There are projects we love so deeply that we forget to breathe. We carry them like feverish bodies: adjusting, lifting, correcting, again and again—without realizing that it is we who are running out of air.
In the world of startups, time is never neutral. It is measured. It is structured. It is stressful. We speak of runway, the number of months a company can survive before the cash runs out. A landing strip, literally. The faster you go, the shorter it gets. In the same logic, the obsession with fast time to market—this race to launch, to capture the user, to exist at all costs—pushes founders to compress time, as if speed were more important than accuracy. But in chasing velocity, we often sacrifice maturity, depth, and listening.
We are taught to move fast. To launch early. To fear failure less than inaction. To raise, scale, prove. And then one day, we look up and time has passed. So has energy. Perhaps even meaning. And the question arises: am I holding on out of faith, or out of fear?
Heidegger once said that time is not what passes—but what we project ourselves into. And maybe that’s the real issue: too much projection, not enough presence. Too much tension in the intention. Not enough space to hear what is trying to speak to us quietly. We try to fix, to explain, to save. And in trying to fix, we wear ourselves out.
Entrepreneurs, like all builders of meaning, live in this duality: drive and blindness. We want things to work. We want them to take off. We want what we feel inside to become visible, viable, scalable. But clarity does not rush. It emerges. And sometimes, it does not respond at all.
So what do we do with the silence? Should we persevere? Wait? Let time do its work? Yes—but to do what? Time can become sterile if we don’t inhabit it. Waiting without nourishing becomes another way of giving up. Patience, if passive, becomes an escape in disguise.
And then comes that quiet turning point. The moment when, despite everything, we feel it no longer grows. The connection loosens. The project no longer responds. The joy fades. That’s when letting go becomes a real option. Not to abandon, but to make space. Not to give up, but to stop forcing. To recognize that a cycle has ended—not because we failed, but because we gave it all.
That moment is never glamorous. It is intimate. Bare. Earned. And it’s often in that withdrawal that a different kind of growth begins—the one that no longer seeks to prove, but to simply be.
And if you ask me how we know when it’s the right time to let go, I’ll say this: we never really know. But one day, we stop trying to force it.
And maybe that’s the day we begin again. With more silence. With more grace. With, finally, the right pace.
﴿ وَيَدْعُ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنُ بِٱلشَّرِّ دُعَآءَهُۥ بِٱلْخَيْرِ ۖ وَكَانَ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنُ عَجُولًۭا ﴾
“Man prays for evil as he prays for good. Man is ever hasty.”
Perhaps this is where it all begins: in this heart that rushes too much, too far ahead, incapable of dwelling in the interval. Impatience is not a flaw—it’s part of being human. But it can become either a path to loss… or a seed for transformation.
And Rumi, across the centuries, offers an answer to that ancient truth:
“Each moment is a seed. What you plant there grows inside you.”
So maybe the task is not to resist our impatience, but to transform it.
To make it not a strain toward immediacy, but a quiet act of care for the present.
And you—yes, you who build, who wait, who strive—what are you planting, in those moments where all you want is to harvest?
Genuinely translated by AI.
