The Eleven Minutes

I once sat in my car for eleven minutes before walking into a meeting where I had to tell my team something I wasn't sure about myself.

Then I went in and said it well. Clear, calm, no hesitation anywhere in my voice. People nodded. Someone told me afterwards it was the right call.

And I stood there thinking: none of you have any idea what the last eleven minutes were.

That gap is what I want to write about.

The Version That Doesn't Get Told

Every decision I've made has two versions.

There's the one my team sees, announced, structured, already moving. And there's the one I lived through, which is slower and messier and almost always happens somewhere private. The car. The stockroom before opening. My kitchen at 2am with the lights off.

For a long time I treated the second version as something unprofessional. A thing to get through quickly so I could deliver the first one properly.

I've stopped believing that. The second version is where the actual leadership happened. The first one was just the announcement.

Why We Hold It

There's a good reason for the silence, and I want to be fair to it.

People need you steady. Teams read your face before they read your numbers. The few times I let doubt out at the wrong moment, it didn't sound like honesty to my team, it sounded like the ground moving. So I learned to hold things, the way most of us do, and I'd do it again.

But holding becomes a habit, and habits don't switch off when you leave the building. After enough years I wasn't only keeping things from the room. I was keeping them from myself. I'd make a decision and not let myself feel what it cost until months later, usually somewhere that had nothing to do with work.

That's the part I want to name. Not the discretion, the discretion is the job. The forgetting.

The Things Nobody Writes Down

I've built a company of more than a hundred people across sixteen stores. There is an enormous amount of material available on how to do that.

There is almost nothing on what it feels like at 6am on payroll day. Nothing on the particular loneliness of a decision only you can sign. And nothing at all on the relief, I'll be honest about this one, when something you've been quietly propping up finally fails, and you can stop pretending it was going to work.

Nobody warned me about the instinct I overruled because I couldn't defend it with data, and had to apologize to eighteen months later.

None of this is dysfunction. It's the ordinary interior of the role. It's just missing from the record, so every one of us arrives at it thinking we're the exception.

How I'll Write This

I'm not going to publish leadership advice here. There's plenty of it, most of it true, almost none of it useful at 2am.

What I'll do instead is tell you what actually happened. My own decisions, including the ones I got wrong and the ones I'm still not sure about. Conversations with founders and executives who agree to take the armour off for an hour. Specific moments, with the fear left in.

That's the whole difference. Leadership is one of the few jobs where everyone performs competence and nobody compares notes. So each of us privately concludes we're the only one struggling with the part that doesn't show.

We're not. We've just never been in the same room when someone said it.

Why Read This

If you lead anything, a company, a team, a business someone handed you and expected you to hold, you already know the gap I described in the car. You've had your own eleven minutes.

I'm writing so that the next time you're sitting in them, you don't read them as evidence that you're the wrong person for the job. They're evidence that you understand what the job actually costs.

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And if you ever want to tell me about your eleven minutes, my inbox is open. That's half the reason I started this.

This is UNTOLD. Where leadership sounds like a real voice.