenue, team, market position, whatever is meaningful to you.
List 2: What I want to be like in five years — as a spouse, a parent, a person of faith, a leader, a human being. What condition do I want my health, my marriage, my faith, and my closest relationships to be in?
Place the two lists side by side.
Ask honestly: are the strategies in List 1 consistent with producing List 2? Or is there a tension between them that you have been managing rather than addressing?
The tension, if it is there, is not a problem to be solved. It is a conversation to be had — with God, with yourself, and probably with at least one person who loves you enough to tell you what they see.
A Note on Where We Go Next
For the next three issues — we are going to move from time to body. Specifically: what chronic depletion costs a business owner spiritually, and why the body is not a separate concern from the business but is one of the most important variables in it
The Door
Three issues in, I want to say this directly: if you are reading this and the honest answer to that last question — "are my strategies for the business consistent with the kind of person I want to be?" — is a clear and uncomfortable no, I want you to know that the Discovery Call exists precisely for that moment.
Not to sell you something. To give you an honest conversation about where you are and what, specifically, might need to change.
It is free. It is forty-five minutes. And the only commitment it asks for is honesty — which, if you have read three issues of this newsletter, you are clearly willing to attempt.
Until the next fortnight,
Fredy Namdin
