This is the moment that broke my heart in The Godfather part 2.

You see, people talk about Michael’s rise to power but they don’t often talk about how ill equipped he was to be the Don. Godfather 2 does more than just tell the story of two characters; it compares and contrasts Vito – the ruthless natural – with his son Michael, who was a good kid pushed into power before his time and, well, without the natural talent his father had. Yes, a talent for manipulating people, and violence, and making offers you cannot refuse, but a talent nonetheless. And like anyone pushed to excel in a role they were never made for, Michael overcompensated. We talk about the Baptism and we quote “just when I thought I was out” but here is Michael, almost broken, revealing just an inch of his tormented soul to his mother who has no frame of reference to understand why he’s so tortured, and what he’s about to do to himself, and his enemies, and his brother. He’s asking for some context and absolution and there’s none of either, not really, when you’re the Don.

Absolutely, yes, of course Michael is a monster, and a self made one, but the price he paid for power and influence cannot be overstated. He’s had to give up so much for something he didn’t even want to do, that he felt like he had to do, that eventually changed him in irreversible ways.

The other Al Pacino role that connects beautifully with this scene is when he contrasts with De Niro again, now in person, in Heat. Check out the diner scene, this bit that starts at 1:28. The subtext is text here so maybe just read it.

My life’s a disaster zone. I got a stepdaughter so fucked up because her real father’s this large-type asshole. I got a wife, we’re passing each other on the down-slope of a marriage – my third – because I spend all my time chasing guys like you around the block. That’s my life.

Vincent can’t stop, he won’t stop. What he does consumes him, is him, in such a deep way that nothing, not even genuine love, can fix. And he ends up – spoiler alert, I guess – leaving his stepdaughter at the hospital post suicide attempt and chasing his arch-nemesis and maybe the only guy who can understand him into an airport and shooting him dead, and then he holds his hand while he dies, right there on the tarmac.

These guys seem powerful. They are powerful, in a way, because they hurt themselves and everyone around them, and this is what old school masculine power is about, isn’t it, hurt and violence. At the same time, they’re completely powerless. Stuck in the image they have of themselves, and what they’re supposed to do, and what that requires of them. They’re at the top and they have nothing. They’re trapped.

I see trapped guys all around me. One day you look around and realize that through a lot of hard work and some luck you have reached the end of the scripted game, that grand plan you had for yourself since you were 18 years old. Like in Grand Theft Auto after the storylines are over, you’re left with only side quests and whatever you want to do, basically, in a huge sandbox universe. What do you do then? Many can’t break out of their own mind.

We’ve settled on a single narrative in tech that success is incompatible with happiness. There’s one scorecard, money, and as long as you’re on the leaderboard you’re all set, life is good, you have it all figured out, and nothing else matters. I get it, it’s hard to evaluate something less tangible like happiness, or ethics, or just being able to have a full night’s sleep, but looking at the folks we put on a pedestal, I see achievement, for sure, but I also see a bunch of trapped unhappy guys. The SPAC king posting thirst traps. The insanely successful innovator who can’t sleep without Ambien. The recluse king in his remote village, trying to remake reality so it makes any type of sense to him. Trapped, trapped, trapped. Trapped in a perception of who they need to be, of what their value is to the world, in how they get their sense of meaning, because money and virtual internet points are stuff you can always have more of. Powerful, influential people, much more than me or you. Trapped nonetheless.

You don’t need to have tragically ended your life in a fiery hell, surrounded by paid-for sycophants, for evidence you’ve been trapped. For many of us it’s much more mundane: another promotion, another business trip, another notch on the belt, this or that logo on our business card. Feeling like you’re worthless without your achievements and that the intensity that got you here should carry you on for the rest of your life. Like Walter White, you Just Need More. It would be tragic if we let ourselves and our generation go on feeling like money and score keeping are all that matters, and happiness isn’t only unattainable, it’s incompatible with success. In reality, happiness starts when you realize you have enough. Then you start to see the lines of the cage you’ve built and can consider whether, and on what terms, you want out.

Nothing matters. You may believe your soul is eternal or that karma determines your future lives. You may not believe any of that. Regardless, our trivial pursuits mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. Our petty squabbles, our victories and defeats, our joys and sorrows have no innate meaning. We are specks of dust on a planet in a universe that is almost endlessly big.

We’re all going to die. Maybe you’re that one guy on Twitter who thinks he doesn’t age but, news flash, he’s going to die and so are you, and so am I. Even if we find a way to upload our consciousness into the cloud, this physical body is withering away. Half my life has passed, and I am weaker at 40 than I was at 20. We’re all dying by the second.

Nothing matters and we’re all going to die, yet we still wake up in the morning to greet another day. We drink our coffee and we turn on the computer and we take the kids to school. Something’s pulling us forward. Something’s nagging at us to live. What is it? Maybe it’s living for living’s sake.

Some things matter and I’m not dead yet. I catch my wife looking at me and there’s love in her eyes. She touches my shoulder as she passes by while I cook dinner. My face in the mirror is like the one I see in our wedding photos but older. My son is crying his emotions and his tears are big and round and shiny like fleeting gemstones. He looks so much like me when I was his age. My aging father, drunk off two glasses of wine, is telling silly jokes at an expanded family dinner, and my brother and I roll our eyes. We fight and we argue, and, in the end, we sit down to eat together.

Some things matter, profoundly, because I say they do, and they matter for as long as I am around on this earth. It’s not a lot but it’s how I run my life.

One surprising thing that I learned about martial arts is that at the highest levels, it is about conservation of energy and well timed exertion more than giving it all you have and winning with a single motion. As a white belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu you know maybe one choke, and your best hope to make it through a sparring round (other than tapping or gassing out) is to aggressively manoeuvre yourself into a position, close the submission to the best of your ability, and hope the other guy taps out before you black out. A black belt will let the other guy roll into their position before springing one of a few submissions. There’s exertion when they close the trap and, sure, they’re in much better shape than you — but what separates the great ones from the best isn’t raw power.

I think about this sometimes at work. Organizations quickly reach a size that defies the efforts of any individual or small group to make rapid directional changes overnight. It’s possible, but it requires an exertion of energy that may kill you, and you only get to do it once or twice. Black belts in business will roll with the team, making adjustments as they go, and have multiple positions where they could exert energy, quickly, to get something done by either discouraging a wrong direction or (more often) over-funding and enthusiastically encouraging the right one. The flexibility to accept organizational dynamics and let them play out to align a team with strategic goals is key to getting stuff done and, well, not blacking out mid-quarter. This is where the often incorrectly-applied word, “strategy”, meets day to day execution.

Content rules. Conference panels are a fixture in the life of a CEO, whether in virtual or in-person. Podcasts are more popular than ever. How do you keep getting invited to those and keep people in the room and not out in the proverbial (or literal) corridor? These are my tips.

Prepare. Maybe 1% of us can wing it and it’s safer to assume it’s not you. I’ve been able to rock panels with high powered CEOs because they didn’t bother to read the list of questions. Prepare, find your angle for each question and for follow up questions, propose questions that serve you if there aren’t any or the moderator invites you to.

Entertain. Many people think panels are an opportunity to pontificate. They are not: the crowd is there to be informed and entertained. Reframe a common thought, offer a framework, or just point a topic not many discuss and explain how it’s relevant to your audience. Serve your crowd’s expectations, cut down on monologues, and try to be least interesting. If you get them to engage, they will remember you.

Repeat. You’re not a standup comic giving the same routine twice a night for months. You don’t need 100% fresh material every time. Repetition leads to mastery and gets the message across. You may be tired of it but your crowd isn’t (unless, see above, you’re a boring lecturer). Don’t try to reinvent your messaging every time — repeat your best ideas in the same way.

Here’s to a less boring 2021. I’m still going to listen to all of you at 1.5X speed and I suggest you do the same with me.

Growth is cool, but also exhausting. The absolute number of fires grows with time as does complexity. I’ve made it a habit to ask my execs not only about business performance but also how they’re taking care of their mental wellbeing. You can only push >100% for a time but burnout is real and is often a bigger problem than underperformance due to incompetence. If you’re a CEO or C-level exec I strongly recommend considering the 50% rule and strong support networks (including coaching) but the risk of burnout is still big. How do you hang on to the rocket ship? I give these three pieces of advice.

Give up the martyr complex. Director+ leaders often forget that they’re not player-coaches anymore and let themselves dive into managing tactical day to day issue. While you can and should be part of your team’s bench and operational buffer as well as an escalation path, those occurrences must be few and far between.

Hire a deep bench. As Jason Lemkin says – if you reach the end of the week and you’re exhausted, you’re missing at least one VP-level hire. Great leaders are great because they build great teams and delegate, not because they do a lot with little, especially in high growth environments.

Renegotiate operating mechanism. Shit will hit the fan and you will be pulled into situations you didn’t create and will have to apologize for. Giving up direct impact to increase your span of control is part of the job. What you should do is negotiate operating mechanisms – OKRs, frequency of meetings, dashboards and what they track – to keep yourself aware of the state of the business. It’s also ok to obsess over these things as long as that obsession doesn’t translate into micromanaging two levels down because you didn’t like the daily change in a KPI.

By now you probably know, managing in high growth is unintuitive. Learning from others, then giving yourself the space to learn and reflect, are critical for your and your team’s success.

The consumer debt space is a graveyard of companies with great ideas that got beaten down by the market. TrueAccord stands out as a lone survivor at scale and the only leader. Why is that? Many reasons, one of the major ones is our ability to successfully balance two very different approaches to doing business. This is a note I shared with my team last month.

As we head into 2021 and start investing heavily into [redacted], we also need to continue to reconcile two approaches within our company.

We need a strong Financial Services approach. We need to have appreciation for our clients’ deliberate planning, their risk-averse approach, and their attention to the minutiae of compliance. We need to [redacted]. We need to scale quickly and responsibly.

We need a strong Innovation approach. We need to think from first principles about products, challenge the status quo, ask “why not”. We need to distribute decision making to fast-moving squads, run multiple experiments, talk to our users and find the next 10X or 100X product evolution, without being limited by how things are in the financial system.

We have always combined both approaches to win in our category, and we will need to do so even more in 2021. The problem is these two approaches don’t always agree.

At its best, the Financial Services approach is super professional, attentive to details, and doesn’t miss a beat in servicing. At its worst it is slow moving, risk averse, and defaults to No.

At its best, the Innovation approach is daring, creative, and constantly evolving so its customers are delighted and its competitors never catch up. At its worst it’s reckless, breaks things, and cannot commit.

Winning this market requires that we understand both approaches and use both at their best. Move fast but be context aware. Write the policies but make sure they don’t unduly slow down innovation. Scale without the hiccups. Take calculated risks and pivot if needed. 

It’s not going to be easy, and as CEO it’s one of my top priorities. It will require a lot of good will, coordination, and the understanding that we couldn’t have been, and won’t be, successful without both.

Two approaches, one culture. One company with the capability to think clearly about the problem, and scale it into an unavoidable force.