Why Your Ego Is Sabotaging Your Success
We want to perceive ourselves as masters of the universe, our egos want to run the show and ship results solo. We tell ourselves we've got this handled, that we can figure it out, that asking for help is a sign of weakness.
Yet the highest-performing founders I know—the ones who've built companies worth hundreds of millions—all have one thing in common: they consistently leverage 1-3 people who help them think through direction, execution, market dynamics, and leadership challenges.
They've figured out something most entrepreneurs resist: one of the most powerful ways to get results is from help.
But here's the catch—you can't just ask successful people to mentor you out of the goodness of their hearts. That approach rarely works because it's one-sided and vague. Instead, you need to create a structure that makes helping you valuable for them too.
That's where the weekly stakeholder note comes in. It's not just a communication tool—it's your systematic approach to harnessing world-class advice and accountability.
The Strategic Advantage: Making High-Level Help Systematic
Here's how you harness this for yourself: find a few people who can do what you're doing 10x better than you—maybe because of experience, maybe because of connections, maybe because they're just better—and make them stakeholders in your success.
Then write transparently about your strategy, your approach, your weekly priorities, and your thinking. Build a thread of strategic reasoning that can be critiqued, encouraged, and potentially supported through their network or knowledge.
This is the weekly stakeholder note: a disciplined practice that transforms occasional advice into systematic strategic advantage.
The magic happens because writing is thinking made visible, especially when you know experienced stakeholders will read it. When you're forced to articulate your strategy, tactics, and methods for people who've built bigger companies than you, something powerful occurs: the gaps become obvious, the logic gets tested, and vague concepts crystallize into actionable plans.
The 10x Multiplier Effect: What This Practice Actually Does
Over the course of a year, you'll end up 10x further ahead with this practice—both because of what it does to your thinking and what it invites from others. Here's how:
1. Forces Clarity in Your Thinking
Most leaders think they have strategic clarity until they try to explain it to their board. The discipline of writing doesn't just communicate your thinking—it forces you to develop thinking worth communicating.
When you know seasoned business leaders will be reading your strategic rationale, you can't hide behind buzzwords or hand-waving. You have to think through the logic, identify the assumptions, and articulate why this approach makes sense right now for your specific business situation.
2. Creates True Shared Understanding
Reality? Your leadership team probably isn't as aligned as you think they are. Without clear, consistent communication of priorities and approach, even talented teams end up working at cross-purposes.
Your weekly note becomes the single source of truth for your organization's direction. When every leader receives the same strategic message at the same time, you eliminate the telephone game that typically distorts communication from the top. Energy gets focused instead of fragmented.
3. Establishes Your Personal Prioritization Rhythm
The discipline of weekly writing creates a recurring moment of truth: "Am I working on the biggest needle-moving opportunities for the business?" "Can I defend these priorities to my board?" "Is this truly what matters most right now?"
Without this forcing function, even experienced leaders stay busy without being productive. They work on what's urgent instead of important, what's familiar instead of critical. The weekly stakeholder note creates your personal rhythm of prioritization—a CEO-level accountability system that keeps you focused on high-impact activities.
4. Unlocks High-Value Advisory Input
Your board members and experienced advisors possess decades of hard-won wisdom, but they can only help if they understand your thinking process. Too many leaders share results but not reasoning, outcomes but not approach.
When you consistently share your strategic rationale, you create opportunities for course correction before problems become crises. Your advisors can spot blind spots, suggest alternatives, and help you avoid expensive mistakes—but only when they have regular insight into your decision-making process.
5. Creates Authentic Accountability
Public commitments to stakeholders drive performance in ways that internal deadlines simply can't match. When you put your weekly priorities in writing and share them with your board and investors, you create accountability that transforms how you approach your work.
This becomes your personal performance management system. The transparency elevates your own standards because you know experienced business leaders will be evaluating your strategic choices and execution capability every single week.
6. Builds Consistent Strategic Action
Regular stakeholder communication rhythms create personal execution rhythms. When your board expects your weekly update, you naturally start thinking in strategic weekly cycles rather than just reacting to whatever lands in your inbox.
You begin asking yourself: "What strategic progress did I make this week?" "What am I personally committing to accomplish next week?" "How do my individual priorities align with the company's most critical needs?"
This personal discipline transforms sporadic leadership effort into consistent strategic progress.
7. It Compounds Your Learning
Regular stakeholder communication creates systematic learning loops. When you share your thinking and get feedback from people operating at higher levels, you accelerate your development as a leader and strategist. You start seeing patterns, avoiding pitfalls, and making connections that would have taken years to develop on your own.
The weekly rhythm becomes your personal operating system for strategic evolution.
The Framework: Your Weekly Strategic Thread
Think of this as building a continuous thread of strategic reasoning that your stakeholders can follow and contribute to:
Strategic Context
What's the key strategic opportunity, challenge, or concept consuming your thinking this week? This forces you to identify what deserves your highest-level attention and mental energy.
Personal Commitments
What are you personally committing to accomplish in the coming week? Not what your team will do, but what you as the leader will directly drive. Include why each item represents your highest and best use of time.
Current Strategic Blockers
What's preventing you from making progress on your most important priorities? This isn't complaining—it's creating transparency about obstacles that might require stakeholder-level resolution or input.
How to Start This Friday
Don't overthink this. Here's your immediate action plan:
Step 1: Block 45 minutes on your calendar for this Friday afternoon. Label it "Weekly Strategic Planning" and treat it as your most important meeting of the week.
Step 2: Create a simple template with three headers:
- Strategic Focus This Week
- My Personal Commitments
- What's Blocking My Progress
Step 3: Write your first note. It doesn't need to be perfect—it needs to be honest. What's the one strategic concept consuming your thinking? What are you personally committing to accomplish next week? What's genuinely holding you back?
Step 4: Send it to your board and key stakeholders with this context: "Starting a weekly strategic planning discipline. This is my thinking and commitments for the coming week. Feedback welcome."
Step 5: Put the recurring calendar invite in place immediately. Same time, every week, non-negotiable.
The hardest part is starting. The value comes from consistency, not perfection.
👉 Bonus: Include anyone whose feedback, knowldge, network, or help could make or break your companies future.
Why Most Leaders Resist This (And Why You Shouldn't)
I know what you're thinking: "I don't have time for another weekly commitment."
But here's the thing—you're already spending time on strategic thinking. You're just doing it reactively, in fragments, without the discipline to translate thinking into action. This practice doesn't add strategic work to your schedule; it organizes the strategic work you're already doing (or should be doing) into a consistent, accountable rhythm.
The leaders who resist this discipline are usually the ones who need it most. They're so caught up in operational urgency that they've lost touch with strategic importance. The weekly note forces you back into strategic leadership mode.
The Compound Effect: Your 12-Month Transformation
Like most powerful practices, the weekly stakeholder note creates compound returns in your development. The first few notes might feel awkward or forced. But as the practice becomes routine, something remarkable happens:
Your strategic thinking becomes sharper because you're getting feedback from people who've thought through similar problems at scale. Your execution becomes more focused because you're creating weekly accountability with people who know what good execution looks like. Your network becomes more valuable because your stakeholders start introducing you to people who can accelerate your progress.
<span id="yellow-highlight" class="rte-highlight" style="background-color: yellow;" fs-test-element="highlight">Most importantly, you develop what successful founders have that most don't: the ability to systematically leverage high-level help to think better, execute faster, and avoid expensive mistakes.</span>
After 12 months of this practice, you'll be operating at a fundamentally different level than founders who try to figure everything out alone. The combination of forced strategic clarity and consistent high-level input creates a competitive advantage that compounds over time.
Building a great company isn't a solo sport, despite what your ego might tell you. The highest-performing founders understand that systematic help from people who've already built what you're trying to build isn't a sign of weakness—it's a competitive advantage.
The weekly stakeholder note creates the discipline and structure to turn occasional advice into consistent strategic advantage. It forces you to think more clearly, creates accountability that drives better execution, and unlocks access to networks and insights that would take decades to develop on your own.
Most importantly, it transforms you from someone trying to figure it out alone into someone systematically leveraging the best thinking available to accelerate your success.
Your ego might resist asking for help, but your results will thank you for it.
Start this Friday. Find your first stakeholder, set up the weekly rhythm, and begin building the strategic thread that will transform how you think and execute.
What's held you back from systematically leveraging high-level help in your business? I'd love to hear about the biggest challenges you face in building relationships with experienced stakeholders who could accelerate your progress.
