“Intensity” is what I say to job interviewers when asked about my greatest weakness. Yes, it’s cliché to reframe a negative as a positive, but in my case, it’s the honest truth. I pay an extremely high internal cost when I don’t go all-in on my work, and I get frustrated when others on the boat aren’t rowing as hard as me.

In my experience, very few people get burnt out working all the time. Real burnout happens when you feel like you’re doing all the work. As if you’re the only one rowing on the boat. I am particularly sensitive to this. Early in my career, I unfortunately was prone to allowing my frustration to become toxic, making it my mission to ensure everyone else to row as hard as I did.

At the same time, “Intensity”, is the reason I found success early on in my career. Every time I joined a new company, I was promoted within the first six months. I started managing people at an age that was probably too young, simply because my founder/boss felt I "mind-melded" with his vision and he knew I would deliver. Within my niche of enterprise infrastructure, I’ve been the person recruited to launch new products, get teams on track, reimagine from first principles multi-million dollar legacy products, and execute high-stakes PE-backed turnarounds.

My intensity hasn’t gone away, if anything, it has increased. But how I use it has shifted massively as I’ve moved from an Individual Contributor to a Product Leader.

In The Matrix, Neo famously learns to “bend the spoon” not by exerting physical force, but rather by realizing the truth: there is no spoon. He learns to manipulate the reality of the Matrix and its internal logic rather than just fighting against it.

I think spoon bending is the perfect metaphor for any leader operating in distressed environments. When you are handed an urgent problem, insufficient time, and a team that isn't perfectly optimized, you cannot succeed by simply working harder. Or hiring better. Or forcing everyone to learn a new process. You cannot brute-force the spoon into your desired shape.

Instead, you have to create a team of spoon benders capable of reshaping the constraints and redefining reality itself.

For me, as a leader, this meant doing three specific things:

1. Create a team of pirates. Giving your team permission to break (some) rules, and making them feel empowered is a pre-requisite for them being able to redefine reality itself. Publicize your different ways of working and celebrate wins to quickly expand people’s realm of possibilities.
2. Spend a freakishly large amount of time on vision. Help the team see the problem so clearly that the path forward becomes obvious. Make the (usually self-imposed) constraints attractive to delete.
3. Use escalations as teaching opportunities. Create an environment where raising a red flag is welcomed. Critically, use these as opportunities to publicly and collaboratively re-examine issues from first principles in order to uplevel everyone’s thinking.

When you successfully build a team of spoon benders, you solve the burnout problems I brought up earlier. You stop feeling like the only one rowing because you are no longer trying to drag the team through the problems; you are teaching them to dissolve the problems entirely.

In a turnaround or high-growth environment, conventional logic says you should fail. There isn't enough budget, the tech debt is too high, your team isn’t perfect, and the timeline is too short. But when you channel your intensity into vision, coaching, and culture, the team stops fighting with the spoon and starts reshaping the outcome. In effect, they get to share with you the ultimate payoff of leadership: being able to rewrite the rules of the game.