Plateau
You're not stuck on flat ground—you're sinking in quicksand (and so is everyone else)
You know that feeling when you're running uphill, lungs burning, legs screaming, and suddenly the ground levels out?
Relief floods through you for about three seconds.
Then comes the dread.
Because plateaus aren't rest stops.
They're psychological torture chambers disguised as flat ground.
I've been thinking about plateaus a lot lately. Not because I enjoy existential dread with my morning coffee, but because everyone I talk to, from Fortune 500 CEOs to solo founders to my barber, seems to be hitting one.
Business growth? Plateau.
Personal development? Plateau.
AI progress? Massive, civilization-defining plateau.
And here's the thing nobody tells you about plateaus, the insight everyone overlooks:
They're not actually flat. They're quicksand.
Think about it. A plateau looks stable. Safe, even. You've reached a landing. Time to catch your breath.
Wrong.
Here's the mathematical brutality:
Inputs keep rising while outputs stop moving.
The ad budget goes up while CAC refuses to come down. Sales calls increase while close rates hold flat. You're working harder for nothing.
Plateaus are actively pulling you down. Every second you stand still, you sink a little deeper. The longer you stay, the harder it becomes to move.
What looks like stable ground is actually:
Market share is slowly eroding to hungrier competitors
Talent is quietly interviewing elsewhere
Culture imperceptibly shifting from growth to maintenance
Energy dissipating into the void
Oxygen running out long before the runway does
Stand still, and you sink.
This quicksand metaphor? It's what most business books miss entirely. They treat plateaus as rest stops when they're slow-motion catastrophes.
Corporate Plateau
Last week, I had dinner with the founder of a $10M ARR Product company. Let's call him John.
"We've been at $10M for eighteen months”.
"Eighteen. Fucking. Months."
I've seen this movie before. Hell, I've directed it.
The plateau hits companies like a silent heart attack. One quarter, you're growing 40% year over year. The next quarter, 30%. Then 20%. Then 10%. Then... nothing or even worse.
The metrics still look fine on paper. Revenue's stable. Churn's manageable. Team's intact.
But underneath? Everything's rotting.
Three Layers of Corporate Death
Every business plateau has three layers, and they all arrive together like horsemen of the apocalypse:
1. Demand Plateaus
Channels saturate, your best-performing segments are overfished, copycats arrive, and pricing compresses.
Your messaging has been A/B tested for sterile safety. What used to work still "works," just not enough to move the needle.
2. Product Plateaus
You ship features that customers like but don't love. NPS is polite. Activation improves slightly, expansion increases a little, and churn decreases a little. It's not failure, so urgency diminishes.
This is where spreadsheets start pretending to be strategy.
3. Org Plateaus
Decision latency increases. Managers spend more time coordinating than creating. New processes prevent yesterday's mistakes while quietly blocking tomorrow's invention. Your best engineers start updating their LinkedIn profiles.
Your sales team stops believing their own pitches.
4 AM
The founder feels it most acutely. You wake up at 4 AM, not with new ideas, but with their absence.
That's what most business writing overlooks: the personal cost on founders.
It's not just "challenging." It's existential. You lie there in the dark, mind racing through the same tired loops:
Why isn't anything working anymore?
Where did my creativity go?
Am I the problem?
Should I step aside?
Is this what mediocrity feels like?
That electric feeling of possibility that used to course through your veins? The one that made 80-hour weeks feel like adventures?
It's dead.
Replaced by the dull ache of maintaining the status quo.
This emotional reality, this death of founder energy? Most business writing pretends it doesn't exist. They focus on metrics and strategies while ignoring the fact that the founder's soul is being crushed in real-time.
You're not just managing a business plateau.
You're working the death of a dream while pretending everything's fine.
Truth
What's overlooked here is that plateaus aren't problems to be solved.
They're signals that your current operating system is obsolete.
The strategies that got you from 0 to 1 won't get you from 1 to 10. The mindset that built your first $10M won't make your next $100M. The person you were when you started isn't the person who'll break through.
Look at Netflix in 2011. The stock price was cut in half, and customers were furious about Qwikster. Everyone thought they'd peaked.
Reed Hastings was getting death threats, and the board was in revolt—classic plateau symptoms.
But they were rebuilding for streaming dominance. The plateau wasn't a dead end, it was a loading screen for the next level.
They burned the DVD business to build the streaming empire. That's what breaking a plateau looks like: controlled destruction.
As I wrote in my "Mediocre Success Is Worse Than Outright Failure" piece:
"There's something uniquely soul-crushing about being just successful enough to keep going, but not successful enough to matter."
The Fatigue Economy
Here's what makes business plateaus particularly vicious, and what most plateau discussions completely miss:
The Fatigue Economy.
I've discovered something nobody talks about: Exhaustion becomes the primary currency in a plateauing company.
Not revenue. Not innovation. Not even time.
Exhaustion.
Everyone's trading in, hoarding, spending, and most importantly, spreading it.
"Oxygen runs out long before runway does."
Exhaustion is Contagious
The founder's exhaustion spreads to the executive team. The executive team's resignation infects middle management.
Middle management's apathy trickles down to individual contributors.
The Infection Pattern:
Patient Zero: The founder's exhaustion (4 AM wake-ups with no ideas)
First Wave: Spreads to the executive team within weeks
Second Wave: Executive resignation infects middle management
Pandemic: Management apathy reaches individual contributors
Terminal Stage: Entire organization enters survival mode
This isn't metaphorical. It's biological. Mirror neurons in our brains copy the energy states of those around us. Your exhaustion becomes their exhaustion.
Before you know it, your entire organization operates at 60% capacity, not because people are lazy, but because they're conserving energy for a battle that never comes.
What the Fatigue Economy Actually Looks Like
Marketing team launches campaigns that look exactly like last year's campaigns, just with updated dates.
The product team ships features that are really just features of features.
The sales team starts selling discounts instead of value.
You know what's happening, but you can't stop it. It's like watching your company develop organizational depression in real-time.
The Fatigue Economy creates its own physics:
Energy conservation becomes the unspoken rule
Innovation requires energy that nobody has
Meetings become energy-draining rituals
Every decision takes 3x longer because nobody has the energy to fight
"Good enough" becomes the new excellence
Creative risk-taking dies because it requires energy reserves that don't exist
Here's what everybody misses:
Teams don't fatigue from effort. They fatigue from effort that feels unconnected to meaning.
The cruel irony? This is precisely when you need maximum energy. Breaking through a plateau requires explosive force, not incremental effort.
But everyone's tank is empty.
You need rocket fuel, but you're running on fumes.
Founders and Core Team
If you're a founder hitting a plateau, I need you to understand something:
This isn't about working harder.
You're already:
Working 80-hour weeks
Sacrificing everything
Giving it everything you've got
Missing your kids' birthdays
Destroying your health
Ruining relationships
The plateau doesn't care about your effort. It feeds on it.
Think about it.
Every extra hour you work in a plateau state is an hour of diminishing returns.
You're not building; you're maintaining.
You're not creating; you're sustaining.
You're not living; you're existing.
Belkins Story
I learned this the hard way, building Belkins. We hit our plateau few years ago.
Revenue was flat, growth stalled, and every strategy that got us there suddenly stopped working. Our best people were leaving, our culture was dying, and I was dying.
My first instinct was to double down. Work harder. Push the team harder. More meetings. More strategies. More everything. You know the drill.
You know what happened?
We went from plateau to decline.
Because I was trying to solve a physics problem with effort.
Like trying to push a car out of quicksand by pressing the accelerator harder.
All you do is sink faster.
The breakthrough came when I did the opposite.
I saw it clearly: We weren't a sales development company anymore. We were a data-driven client acquisition company that happened to do sales.
That shift, that willingness to destroy our identity, broke the plateau.
Identity Crisis
Here's what really happens to founders during a plateau:
Year 1-2: You're a visionary, a builder, a force of nature
Year 5 (Plateau hits): You become a maintainer, a firefighter, a therapist
Year 10: You don't even recognize yourself anymore
The person who started the company, full of ideas and energy, is gone. They're replaced by someone who spends their days in back-to-back meetings about meetings, optimizing things that don't matter, and pretending to care about OKRs.
You've become what you swore you'd never be: a corporate manager.
This connects directly to what I explored in "The Stochastic Mindset":
"Sometimes you need to embrace uncertainty, not fight it. Generate options, not perfect plans."
Personal Plateaus
Now let's talk about the plateau that's probably keeping you up at night:
Your own.
Personal plateaus are sneakier than business ones. They disguise themselves as stability, maturity, and "Finding your groove."
But you know the truth. That groove is a rut.
And ruts are just graves with the ends kicked out.
You're doing the same workouts you did three years ago. Reading the same types of books. Having the same conversations. Making roughly the same amount of money inflation.
Your comfort zone hasn't expanded; it's calcified.
The most insidious part? You're still busy. You're still productive. You're still checking boxes. But you're not growing. You're maintaining.
Reality Check
I hit my personal plateau at 28. I was successful by any reasonable measure. Good business. Good team. Good life.
And I was dying inside.
Because plateaus don't just stop your growth. They stop you from becoming. That person you were supposed to evolve into? They're stuck in suspended animation while you run in place.
Here's what's usually overlooked: plateaus are comfortable. That's the trap. Our brains are efficiency machines, always looking to automate, to reduce cognitive load. A plateau means you've successfully automated your life.
Congratulations, you've optimized yourself into stagnation.
"Your feedback to others becomes meta, not material. You can predict the next quarter's calendar without a calendar."
The comfort is an illusion. It's not peace; it's numbness. It's not stability; it's stagnation. It's not maturity; it's premature death.
Breaking the Experience Barrier
Here's your escape plan. Five specific steps:
1. Switch the surface, not the mountain
Maintain your main goal but change the practice method for 30-60 days. If you're a founder, dedicate 10 hours a week to support or QA. If you lead sales, create the demo yourself and make three cold calls.
2. Train at the edge of failure
Choose one skill where your success rate is around 70%, and focus on lowering it to 55% for two weeks. That's when adaptation occurs.
3. Shorten the feedback loop
Daily metrics for the one thing you're trying to improve. Not a dashboard. One number, hand-entered, with a note on what you tried that day.
4. Add a forcing function
Book a live talk, pre-sell a small cohort, schedule a stakeholder review, promise a public demo. Deadlines manufacture slope.
5. Borrow a brain
Work with a coach or a peer who has already crossed your hill. Cheat by importing their errors and their map.
My Public Speaking Experiment
Seven years ago, I forced myself to learn something I was terrible at: public speaking without preparation. And if you know me, you know. I have public speaking.
I joined an improv speaking group where you get a random topic and have to speak for 5 minutes. No prep. No notes. No safety net.
First attempt: I literally forgot how to speak English. I stood there for 30 seconds in silence, and my mind was twisting. It was a long time ago, but the topic was "Why penguins are the best entrepreneurs." I said "Uh" seventeen times in two minutes before sitting down in defeat.
But here's what happened:
Failing at something new reminded me what growth actually feels like.
That mixture of terror and excitement I hadn't felt in years returned.
Six months later, I keynoted a conference for 500 people. No script. Just me, a microphone, and the terror-excitement cocktail that means you're alive.
Protect your energy.
Fatigue is not just physical.
It's cognitive, emotional, and spiritual. Swap a Saturday scroll for a long walk without your phone. Sleep well for three nights in a row and then re-evaluate how "stuck" you feel.
AI Plateau
Now let's talk about the plateau nobody saw coming: AI's.
The Hype Train Derailment
Remember December 2024? Everyone was convinced GPT-5 would be AGI. The singularity was scheduled for Q1 2025. We were all about to be unemployed or uploaded or both.
Sam Altman was tweeting cryptically, and the tech Twitter echo chamber was in overdrive. VCs were throwing finances at anything with "AI" in the pitch deck.
Then GPT-5 dropped.
And it was... barely acceptable.
Better at some tasks? Sure. Hallucinates less (down to 15% from GPT-4's 37%). Better at following instructions. Revolutionary? Not even close.
The collective disappointment was palpable. Like watching a crowd realize their messiah is just another guy with good marketing.
Emotional Connection
But here's what everyone overlooks: people had formed emotional attachments to previous models.
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