Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Every milestone reveals a bottleneck
The million-dollar bottleneck
At Ethos Benefits the bottleneck at that point was Chelsea Ryckis herself. The next milestone is ten million, and after that everything breaks down without really solid processes and systems. Regardless of revenue level, a leader reaches a point where she literally cannot do it all anymore.
Life as infrastructure
That calls for looking at everything as infrastructure, personal life included. Maybe cooking matters enough to keep doing, or maybe ordering meals, hiring a chef once a week, or having a nanny makes more sense. Every one of those choices has consequences, which is the part left out when social media says you can have it all.
Letting go
Releasing control and coaching others has an upside: very quickly the founder is no longer the smartest person in the room or the most qualified to deal with an issue. That never happens without letting go. Holding on spills into the rest of life, and for her it showed up as friction with her husband and micromanaging her employees.
Why does one constraint cap a whole business?
Eliyahu Goldratt introduced the Theory of Constraints in his 1984 novel The Goal. It holds that the output of any system is limited by its single most restrictive step. Improving anything other than that step does not raise total output. In the novel, a plant manager finds the constraint by tracing the pace of a slow hiker named Herbie on a scout troop hike.
Why do people say you can have it all?
The phrase became a slogan after Helen Gurley Brown published the book Having It All in 1982. Brown was the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. In 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic essay "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" revived the debate. Slaughter wrote it after leaving her post as director of policy planning at the US State Department.