The anxious leader, the leader who gives up, and the mature leader.

Solomon was not a philosopher of the library.

He was a king. One of the richest, most powerful, and most influential men in the ancient world. He had access to everything that money, power, and intelligence could buy. He built, expanded, made mistakes, lost, and started over. And with all that weight of life on his shoulders, he stopped and wrote:

"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the sun." Ecclesiastes 3:1

Keep this in mind as you read what follows.

Anxious leaders don't lack patience. They have an excess of control.

A king who ruled one of the greatest kingdoms in history knew better than anyone the pressure of making things happen. The pressure of not missing opportunities. The pressure of deciding quickly, acting strategically, building right.

And yet, he wrote:

"There is a time to plant and a time to uproot what has been planted."

This is not a statement about passivity. It is a statement about discernment.

Most leaders and entrepreneurs don't suffer from a lack of will. They suffer from not being able to distinguish between a time to plant and a time to uproot. And this confusion is very costly.

It costs energy that should be spent on another phase. It costs forced decisions that the process hasn't yet called for. It costs the beauty of what is being built now.

Anxiety in leadership has a precise definition.

In my years working with brand and community strategy, I've learned to recognize a pattern in the founders and leaders I talk to: anxiety doesn't stem from difficulty. It comes from wanting to anticipate, by force, what cannot be anticipated.

Solomon called this vanity.

"There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance." Ecclesiastes 3:4

When you cry during the dancing, you're out of sync. When you dance during the crying, you're denying what the process is trying to teach you.

Anxiety is this: being out of sync with your own timing, while the world follows the rhythm that has been determined for you.

We cannot postpone the inevitable.

There is a time for everything. And no business strategy, however sophisticated, can change that. What changes is your attitude towards what is happening.

Giving up too soon: why switching games doesn't solve the level.

Giving up is the other side of the same mistake.

Anxiety wants to anticipate.

The withdrawal aims to skip the next phase.

Both are ways of rejecting what the process is trying to teach.

"There is a time to seek and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to throw away." Ecclesiastes 3:6

When you're in a period of searching and decide to stop because you haven't found it yet, it's not necessarily a sign that you're on the wrong path. It could be a sign that your time hasn't run out yet.

The problem is not the lack of results.

It's the lack of understanding about what stage you're at.

Giving up too soon isn't humility. It's refusal.

Anyone who grew up in the 90s knows what I'm talking about.

Video game cartridges. When you finally reached a difficult level, the concern wasn't just about passing it. It was about not losing what you had achieved. You hoped the power wouldn't go out. You hoped your parents wouldn't unplug the TV. When you needed to sleep and hadn't finished yet, the solution was to turn off only the TV and leave the video game on, because turning off the video game meant starting from scratch. ( We still didn't have a concept of an electricity bill... haha)

But when the level got too difficult and your patience ran out, you'd change the tape.

The problem is that every new game starts from level one.

You'd switch games, switch scenarios, switch characters. But the logic remained the same: level one, level two, level three. The difficulty you wanted to avoid would appear at some point, one way or another.

That's how it is in life. That's how it is in business.

What you need to learn will be there, regardless of the scenario you choose to change. You can change companies, partners, markets, or segments. But the lesson the process is trying to teach you will reappear. At the same stage. With different characters.

The only way out is to cross.

What each phase of the business wants to teach you.

Solomon was a king. Not a symbolic king. A king who built one of the greatest legacies in history, who squandered resources, who made terrible mistakes, who gleaned wisdom from every cycle he lived through. And in the end, after everything, he said:

"There is a time to be silent and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace." Ecclesiastes 3:7-8

Each phase has a voice. And if you don't stop to listen, you'll waste energy fighting the process instead of learning from it.

A company that is under construction has lessons that only emerge during that phase. A leader who is experiencing loss gains clarity that only comes with loss. A team that is experiencing conflict has a cohesion being forged that comfort could never create.

We can't speed this up. But we can observe, understand, and navigate it more fully.

The question that changes everything isn't "why is it taking so long?"

So, what is this phase trying to teach me?

How a mature leader learns to recognize the right time to act.

"Everything has its appointed time."

Not "everything can have". Not "everything should have". Everything has.

The process already holds the answer within it. You don't need to force it. You need discernment. And discernment begins with the willingness to stop fighting the process and start learning from it.

An anxious leader tries to force time. A leader who gives up stops listening to the times. A mature leader learns to recognize the season.

A king who ruled the ancient world, with all the power and resources he possessed, paused to tell us that there is a time for everything.

This is not an invitation to passivity.

It is an invitation to discernment.

Anxiety wants to pluck the fruit. Wisdom learns to recognize the season.

Have a good Tuesday.