Running Through Walls vs. Building Doors

Last week, in very predictable end-of-year fashion, I found myself reflecting on the last few years of my life. What worked. What was mediocre at best. What cost more than it needed to.

One pattern stood out immediately.

Speed has never been my problem.

I move fast. I decide quickly. I’m comfortable under pressure and unusually tolerant of pain and discomfort. That has served me well.

It makes me reliable in chaos. It makes me decisive when other people freeze. It means I’m rarely deterred by the cost or the sacrifice if the outcome matters.

That tolerance has built businesses, carried teams through hard seasons, and allowed me to keep moving forward when slowing down wasn’t an option.

It’s also left a few unnecessary scars.

My business partner and co-founder is wired very differently. He’s a deep thinker with an almost insufferable tendency to boil everything down to first principles. He looks at a situation, pulls it apart, understands what’s actually being solved, and then designs around that.

I’ll run through a hundred brick walls without hesitation. He’ll stop, study the structure, and build a door.

We both end up in the same place. We just pay very different prices to get there.

When we first started working together, I thought he was lazy. I’m sure he thought I was reckless.

We’d have conversations about slowing down, designing things properly, and giving him full context before I went running at something at 100 miles an hour. If he had ever given me a performance review, I’m confident I would’ve been placed on a performance plan.

For a long time, I resisted slowing down because it felt like talking was getting in the way of solving the problem. I’d feel agitated, unconvinced, and, in hindsight, probably insufferable myself.

What’s obvious to me now is that my problem was never execution. And he wasn’t asking me to move slower for the sake of it.

He was asking us to stop deciding before we fully understood what we were building.

My pain tolerance made it easy to move without clarity. To accept friction as part of the deal. To confuse momentum with progress. And to make decisions quickly, sometimes for myself and sometimes for others, before the desired outcome was fully defined.

What I’ve come to respect about my partner isn’t that he moves slower. It’s that he moves with purpose.

He refuses to pay for problems he can design his way around. He doesn’t confuse struggle with virtue. And he doesn’t build momentum until he understands the problem well enough to aim it.

That will never fully be me. And that’s okay.

What I can do is slow down long enough to make better decisions. To collaborate before charging ahead and still be the person willing to run through a wall when the situation truly requires it.

When you look closely at the hardest moments leaders and business owners experience, they’re usually tied to premature decisions. Action taken before the purpose was clear. Costs absorbed that didn’t need to be paid.

Speed is powerful. Endurance is useful. Pain tolerance is an asset.

But without clarity, those strengths don’t build anything durable.

If you’re anything like me — a little wild and a little too comfortable taking a hit — the goal isn’t to become cautious or to second-guess yourself.

It’s to insert a moment of assessment before the decision, not before the action.

For me, that looks like pausing when I feel the urge to move immediately and asking a different set of questions.

Am I solving the right problem, or just the loudest one?

Do I actually understand what I’m building, or am I just building momentum?

Is this decision mine to make, or am I stepping in because it’s faster if I do? What would this look like if I designed it instead of pushing through it?

And is the pain I’m about to absorb necessary, or just familiar?

Running through walls will always get you somewhere.

Taking the time to understand what you’re building determines whether you arrive intact.