The Disease of Good Ideas

Imagine.

Imagine a period in your business when everything seems to be growing.
There’s money.
There’s energy.
The market is cooperating.

And more than anything? Extraordinary ideas keep coming, one after another.
Not ordinary ideas.
Ideas that make your heart rate rise a little when you think about them.
Ideas where you can see the future.
Ideas that, if you tell someone, they say: “That’s amazing. You have to do it.”

You wake up in the morning and you feel like it’s time to build.
You feel like a wave has arrived—and if you don’t ride it right now, you’ll lose the opportunity of your life.
You feel like these ideas are too good to just walk past.

And that’s exactly where the danger begins—quietly.

We had a period like that in K2.
The algorithms were working well.
An investor had come in.
We were growing.

And I had exactly the thought you might have in that situation:

If we have capital now, we have a team now, and the market is cooperating, why not expand the scope right now?

Launch a new product.
Add another service.
Open a new branch that generates independent revenue.

That question was logical.
Completely logical.

And that’s exactly why it was dangerous.

Projects started one by one.
K2-OMS, K2-Cortex, K2-Summit, K2-DB, K2-Wallet, K2-Coin, and …
Each one appealing.
Each one defensible.
If you asked me, I had an argument for every single one.

And maybe if you were in my place, you would say: why not?

None of them was a mistake.

But together, they were.

Scattering never starts with an explosion.
It starts with a small crack.

Imagine one day you spend just a little less time on the main project.
The next day you have a few more meetings.
The day after that you say, “Let’s just start this one too.”

Nothing looks catastrophic.

But one day, suddenly, you realize:
the center of gravity has shifted.

You’re still working.
Even more than before.

But on what?

Not because you became weak.
Not because the market collapsed.

Because you don’t have one direction.

In that period, I also kept looking for an external reason.
Resources?
Team?
Structure?

Maybe you would do the same if you were in that situation.

But that wasn’t the issue.

The issue was that I had chosen more than one destination at the same time.

Little by little, I realized it’s as if the human mind isn’t built for multiple directions at once.

The human mind doesn’t have multiple compasses.
It has one.

And when you move in several directions at the same time,
that compass starts to tremble.
It starts to misread.
And eventually, it gets confused.

Later, I realized this wasn’t just my story.

If you look around, you see the same pattern.
Smart teams.
Serious founders.
Great ideas.

And in the end: scattering.

Interestingly, bad ideas are usually not dangerous.
You can say no to a bad idea easily.

But a good idea?

A good idea gives you a sense of the future.
A sense of opportunity.
A sense that if you don’t start right now, you’ll lose something.

And that is exactly the moment focus is lost.

Steve Jobs once said:
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.”

Now ask yourself:
How many times have you been able to say no to a great idea?

I couldn’t either.

The turning point for me happened when I had to write a business plan.
For Canada’s startup visa.

I sat down to write.

At first, everything seemed simple. The more I went forward, the feeling of being lost showed itself inside me.

I was pushing two paths at the same time: K2-Fund and K2-PortfolioManagement

Both attractive.
Both defensible.
Both looked “smart” from the outside.

But when I went into the details, the story changed.

For each one, I had to write a separate investment plan.
For each one, I had to design a different hiring plan.
Their six‑month goals were not the same.
Their growth maps were not the same.
Their risks were not the same.

Each one wanted its own financial tables. Each one wanted an independent cash‑flow forecast. Each one needed its own SWOT. Each one had its own failure scenarios.

And I was sitting there, trying to fit two worlds inside one mind.

The more I wrote, the more scattered I became.
The more precise I got, the clearer the contradictions became.

At some point, my mind locked up.
Not from lack of knowledge.
From conflict of direction.

Because I was building two different worlds at the same time.

And right there I understood: the problem wasn’t writing.
The problem was choosing.

I had to remove one.
Just one.

And the moment I made that decision, something strange happened.

Clarity arrived.

It was as if my mind could breathe.

When one was removed, I finally saw how big the one I chose was—by itself. How much depth it had. How much real work was inside it.

Removing wasn’t retreat.
Removing was power.

Because for the first time, I had one direction.

And maybe if you look honestly, you’ll see the issue isn’t a lack of effort.

Maybe the issue is that you’ve chosen more than one destination at the same time.

That’s when I realized what I was missing wasn’t willpower.
It wasn’t knowledge.
It wasn’t even capital.

What I was missing was a North Star.

A North Star is a simple answer to a simple question:
When a new idea arrives, what is my answer?

If the answer isn’t clear,
everything turns into “maybe.”

And “maybe” is the death of focus.

Later, when I had mentoring sessions, consulting meetings, and coaching sessions with different startups and businesses, little by little I realized this wasn’t only my issue.
In almost every team, I saw the same pattern.
A lot of energy.
Brilliant ideas.
Multiple paths at once.
And a missing center.

Until I came across the book Essentialism.
And there I understood this isn’t a personal mistake.
It’s a recurring breaking point.
A point that starts exactly from an abundance of choices—and an inability to remove.

The problem isn’t a lack of ideas.
It’s an overflow of ideas.

And if there isn’t a system to contain that overflow,
good ideas slowly consume everything.

Maybe you also have a few open projects right now.
A few half‑finished paths.
A few suspended decisions.

Or maybe you have extraordinary ideas in your mind that visit you from time to time.
Ideas where you tell yourself: “If only I had more time…”
Ideas you wish you could spend a full year on—just those.
Ideas that make you smile when you think about them.
And then you sigh.
Because you know you can’t build all of them at once.

And maybe you think you just need a bit more organization.

But the issue isn’t organization.

The issue is direction.

And direction isn’t built with an emotional decision.

It’s built with a system.

A system that holds you when excitement rises.
A system that filters the next opportunity when it appears.
A system that lets you finish one thing—before you start ten other things.

In the next chapter, we enter that system.

A system that begins with one question:
Why do we exist—exactly?

And then turns into this question:
This season—what exactly must be built?

If you don’t have that system,
good ideas will spin you around.

If you do have that system,
good ideas stand in line.

And you can finally complete one thing.

And see the result.