“Different rooms, same furniture.” That was how Marcus described it — and I’ve never heard the problem stated more precisely.
He had done everything a serious founder is supposed to do. Executive coach. Mastermind group. Two leadership programs. Deliberate travel. AI as a strategic thought partner. Years of relentless self-investment.
When I met him, he was stuck.
“I keep doing all the things,” he told me. “And I keep having the same conversations.”
The formats were changing. The participants were rotating. The venues were improving. The investment was scaling.
And the furniture — the underlying patterns of thought, the recurring assumptions, the familiar loop of ideas — remained stubbornly, invisibly in place.
Marcus wasn’t underdeveloped. He was what I now call *overdeveloped*: heavily invested in formats that had become so well-matched to his existing thinking that they had stopped producing genuine friction.
Sharpening makes the current tool more effective. Expanding produces a different kind of tool entirely.
Most entrepreneurial development is extraordinarily good at sharpening.
Expanding requires something different. A different room. A different set of conditions. A different kind of design.
If the most recent time you left a conversation genuinely uncertain about something you thought was settled was months ago — notice that.
About the Author
Anna Lautenschlaeger is a founder, economist, and convener of rare rooms. She holds two PhDs (including Economics), an MBA, and spent years as a professor at the University of London. She is the bestselling author of Hiring & Managing Virtual Assistants and founder of ASENUI — a by-invitation-only society for accomplished entrepreneurs seeking depth over display, and LAULAU – an offshore and nearshore staff recruitment agency.