There is a tax accomplished founders pay continuously, and most have been paying it so long they’ve stopped noticing the deduction.
It’s the performance of competence.
Somewhere along the way, you became the person with the answer. The one who decides, who reassures, who holds the line when everyone else wavers. It served you — that posture is part of how you built what you built. In most rooms, maintaining it is both rewarded and rational.
But it costs something to never put it down.
The cost is that you lose access to your own uncertainty. The questions you most need to ask are precisely the ones that reveal the limits of your knowledge — and those are the questions the performance of competence will not let you voice. So they go unasked. Not because you don’t have them, but because there is no room in which asking them carries no social penalty.
This is the quiet exhaustion underneath a lot of high achievement: the energy spent, constantly and invisibly, on being seen as the one who knows.
The right room removes the conditions that make the performance necessary. When everyone present has achieved at a comparable level, there is no one to perform for. The posture becomes pointless — and when it drops, what’s underneath is not weakness. It’s the genuine, uncertain, exploratory thinking that the performance was suppressing all along.
The founders who keep growing are the ones who find, occasionally, a room where they are allowed to not know.
That permission is rarer than money.
And for many, it’s the first real rest they’ve had in years.
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.
