I remember standing in the kitchen at home in a clean shirt and yesterday’s trousers, watching the little green digits change from 11:58 to 11:59, trying to calculate whether I still had time to save the day. The shirt was buttoned wrong. My hands smelled faintly of gin through the soap. On the counter there was a glass with warm tonic in it, flat already, because I had poured it to calm my stomach and then forgotten to drink it.
From the outside, that kind of life can look like laziness.
You answer late. You postpone calls. You move slowly. You sit for too long in front of a screen without sending the email. You say you are tired all the time. You cancel. You disappear. Your face loses sharpness. Your decisions become soft at the edges. People start using words that are efficient and cruel. Undisciplined. Unfocused. Weak. Lazy.
I understand why.
Laziness is easier for other people to tolerate than confusion. It is cleaner. More morally convenient. If a founder is lazy, the world still makes sense. He simply failed to apply himself. He had work to do and did not do it. Case closed.
But that was not my truth.
My truth was uglier and less elegant. I was no longer steering my life in a straight line. I was drinking gin too often and too quietly. Not in a dramatic way. Not with broken bottles and public scenes. In the more dangerous way. In the adult way. Measured. Functional. Private. Enough to blur the edge of panic. Enough to slow my thinking. Enough to give me ten minutes of false peace and a whole day of weaker judgement.
And because I was still dressed, still answering some messages, still attending some meetings, I could pretend I was operational.
That is one of the dirtiest lies a founder can tell himself. Not that everything is fine. That lie is too obvious. The more seductive lie is this: I am still functioning, therefore I am still in control.
I was not in control.
I was getting lost in small ways first. I would read the same paragraph of a contract three times and notice nothing. I would open my laptop to do one urgent task and forty minutes later find myself staring at an old spreadsheet without knowing why I had opened it. I would agree to timelines that no honest man should have agreed to. I would tell myself I needed one drink to settle down before thinking clearly, then wonder why clarity arrived late and left early.
This is why I resist the easy language people use around failure.
A founder in that state is still responsible. Let me be very clear about that. Stakeholders do not suffer less because the root cause was disorientation rather than indifference. Suppliers still wait. Creditors still worry. Staff still sense instability before they can name it. Clients still feel the drag when something in the structure has gone soft. Harm does not become poetic because the person causing it is suffering too.
That matters to me deeply.
When a company weakens, the damage does not stop at the P&L. It enters kitchens, marriages, rent payments, school plans, trust itself. One delayed payment may mean someone else postpones theirs. One unstable decision can travel through other people’s lives without ever meeting your eyes. I know this now with a seriousness I did not have before. I carry that knowledge as part of my duty, not as decoration.
But responsibility is not the same thing as description.
Calling a man lazy when he is actually lost and drunk may feel morally satisfying, but it also hides the mechanism. It hides the progression. It hides the warning signs other founders need to recognise in themselves before damage spreads further. Laziness suggests character. What I was living was collapse of orientation.
That distinction matters because the remedies are different.
A lazy man needs discipline.
A lost man needs truth.
And a lost man who is drinking needs interruption before he destroys what still can be protected.
I did not need another lecture about productivity. I needed to admit that I no longer trusted myself in the ordinary rhythm of a working day. I needed to say, without style and without excuses, that gin had stopped being a detail and had started becoming part of the machinery. I needed to face the fact that my problem was not a bad week, or stress, or overwork alone. My internal compass had gone soft. My judgement was no longer reliably mine.
That is a frightening thing for any entrepreneur to admit.
Founders build identity around agency. We decide. We carry. We absorb pressure. We move. So when movement itself becomes distorted, the shame is immediate. You start hiding not only the damage, but the loss of inner authority. You do not want people to know that simple tasks have become strangely heavy. You do not want to explain why opening a message feels physical. You do not want to say that some mornings the effort required to act like yourself is already too high before noon.
I know now that this is the moment when language becomes decisive.
If you call yourself lazy, you will probably choose punishment.
If you tell the truth that you are lost, you may still choose repair.
For me, repair did not begin with inspiration. It began with humiliation. With naming things plainly. With no romance. With no founder mythology. With the sickening recognition that some of what I had called resilience was in fact delay. Some of what I had called endurance was concealment. Some of what I had called coping was alcohol arranged neatly enough to pass.
That recognition did not erase responsibility. It sharpened it.
It also gave me back a direction.
Paolo Maria Pavan did not need a better calendar. He needed a structure strong enough to tell him the truth before he disappeared inside his own habits. That is one of the reasons I later built the kind of business clinic I once needed.
Not every struggling founder is drinking.
Not every slow founder is lost.
And yes, some people are simply avoiding the work.
But now and then the founder everyone calls lazy is fighting a quieter collapse. He is misfiring internally. He is hiding confusion behind routine. He is using small private anaesthetics to cross the day. He is still standing, which is exactly why others miss the seriousness of it.
If that is you, this is not permission. It is a warning.
Do not flatter yourself with the word functional.
Do not hide inside the word tired.
And do not let the word lazy become the mask that keeps the real problem untouched.
Some people around you may prefer the simpler story.
You cannot afford it.
Because once a founder loses direction badly enough, the business does not carry him back to shore. It follows him into the fog.