Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

Last weekend I woke up grumpy for no reason I could point to.

It was Father's Day. I should have been relaxed. Instead I was a quiet grump, stewing about nothing in particular, vaguely annoyed at the whole day.

At the time I told myself it was just one of those mornings. Woke up on the wrong side of the bed. But that wasn't really it. The real story was that I had a couple of new clients and a stack of work I owed them, I had progress I needed to make on Predictable, and somewhere underneath all of that I was angry at myself. Angry that I felt the need to work on Father's Day at all. Angrier that even when I gave myself permission to stop, I couldn't, or wouldn't, actually relax.

I couldn't access any of that in the moment. I just felt off and didn't know why.

So I did the only thing that reliably works. I took a shower. I went to bed. I woke up the next morning and I felt fine.

That was the whole arc. One bad day, gone by morning.

There's an old post I keep coming back to whenever this happens. Mark Suster wrote it on his blog, Both Sides of the Table. It's called "Invest in lines, not dots," and it's about how VCs actually evaluate founders. The idea is that a single meeting is a dot. One data point. An investor can't tell much from a dot, because a dot doesn't have a direction. What they want is a line. They want to meet you, watch you go away and come back, and see that you've moved. Performance climbing over time. So the smart move isn't to nail one pitch. It's to build the relationship early enough that they can watch the line form.

It was a sharp idea about fundraising. It turns out to be true about a lot more than fundraising.

My bad weekend was a dot.

I get one of these maybe once a month. A bad day out of nowhere. And for a long time, a single bad day could send me spinning, because it felt like evidence. Evidence that I was a bad entrepreneur, that the business was going to come apart, that I was going to lose the mortgage. One rough morning and my brain would draw the whole doom line straight through it.

But one bad day is a dot. You cannot draw a line through a single point. You take a shower, you sleep, you wake up, and the point just sits there, connected to nothing. It doesn't mean you're failing. It mostly doesn't mean anything.

Now, sometimes you get a few bad days stacked together. That is a different thing. That is a line. And when I see a line, I pay attention, because a line is actually telling me something.

I know what real lines look like. When we were trying to keep the agency alive, I had months of bad days. Not a dot here and there. A solid, unbroken run of them. At one point we didn't even have enough cash to shut down properly. We couldn't afford to let everyone go and pay out the severances, so we just kept going, because going was somehow cheaper than stopping. Those were the thickest lines I've ever lived through.

I bring that up because here's the trap. Sometimes a single bad day feels exactly like those months felt. A client leaves. A sales call goes sideways. Something I built doesn't work the way I thought it would. An invoice lands bigger than it was supposed to be. And my body reacts like it's back in the worst stretch of the agency, even though nothing about my actual situation looks anything like that anymore.

That is where Suster's question saves me. Is this a dot or a line? Over time, is the thing getting better or getting worse?

If it's a dot, I let it go now. I used to interrogate every bad mood like it was a warning I needed to decode. Most of the time it wasn't. Most of the time it was just a Sunday, or a Tuesday, or a Father's Day where I'd loaded myself up with more than I could carry and my body finally said enough.

If I get two or three dots in a row, then I lean in. Because that's a trend, and trends usually have a cause. They tend to be driven by something real and external, something worth listening to. A line earns your attention. A single dot usually doesn't.

The hard part is telling them apart in the moment, when the dot feels enormous and the line, if there is one, is still invisible. I don't have a clean trick for that. What I have is a rule. I wait one day before I decide what a bad day means. A shower, a night of sleep, and a fresh look in the morning will usually tell you whether you were staring at a single dot or the start of a line.

Most of the time, for me, it turns out to be a dot.

Mark Suster's original post is worth reading if you've never seen it. It was 404ing when I went looking, so here's the archived version.

What did your last bad day actually turn out to be?

Collin

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