Mental Models from a Shrink for Entrepreneurs

Peter Shallard is a psychotherapist who has spent 14 years working exclusively with founders — many of them running venture-backed companies that double in size every few months. He calls his career "the world's greatest MBA that I was paid to take," because he learned as much from his clients about business strategy as he taught them about psychology. He typically meets founders "the morning after the darkest night of the soul," often brought in by VC funds who want to keep a promising founder from derailing during a crisis.

The Action-Result Gap and Why Founders Chase Proxies

Shallard's central framework is the "action-result gap." Human beings struggle to persist at behaviors where the payoff is delayed. Working out and eating salads for two weeks before seeing results is hard. Eating a donut gives you an immediate chemical reward. Entrepreneurship, especially building a genuinely valuable business, has the longest action-result gap of all — it can take five to ten years to see the real payoff.