The 3AM Question Every Founder Asks and Never Says Out Loud
The eight-Christmases math that changed how I run my business, and why the question you ask at 3am isn't a crisis.
This is the first piece in a three-part series on the thinking behind Global Life Project.
It's been a minute since I've written here, so a quick reset before we get into it. This is Global Life Project. I've run a business since 2011, moved my family across four cities in three countries, and spent fifteen years behind the kind of founders doing seven and eight figures who think the freedom comes after the business is finished. It doesn't. I stopped waiting for permission to build the life at the same time as the business, and this project is everything that decision taught me. Over the next few weeks I'm publishing three pieces on the beliefs that keep capable women stuck running businesses that own them. This first one starts with a walk, a podcast, and a question I couldn't put back down.
Somewhere along the way you decided that doing everything yourself was strength, and that balance means splitting yourself evenly across every part of your life until nothing gets enough of you. Neither one is true, and the cost of believing both shows up as a number you haven’t run yet.
I was on my morning walk in Doha this year. School run done, eight in the morning, headphones in, listening to Emma Grede talk about her kids on Start with Why. She said something like: I have this many years left with all of them in the house. That’s the number.
I stopped walking.
My daughter Mia turns ten in October 2026. She’ll be eighteen eight years from now.
Eight summers. Eight school years. Eight Christmases, sitting at a table I built, with the people I built it for, before she goes off to university, a job, a partner, holidays spent somewhere else. That isn’t a metaphor. That’s the number.
For years I’d heard the same quiet question surface in founders I work with, usually at three in the morning or in a hotel room between client calls: is this it? You don’t say it out loud, because from the outside everything you built is the answer to what you wanted in your twenties. The business makes money. The team is in place. The accountant says you’re fine.
What I’ve come to believe about that question is this. It isn’t a sign that something is wrong. It’s a sign you’ve outgrown the design. The business you have was built by the version of you who needed to survive that year, the clients you said yes to because the work was available, the hours you kept because that’s what founders do. None of it was designed for who you’ve become.
When that question shows up, it isn’t asking you to burn the business down, sell it, or book a flight to Bali.
It’s asking something harder: if I were designing this from where I am now, what would I design?
That’s the real question, and it’s bigger than the smaller ones people ask instead of it. Should we move. Should the kids go to international school. Should I take six months off. Should I sell. Those are the questions you ask when you can’t yet face the big one.
I’ve lived this math myself, in four cities, three countries, over nine years, and I didn’t make those moves with the eight-Christmases number in front of me. If I had, some decisions would have looked the same. Others would have been smaller. I’d have stopped saying yes to the conference that lands on the school play, the client who only books Friday afternoons, the launch that eats the week my kids are home.
That’s not retreat. That’s design, and it’s the opposite of both stories you’ve been sold. The hustle story says the answer is more hours, more sacrifice, you as the engine forever. The other story, the passive-income fantasy, says the answer is walking away from real work entirely. Neither is honest. Ease isn’t the absence of ambition. It’s fewer systems, built better, so the years you’re counting don’t get spent servicing a business that was never designed to let you live in them.
Count your own number before you close this. Summers. Christmases. Ordinary Tuesdays. Subtract what’s already gone. Look at what’s left, and ask whether the life you’re running was designed around that number, or around something else entirely.
P.S. This is the first piece in a three-part series on the thinking behind Global Life Project. Next: why being available to everyone isn’t the same as being necessary to anyone.