Move fast and break things is BS

I want to talk about a conversation I had last weekend with someone I'd just met.

She'd just relaunched her business two months ago.

She told me, quite candidly, that it's been really hard. She hasn't sold anything yet.

But her sense of alignment - the feeling of actually doing the right thing, finally - has never been stronger.

And there was this pause in the conversation. This little unspoken question hanging in the air.

Does that feeling of alignment matter if you haven't sold anything?

Well, yes. I think it does, actually.

Because two months is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Two months is just a little smidgen when you're building something to last.

I know this because I'm also just over two months into formally launching my coaching business, and I don't have a full income yet either.

I've funded my move back to London on savings, and I've made peace with that. It's an investment. It's bringing me closer to the people, the rooms, the opportunities that will help all of this move faster than it would if I stayed tucked away by the sea, waiting to be discovered.

Me and my new mate aren't the only ones in this boat, though.

I know at least four people who've pivoted their business this year.

Every single month since January, without fail, someone tells me they want to leave their full-time job to go and do the thing that actually feels like them.

That's a lot of people in the middle of, or dreaming about, rebuilding.

But we don’t talk enough about how long this actually takes, or how normal that is.

We've absorbed this idea that building anything means moving fast.

Launch it. Iterate. Break things. Optimise. Scale.

But “move fast, break things” is utter bullshit.

It was literally made up by one of the worst men of our generation, Mark Zuckerberg, someone who couldn't care less about the damage this kind of mentality costs, human or otherwise.

When you apply this logic to rebuilding your actual life, the thing that breaks is you.

A life, or a business, or a version of yourself that you actually recognise and like, none of that gets built at start-up speed. It gets built slowly, step by step, and with a lot of unglamorous, unphotographed months in between the decision and the evidence.

And remember, you are only one person.

One person, making a huge change, with a finite amount of energy, time, and headspace.

There's a limit to what one person can do in a day, a week, a quarter.

I’m sorry to tell you but you do not have the same 24 hours in a day as Beyoncé. Or Molly-Mae who tried to tell us that we did in the tone-deaf way influencers do.

Because Beyoncé, and Molly-Mae for that matter, have a team of stylists, a nutritionist, a personal trainer, a nanny (several, probably), an assistant who has an assistant, a publicist fielding everything so they never have to, and people whose entire job is to make every idea they have look effortless.

You have you, babe.

And the washing up, and the school run, and the dog walk, and the invoice you forgot to send.

But we often expect ourselves to move like we've got a whole team behind us, too.

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A few weeks ago, after a particularly wobbly day, I sat down and wrote out every sales idea I could think of for my business. Lines and lines of them. Some brilliant, some completely unhinged, most somewhere in between.

And looking at that list, I realised something:

A lack of sales right now doesn't mean it's not working.

It might just mean you haven't tried all the things yet.

I'm one person, working through a very long list, one idea at a time. That's not failure. That's just the maths of doing this properly, on my own, without a team, without a fast-track.

I'm actually genuinely excited to work through my list! It’s full of opportunity and things I've never done before. I feel lucky to have so many experiments and ideas up my sleeves.

If you're in the thick of building or rebuilding something - a business, a career change, a life that finally fits - and you're feeling like you’re behind or not where you'd hoped you'd be by now, here's your reminder:

Building something meaningful and sustainable takes time.

Things that are built quickly aren't built to last.

Quality matters. Testing matters. Experimenting matters. Pivoting, more than once if you need to, matters.

I’m not saying "just keep going regardless." Of course, we need to check that we’re getting meaningful signals.

But those signals aren’t instantly sold out offers, or a big launch moment, or going viral. It’s not the overnight-success myth that we're fed on repeat.

The signals we should be focusing on are the smaller stuff.

The woman I met this weekend had no sales yet, but people were replying to her, sharing feedback, telling her this was exactly what they needed and why. These are signals. That's real data, even if it doesn't look like a bank transfer just yet. It's something she can work with.

For me, right now, my signals look like this: someone telling me on a chemistry call that something has already shifted for them based on our conversation; potential clients quoting parts of my website that resonated with them; 20 people showing up to a group coaching event and over half of them giving me feedback; the fact that I have a slowly growing list of people booking chemistry calls and who actively want to work with me.

None of that is proof in the way we've been taught to want proof, but it's not nothing either.

The thing worth asking isn't "has this worked yet?" It's "am I getting real signals that show I’m close to market fit?"

If yes, that's not you flogging a dead horse. That's you doing the actual, unglamorous, mostly-invisible work of building something that lasts. Sustainable businesses take years, not months. The highlight reels we absorb skip the messy middle.

And if the answer is no - no signals, no feedback, no small shifts - that's worth sitting with too. That's different information possibly about your (potentially lack of) fit within the market you’re targeting.

But "it's taking a while" and "it's not working" are not the same. Don't let anyone, including your own brain at 2am, tell you they are.

If this is resonating, here are a few questions you might want to sit with:

• What are the actual signals telling you right now?

• What's the difference, for you, between "this is slow" and "this isn't working"?

• Where have you been quietly measuring yourself against a version of success (instant, viral, overnight) that barely exists for anyone, even the people who look like they had it?