The Thing You Do for No Reason

I met a founder at a dinner last year who had just sold his company. Eight-figure exit. Team landed well. Investors were happy. By every measure that matters in our world, he had won.

He told me he hadn’t felt anything in months.

Not sadness. Not joy. Just a low, ambient nothing. He described it as standing in a room where the music had stopped but nobody had left yet. He didn’t know what to do with his hands.

The identity collapse

Founders pour everything into the company. Time, obviously. But also identity. Your calendar becomes your personality. Your metrics become your mood. When someone asks how you’re doing, you answer with your MRR.

This works, for a while. The company gives you structure, purpose, and a reason to get up at five in the morning. It tells you who you are. Builder. Leader. Operator.

Then one day the company is gone, or it’s running without you, or you simply look up and realise you’ve become a person who only knows how to do one thing. And that one thing doesn’t need you the way it used to.

The emptiness that follows isn’t burnout. Burnout is exhaustion. This is something quieter. It’s the realisation that you optimised so hard for one variable that you forgot to have a life outside the spreadsheet.

The useless thing

The founders I know who survive this, who actually enjoy the years after the exit or the IPO or the transition, all have one thing in common. They have something they do for no reason.

Photography with no Instagram account. Woodworking with no Etsy shop. Chess with no rating ambitions. Cooking elaborate meals for four people on a Tuesday. Reading history books that have nothing to do with their industry.

The defining quality of the thing is that it has no purpose. No KPIs. No audience. No growth trajectory. You can’t pitch it. You can’t monetise it. It exists purely because you chose it, and you keep choosing it, and that’s enough.

This is harder than it sounds for people who have spent twenty years turning every interest into a project. The instinct is to optimise. To track progress. To set goals. To find the angle.

The whole point is that there is no angle.

Why it matters

There’s a particular kind of emptiness that comes from being very good at something that no longer fills you up. It’s not that the work was meaningless. It’s that you let it become the only source of meaning, and meaning from a single source is fragile.

The useless thing, the hobby with no outcome, is a hedge against that fragility. It gives you a place to go that doesn’t depend on market conditions, board approval, or quarterly targets. It reminds you that you existed before the company and you’ll exist after it.

More practically, it keeps a part of your brain alive that atrophies under constant optimisation. The part that notices things without categorising them. The part that can sit with something unfinished and not feel anxious. The part that remembers how to be interested in something without needing to be good at it.

The conversation nobody has

In thirty years of building companies and working with founders, I’ve never once heard this discussed in a board meeting, at a conference, or in a pitch deck. Nobody talks about the emptiness that follows achievement because it sounds ungrateful. You built something. You won. What’s the problem?

The problem is that winning was supposed to be the destination, and it turns out it’s just another Tuesday. And if you don’t have something else, something small and pointless and yours, that Tuesday can feel very long.

Start before you need it

The worst time to find a hobby is when you desperately need one. If you’re in the middle of building right now, carve out something that is purely for you. Not for your personal brand. Not for networking. Not for “balance,” which is just another way of optimising.

Something you do badly. Something you do slowly. Something that produces nothing of value to anyone except the quiet fact that you enjoyed doing it.

That’s not a distraction from the work. It might be the only thing that makes the work sustainable.