My Top 5 Lessons from 2025 | Ep 334

What's up guys, welcome back to build and today we're going to do a little bit of a different episode. We are going to do my top five lessons from 2025. So making this episode I've made, I think I've made an episode every year for the last three years on my top lessons from the year. This is actually something that my husband Alex and I do. We both look back at our years and we share with each other like what did we learn. And he just helped crystallize a lot of the lessons so selfishly it helps me learn it better. I also think it gives you guys a recap of everything that's happened both professionally and personally and my takeaways. So hopefully you can learn from the things I learned this year. As I started writing these down a lot of times I do like 10 or 20 lessons and I was like you know this year had a lot of big themes and I really wanted to crystallize them into just five because I think that's more digestible. You are more likely to take action off of it and I think it's ultimately more helpful. And so I want to start by kind of rewinding and I'll be honest like going back to think about the lessons that I learned this year was hard because this last year if I think about how last year started it was honestly like the worst adult year of my life for the first six months. It was very difficult for me. And it was hard to think about and write about it's not something that I like going into great detail because it was just a time where I felt very helpless and I didn't know what to do and I was also incredibly stressed. Now coming out of that for those who don't know last January I got sick and then I got sick and put on antibiotics and more antibiotics and more and more and more and all these things that led to just a ton of health challenges and I ultimately had to have surgery which required at least a month that I was really not able to work much at all. I haven't talked a lot about it because it was confusing and I don't feel like having medical opinions put at me on social media so I have decided not to share in great detail what occurred. It was really scary and I didn't know what was going on. I had a lot of days where I was in so much pain and I thought I was going to die. And looking back at that time it was also in my business was exploding the most. I had two lawsuits occur. I was supposed to start a cycle of IVF, I had just hired four new executives and I was wearing so many hats in the business. I think I lost 20 or 25 pounds because I didn't have an appetite. I wasn't eating. I was also in pain. I remember looking at Alex's phone he'd like set it down next to himself and I remember he texted his friend and said I'm so scared with how thin she is. I remember thinking I just don't know what's going on with me. I didn't know it was wrong. There wasn't something I was doing on purpose, this is all happening while I have this company that is massively succeeding, right, which is the irony of it all is like looking back. I can't fathom how many good and bad things happen at the same time. And during that time I think this is what's most important to share here and we'll lead up to the lesson is there were so many days where I wanted to give up. I would be lying and I'm not the type of person who thinks about giving up because I love what I do but I just want to give up on life. I didn't know what was going on. I don't say that to scared you but you're to mean anything but I think it's really reasonable to feel incredibly depressed and not look forward to your days, not like waking up in the morning because you're in excruciating pain. You don't know what's going on. Everything around you feels incredibly stressful and it doesn't seem to have an end. And there were a lot of days where I only felt like I was able to work and I kept working because it kept my mind off of thinking those things and going to a really really dark place. It was really hard. I was incredibly depressed and had a thing to show up for my company and my business and my employees and try and not bring that to them was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I've had to go through law, grief, terrible anxiety and stress with my teams before when I've led them. It's been a decade now but the element of adding on the physical pain and the just sheer terror of not knowing what was going on with myself was very hard for me, especially as somebody who prior to this year identified with being incredibly healthy, I've always taken care of myself, always ate well, exercised, stressed management, sleep, etc. Not once in my years did I really ever not prioritize those. I never pulled an all-nighter, not on purpose. I never completely skipped working out forever. I always did enough, I always did a minimum, and so I didn't identify those things, but then this last year hit and it was just so hard, I was depressed, it was hard. In the moment that I was feeling all this and I remember after my surgery, I was recovering and I was thinking about what is my number one lesson? What have I learned from all this pain and discomfort and anxiety? I literally wrote this down, I said most people quit when they just need to rest. It honestly got me through recovering, it got me through the feelings I was dealing with, it got me through so much because I realized that I needed to rest. I needed to rest to recover my body and reset mentally. I needed to rest, but I didn't need to quit. I realized, zooming out so much of my life, I live in the extremes. I think everyone that knows me, even since I'm college, would say you get obsessed, you're extreme. These are correct statements. I'm flawed as a human, I do not say things to try and help you guys live a life like mine. More to avoid mistakes I've made, I would say my business acumen is high, but I know I can be extremely obsessed and I felt so many times last year like me resting was quitting and I started really thinking about it, I was like that's so interesting as somebody who has identified as an athlete in most of my life, athletes are coached to rest as part of training. Yet in business, it's like high performers were taught to feel guilty for it and so it's interesting because I started really thinking about it, physical overtraining is like a universally understood concept. You can physically over train. I remember when I was training a lot, getting to a point where I have coaches say you need to take another rest day, we need to do this and you do that and it moving the ball forward for me. But it's interesting because we don't think about cognitive or emotional overtraining. Instead, if we have, quote, cognitive or emotional overtraining, we label it as weakness. If we are, you know, business owner entrepreneur, a high performer of some sort, you know, another piece that I was thinking about is like in sports, we call rest recovery. In business, when people rest, what do we normally call it, lazy, crazy to think about, right? I was thinking about all this as I was recovering and realizing that I knew how to take days off. I'll be honest with you guys. I have gotten past the point of feeling guilty, taking time off. I don't feel guilty, taking time off. I don't feel guilty resting. But I just didn't think about it the same way as I do now. I didn't have to do such extended periods. I started really thinking about the concept and realizing that even over the months where I was dealing with all of my health issues, that fatigue I was feeling because of the pain and the exhaustion and the anxiety loop that I was in, it did a lot of stuff to me, my entire life outlook, like it distorted my judgment. And I think a lot of people quit not because the work is wrong or they made the wrong decision, they quit because they're exhausted. They quit because they're exhausted and the fatigue distorts your judgment. And that became very real to me because there were many days where I was like, I just want to send it in. I would have to run a meeting for the entire team or do it in person filming or recording or something. So much pain and I was so anxious about what was happening to my body and I was like, how am I going to do this right now? I had a few times where I definitely broke down, you know, and I was just like, I would just cry because I felt so tired of dealing with all of this. I realized that those feelings of fatigue and tiredness really narrowed my perspective and made problems feel permanent. That looking back when I rested, we're very manageable. They really made me think about other areas that this could show up and how I can use this moving forward, which is rest before you quit. If you feel like you want to quit something, I just deeply encourage you to rest first. The amount of entrepreneurs that I've seen end businesses, change direction, etc. because they just need to take a fucking weekend or a week or two weeks or maybe a month's spectacle for all I care, but quitting when you're depleted is not a way to gain clarity. It's letting exhaustion make a decision for you, which has a high chance of regret. And so I've really spent a lot of time crystallizing this, which is I do believe that high performers don't rest to avoid work. They rest to return with better decisions, higher standards and sustained output. From my TLDR from that, I really think the most expensive mistake in business is not slowing down. It is walking away, it is quitting, when recovery would have changed the outcome for you. I thought about this a lot. In the months that I was recovering, I think about it probably every day now because I have to be a lot kinder to myself. I'm still doing physical therapy, still recovering from my surgery takes 12 months to really recovery, all the muscles that were operated on and so it's been tough because I can't go at the speed. I was in many different areas of my life and I realized that there's nothing wrong with that because it is creating sustainable performance for me. But in the past, I would have considered that to be a problem or something wrong with me or I'm lazy. I'm interested in all these things and it's funny because during this time, like you guys know, I would say like 234, I was definitely a little more hardcore than my other years of life business, like fuck your mood, follow the plan, all these things. And that's probably what you guys are thinking, listening to this. I also just want to speak to that, like fuck your mood, follow the plan, absolutely does not mean that you need to, this is not me advocating for self-induced suffering. Like I said, fuck my mood, follow the plan so many times I was recovering because my plan was to rest. I was like, fuck my mood, follow the plan, your plan is to fucking rest. I can't tell you how many times I said that to myself for those of you who follow me and have heard me say that phrase, like it means whatever you want to mean for you, it's just what's the plan. That's all. My plan was to rest. I will say going into after my recovery and starting to work again, we had hired a lot of people. So this year, we more than doubled our team. In fact, this last quarter, we hired 41 people alone. I do think that part of what contributed to my stress and cue point when I had helped this use is that things grew so fast that I couldn't find people fast enough to put them in seats. And it taught me something zooming out and having that period of rest, which was a different level of real to me is you have to design the system, not be the system. I'll tell you how this has changed for me. I have always understood and done a great job of doing and teaching that you have to design the system. You can't be the system. However, when a company grows insanely quickly, that's very difficult to do in practice. And business is not perfect. It's fucking messy. So if anybody out here is telling you that they don't ever have to jump in, I can promise you that they're not running a billion dollar company. I realized that a lot of what made the company successful eventually became the constraint me having proximity to have been in the team, me using heroics to solve big problems. That had to get replaced with creating clarity with governance with decision rights. And I had to replace it ahead of time. If you really want to design the system rather than becoming the system, hire ahead. And this is what I learned. I have done that when there's periods of calm. I haven't done it when it's periods of growth because I don't want to overshoot. Then I took a step back and I really thought about this and I was like, I have the capital. I have the team. I have the ability. I should overshoot because not overshooting means that I might have to over extend myself time after time again. And I can't keep doing that to myself, to my health, my body. And so I decided that I was going to do things differently in that way, which is also why I said, I'm hiring a little bit ahead. I'm trying to create cushion because there's cushion. And if my team has buffer, it's very unlikely that I have to jump in and be the buffer. If you have a very profitable business that has steady growth, you're not worried about it declining anytime soon. I highly suggest hiring with cushion rather without. Now, I'll be honest, this is something that disgusted me. At many points in my career, I hate excess and then I realize that excess, it's almost like a safety net rather than something to be disgusted by. And that has helped me a lot in thinking about how to build my company. The second piece to that, when you think about designing the system, not becoming it, is if your team, your organization, depends on your presence, judgment, energy, it is fragile. Durable companies are the ones that are built with systems work without the founder in the room. I remember there was a conversation I had with someone in my team where I took a step back from a certain department and they said, hey, like things are not feeling good, I really think you need to jump back in. And I said, perfect, love knowing that, I'm not jumping back in. I want to see a couple of things. Now I can see the problem work clearly. I'm plugging that hole when I'm being that person and covering up the problem, I can't see it as clearly. I need to get some distance from it. Second is, you never know who in your organization can step up to solve that problem. If you don't allow it to sit and exist and see who wants to step up and grab it. Another thing, when you want to build a system that works, you can't build a system without knowing it's flaws. So you have to step back far enough to objectively see the issues with the system. If you're too close, you're not going to know what it's coming from. And for me, what I recognize by step back is it was not talent and it was not effort. We have amazing talent and amazing effort. It was infrastructure of having the right data, the right decision making rights assigned to the right people and the right operating kittens. The lesson for me was not like, oh, you need to slow down. This wasn't the same as that. It was build the machine so speed compounds instead of collapses it. And so a lot of what this means is knowing when to step back, knowing when to stop, knowing when to actually disengage from parts of your business so that you can see the flaws and then design something that can scale beyond you. Now the issue I see with a lot of people is they won't step back far enough. I see a lot of people on my team who are leaders. They will not step back far enough to see the problems objectively because they think that means they're a bad leader. Getting perspective doesn't make you a bad leader. And I even like to tell my teams I'm doing this because then I'm like, well, at least they can learn that way because that's the truth. So the third lesson that I took away this year is that the right kittens beats constant availability, having all the health issues I did and then having to really be out, part of recovering was like, you know, my doctor's like, you cannot be stressed. You need to like not be checking slack, not be like, I want you to veg out on the couch. I was like, oh my God. What the fuck? I am not the type of person who likes to do that for more than a couple hours once a week on Saturday night or Sunday night. So hearing that was really difficult for me. And I was like, how the fuck am I supposed to do that? So I said, all right, well, I'm going to do that. And then and looking at the rest of my calendar for that month, I was like, well, I have all this PT I have to do and doctor's appointment. So how am I going to manage this? I realized I had to cut down a lot of my meetings more than ever. I had to be really ruthless with my time in a way that I'd never been before, which scared me because I'm like, wow, I have a lot of people that report to me on the CEO. What am I going to do? And I took away a few things from that realizing how it helped me become a better leader. The first one is that I realized that me being constantly available, which I looked at as being fast, I want to lose fast, I want to respond fast, I want to keep the pace of the company. I'm no longer at a point where that actually makes the most sense. It makes the most sense for people below me. Constant availability just creates dependence on you. I think a good cadence creates capability in others when people know when and how decisions happen. They stop escalating everything to you all the time. And I get it because being always readable feels like I'm just being responsive and anything thinks fast. But what I realized is it trained my team to bypass a lot of ownership and preparation. It was just like hitting the easy button. I'm not talking about running a five or ten million dollar company here. I'm talking about running a company that's on its way to maybe already worth a billion dollars. These problems can exist far up the chain. So I started realizing that and what I recognized in taking that time and having so many less meetings and cutting things down is that my team became so much stronger. I cut more meetings than I ever cut my entire life and I'm pretty ruthless with making sure I don't have useless meetings in my calendar. But in me protecting that cadence and saying these are the only ways that were communicating making these decisions, I had so many fewer interruptions, which meant I had so much higher quality questions coming to me, quality decisions that I was making, and quality outcomes. I wrote down, I said availability scales poorly, cadence, the scales leadership. Availability creates bottlenecks, the other build leaders. That helped me a lot think through this time because I saw how beneficial was for my team. So many people stepped up that would not have otherwise and so many people found other ways to solve problems that they were using me for. In doing something like this, a goal is not that people always have access to you for you to be a great leader. The goal is that people understand who makes what decisions, what frameworks to use and when to expect to hear from you. I think that if I had to sum it up into like a sentence, I would say that like strong leaders aren't hard to reach, but they are predictable, prepared, and decisive at the right moments. I wouldn't say that I'm hard to reach, I'm not hard reach, but I am not constantly available anymore, and I am not going to allow messy, sloppy thinking to come to my desk when I might have done that in the past. In the past, I was on Slack messaging people from 4 a.m. until 9 p.m., but it's like I'm not going to check it first thing because I need to use my best thinking time in the morning. I'm not going to check it late at night because I'm not going to disturb my rest and sleep. And I've also realized that there's very, really, in fact, there hasn't been anything that has justified either of those times of the day, so far, since I enacted this into my life and way of running things. So the fourth lesson that I have for this year is about being kind, not nice. The goal is to be a kind leader, not a nice leader. This is something that I really want to say the end of 2024, I start, I coined that phrase until my team be kind, not nice, that's the goal. However, I don't think I really embodied it fully until this year. Now I feel like people probably say I'm nice, but I think I'd be described so much more as kind is become so real and cemented into the way that I lead. A huge piece of this is seeing how one leader I had in my company years ago tainted a department indefinitely from their inability to be kind and their overextension of niceness. What's the difference here? Niceness essentially avoids discomfort and postpone the truth. Kindness requires honesty, timely feedback, and decisions that protect your long term, you know, health goals, et cetera, over short term, easy. When I think about being nice, I think about avoiding the truth, to spare someone's feelings of the short term, but then you create dysfunction in the long term. Being kind means that in the short term, it might sting a little, but in the long run, it makes them so much better, use so much better, relationships so much better, and strong and durable. And seeing that I had one leader on a team who built a team off of niceness, I am still two years later, paying for that. In fact, the team knows we talk about it because it was so deeply ingrained into the behavior. And I think a lot of what came out of that niceness with that person was permissiveness. It was withholding clarity, to spare people's feelings, which feels compassionate in the moment, but it roads trust over time. And then when somebody comes in who tells the truth, they just trust that person because they're like, I don't understand this other person's promises. They were just avoiding telling you the truth because I was uncomfortable for them. And so it's a terrible thing to undo. It takes a long time, and it builds a team that it does not uphold standards, morals, or values of a company, but instead constantly tests them, molds them, and works their way around them. And it attracts people who also do that. Kindness, on the other hand, respects people enough to be clear. That's what it is. Kindness is respect, right, niceness is the worst thing you can do for evil because you're telling them you can't handle the truth. I don't believe you can handle the truth, so I'm going to be nice, not kind. I'm not going to tell it to you. Sucks, can you imagine if your spouse was like that to you and they just assumed you couldn't handle it? In reality, what I have learned, and I think I do a great job of this now, hot, I have high standards, but I deliver them with respect to my teams. So I have high standards, I deliver them with respect, and I support them, which I believe builds safety in teams. Whereas on the other side, avoidance, while delivered with a smile, still creates uncertainty, instability, and probably a lack of safety and security. And so what this taught me in seeing this play out over the years is that at scale culture is not shaped by intent. No way. It doesn't matter how well-intentioned you are. You can ruin people's lives, departments, and businesses. Culture is shaped by what leaders are willing to say out loud, really and consistently. And the kindest leaders that I know they don't protect people's comfort. They protect clarity, dignity, respect, and the future of the team. I have more leaders on my team that lead with kindness, not niceness. But I do think when somebody is less experienced, when they are more permissive, when they are timid, when they are anxious, when they're stressed, they might default to niceness, and I hope you share this with them. I hope if this resonates for you, you understand how important it is that you be kind, not nice. It is better for your team, better for you, better for the long-term health of your business. There's literally not one way in which niceness beats kindness. And please do not learn the hard way, I kept somebody on the team for far too long who was nice and not kind. And I'm still paying for it, almost two years later. So that brings me to my last lesson, which I would say is probably the biggest business shift that I've made this year, which is realizing the quality of my judgment matters more than the quantity of my effort. I have realized this is the first time my company is finally big enough in terms of revenue and people, like I've had a company at this size team before, but not of this revenue, where I recognize that my job has changed so vastly that I must change as a person to fit into it. I have to change my schedule, I have to change how I talk to people, I have to change how I communicate, I have to change how I make decisions, I have to change how I work, how long I work, the hours I work, what I do with for work, what I do with my time. Just now me making one good decision far outweighs any amount of hours that I can work for my company. And so working longer is no longer an edge for me competitively. I actually think that it's probably the opposite, it is for me, in order to make good decisions, I have to be well rested, I have to have space, I have to have cognitive bandwidth. And those all now become essential, because really my company depends on my discernment, not my stamina, which is a spot that I have been in briefly, but never to this degree. My highest leverage for my company is not doing more of anything, it is deciding what not to do, deciding where we don't go, and then deciding what to do and where we do go. And communicating that exceptionally well. If you really think about it, in the beginning of your business, and even up into multiple eight figures, you kind of have to hustle, if you are a small business, you can't skip to get here, you have to hustle, you have to work, and your output is valuable to the business, because your business is not a point where decisions have that much leverage. Hustle is good, and that point creates a lot of motion and growth for the business, where my business is at right now, I have lots of that in my organization. Management, create direction. Think about it like this, if you have the Titanic that you're steering. How much more important is it that you have a good captain steering the Titanic than captain steering a robot? There's a reason you don't need a license to row a robot, but you need a license to draw the Titanic. Why is that? Because if you use good judgment, you go in the right direction, which means it's a safe trip. If you don't use good judgment, how hard is it to turn that Titanic around? You might hit an iceberg. You see the iceberg coming before you can do anything, like your judgment is more valuable than your work ethic. That is the point you get to at some points in a business. Probably when you're close to the nine figures or above is when this happens, and it has happened for me. And so what I've recognized is that, and I do think this is probably a gradual scale, so it increases more as your company gets bigger. But this means that there are things that were probably less important before than are more now. Like, I cannot risk showing up to a meeting not emotionally regulated. It is a soft scale that you must have to scale, and in my opinion, it's a prerequisite for a few things, clear thinking, resolving conflict, making sound decisions, communicating well to my team. If I am not emotionally regulated, then how am I going to do any of those things? If I'm exhausted from pulling it all nighter, trying to do things with my team, and then I get on a meeting and I have to propose how we're going to make this deal. That's going to be a multi-billion dollar structure. Is that a sort of idea that I'm exhausted making that decision? No. And so this became so real to me this year because my work changed from being the tactical of how we're going to get this done to, oh wow, I have to be planning three, five, six, seven years out. In order to do that, I need way more time to think. In order to do that, I have to make way more decisions, and they are way more important, because if we don't move the Titanic in the right direction, it's a steering in the opposite direction, way harder to do when you've got it, than when you have a robot. Some of you might be just transitioning to a spot where you realize that you're no longer just to tactician your business, you actually have to make decisions. I do think it's gradual. I learned to make decisions be two or three years into my business. The first two years, just throwing shit out of wall and listening to other people's opinions of what you need you to get there. But gradually, you'll see that your work starts to be more decision-making, more judgment. At some point, you completely shifts, and you're like, wow, that's all I do now. I'm at a point where that is a lot more of what I do than now. I feel very confident that's where I need to spend my time. But it is a completely different job than I've had in prior years, and so I have to train for it differently. I think about it like if I'm an athlete, and this is a job, then I need to train for that job differently. If it's a sport I'm playing, it's like, okay, what am I going to do differently here? So that being said, those were my top five lessons of the year. Most people quit when they just need to rest. You need to design the system rather than become the system. The right cadence beats constant availability. You want to be kind and not nice. And the quality of your judgment matters more than the quantity of your effort. So whether you're a business owner, looking to have a business, making money on the side, or a leader in organization, I hope this was helpful for you. This was a weird year. I honestly think this is the most I have changed as a person in the last decade. My identity has shifted quite a bit. I'm in a place where I have let go of the old and recognize I cannot go back, but I still have yet to understand exactly what the new looks like. It's kind of uncomfortable, but I'm okay with it. I know it's directionally correct, unsure what new completely looks like. Also excited for new. So maybe you guys can relate, if not, that's okay too. You don't always have one of those years. God, I hope I don't always have one of those years. I appreciate you guys. I hope these lessons help. I hope they can serve you, and I hope you have an amazing kickoff to your 226.