05/05/2026
It’s 3pm in Doha and I’m staring at my laptop.
My day was full.
Back to back meetings. Slack messages. Decisions only I could make. A client question. A revenue thing my CFO flagged.
I did the work. I’m exhausted.
And I haven’t had a single hour of actual thinking in three weeks.
This is the part I’m only just figuring out, even after years of running businesses.
I’m not tired because I work hard. I worked hard with a team of five people too. I’m tired because the work has changed, and the part of me that used to think about the business has been quietly buried under everything only I can do.
I call it brain space. The cognitive ground you stand on when you’re actually leading the company instead of running it. Where strategy lives. Where you notice what’s about to break before it breaks. Where you decide what next year looks like, not just what’s due Friday.
Most founders don’t lose brain space all at once. They lose it like savings to small monthly subscriptions. A decision here. A follow up there. A handoff that broke. A meeting nobody else had context for.
By Tuesday afternoon, the brain space is gone.
And here’s the part that kept hitting me this week.
You can’t actually live a global life on a brain that’s running on fumes by Tuesday. You can travel. You can change cities. You can sit in a café in Lisbon or a hotel in Bali. But if your business runs on your daily attention, you’re just running the same exhausted company from a prettier window.
Real freedom isn’t where you sit. It’s whether your brain gets to.
I wrote about this on Global Life Project this week. Link in bio if you want the full piece.
