The true test of living as a child in a grown-up body doesn’t happen when life is calm. It happens when the phone rings… and everything drops.
For Koni and me, that moment arrived with a call that threatened to destroy our company and everything we had built.
We supplied mattresses for the hotels of one of the largest hotel chains in Latin America. It was our largest customer. Then, over a year later, we got word that the owner had slept in one of his hotels… and was very dissatisfied with the mattress.
And it got worse. He demanded we come and remove every mattress from every hotel and he was not going to pay us another dime. They owed us an enormous amount in receivables. And on top of that there would be no more orders coming our way as a result.
They were essentially saying: “We’re not paying you what we owe you… and you’re coming to clean up the mess… and if you don’t, we’ll destroy you.”
In this Latin American country this level of business leader rules with an iron fist. Those with the gold make the rules, and there was nothing we could do about it.
This would have destroyed the company.
The first wave wasn’t spiritual. It was biological. A tsunami of pure survival.
My mind flooded with a war plan: Lawyer up. Find the contract. He signed it. We’re going to sue them.
But positivity doesn’t mean you don’t feel fear. It means you don’t let fear hijack you.
So we didn’t ignore the panic… but we also didn’t obey it. We let ourselves feel the hit—the embarrassment, the threat, the desperation—without turning it into an identity.
In the quiet space that followed… we did the most counter‑intuitive thing possible.
We didn’t jump into a war plan. We didn’t start firing off emails. We didn’t go into 18‑hour workdays, losing sleep, living on caffeine, and destroying our nervous systems while pretending it was “leadership.”
We got still.
We let the noise settle. We breathed. We stopped feeding the future with horror movies. We stopped replaying the past like a punishment.
We came into the moment. Because the moment is the only place where you can actually see clearly. And the moment is the only place where solutions appear.
Stillness did something else. It made us release.
You can’t force life to obey you. You can only choose how you respond.
So we let go of the desperate need to control the outcome. We didn’t become passive. We didn’t become careless. We became clear. We became grounded. We became human again.
And that’s when the first real strategy emerged.
No matter how complex the problem, Koni’s first answer is always the same: “Well… first, let’s just love them.”
In this moment, it wasn’t cute. It was real.
Because love isn’t just a feeling. Love is an internal state where you don’t become an enemy. Love is what keeps you from becoming ugly inside.
So that’s what we did. We actually pulled out pictures of the owner and his key people, and we sat there giving ourselves the opportunity to feel goodness toward them. To remember they were human beings—even if they were acting like kings.
We even made a music video called “Koni Loves Our Customers”—a two-minute, crayon-colored sing-along starring photos of every client, sung by a chorus of off-key staff voices. Each morning we hit play, bounced in our chairs, and belted it out like kindergarten show-and-tell. No KPIs, no spreadsheets—just a screen full of smiling faces and a song that made the coffee taste like recess.
And here’s what’s wild: That choice didn’t make us weaker. It made us smarter. Because when you remove hatred, panic, and ego from the equation… clarity shows up.
Even in that moment… we stayed light. We smiled. We laughed.
Not because it was funny… but because we refused to let the crisis turn us into fear machines. We didn’t let it steal our joy. We didn’t let it steal our peace.
We actually made the experience fun—as crazy as that sounds. Because we knew something deep: Whether the company folded or didn’t fold… we were not going to collapse internally.
Before we reached for ammunition, we reached for the mirror. What if the king was right and the mattresses were junk? If we’d sold junk, we’d own it—no spin, no lawsuits, just truth.
The king’s gripe was blunt: “Guests hate the beds.” So we built a truth-seeking missile—scraped thousands of reviews in twelve languages, taught code to sniff every whisper of “mattress.” Data returned: avalanche of praise, guests swooning on our beds. We held the smoking gun; ego begged us to pull the trigger.
Instead we pocketed the weapon and spent weeks walking them through the evidence—piece by patient piece. We handed them the mirror, not the knife—let them see the truth without tasting blood.
We got paid, the kingdom stayed whole—because we fought the fire without becoming it.
Two kids in grown-up shoes, acting from innocence and honesty, making the impossible look inevitable.
I lost my way at one point and started to build a robot company—perfect code, perfect charts, a PM I called “the machine.” We hit every metric; the client hit eject. “I don’t need a dashboard,” he said. “I need a partner.” I’d welded a fortress and locked myself inside.
Then the storm: two founders out sick, sales in free-fall. My reflex—work harder—felt obscene.
A line from an old story floated up: Moses—sea in front, army behind, a nation screaming in panic. The message he heard? “Be still. The sea will part.” No fight, no flight, no frantic prayer—just stillness.
So I did what a child would do: I stopped treating it as a nice story and actually did what he did. One hour of stillness for every thirty minutes of work. No mantra, no phone—just a closed door and a body that loathed silence, counting down sixty itchy minutes until it could sprint into its thirty-minute sugar-rush of busyness. It was torture.
Dopamine twitches, phantom buzzes, the whole withdrawal circus. But I stuck with it—clocked in at 7 a.m. and kept the weird rhythm alive: sixty minutes of nothing, thirty minutes of something, repeat until the moon replaced the fluorescents. By Wednesday my nervous system was filing a complaint; by Friday the silence felt less like enemy territory and more like the colleague I’d never bothered to meet.
I did this for three weeks straight.
Toward the end of the first week the picture arrived—no email, no dashboard, just a sudden, silent snapshot in the middle of a breath: my team lit blue by their screens, updating tickets instead of fixing problems, feeding the machine I’d built with their own daylight. I saw the assembly line from the inside out—perfect systems, perfectly empty—and the last frame of the image was me, standing off to the side, holding the wrench I’d invented to tighten the bolts on a prison I now lived in.
The systems weren’t broken; they were doing exactly what we asked—turning people into bots.
Next morning, laptops stay shut. “Admit a real weakness,” I said. I went first. They served rehearsed flaws: “I care too much.” “I demand excellence.” Plastic scars, not real ones. I was staring at a room full of mannequins, and I had built the shelf they stood on.
We started new rituals—morning stretches, inspirational videos, real breaks, screens face-down, laptops closed while mouths opened. I phoned a smoldering client on speaker. Three-minute fix, everyone listening. No applause—just the sound of armor cracking.
Weeks of daily lid-closed meetings. The machine-girl came in glowing: rude client, no script, just ears and a smile—deal saved. Sales followed. Company saved.
Stillness wasn’t a retreat—it was the original operating system Silicon never coded: the innocence that knows the answer before the algorithm finishes loading. I still run it—shorter timer, same voltage: when the kid in me boots up, the whole hallway exhales.
Same door, same phone, two different people—one driven by panic, one carried by the quiet certainty that if you stand still long enough, the sea remembers how to part.