Why Founders Remember Differently

And why I've become suspicious of tidy stories.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of tidy stories. Especially my own.  

I don’t forget the facts. Most of those are still there. It's the emotional texture that’s shifted or at best harder to recall.

When I look back, decisions that felt terrifying at the time have become oddly... inevitable. The uncertainty has faded and the times I changed my mind, or lay awake at three in the morning, wondering whether I was right, wrong or incapable of making the right call - those memories are still there but I have to dig deep to remember the context.

What comes naturally is the much neater story and that worries me although, I suspect, it’s what happens to all of us.

I've spent most of my career in and around businesses. Starting them, growing them, selling them, watching others succeed and fail, succeeding and failing myself and over the years one thing has become increasingly obvious to me.

Success changes the way we remember. Failure does too.

Not because successful people are dishonest nor for that matter, are people who have failed. Far from it. As entrepreneurs we’ve all suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and in my experience most are trying to tell the truth as they understand it.

It's just that memory is forever trying to make sense of the past. It likes to tidy up loose ends and prefers decisions to look deliberate and journeys to have direction. It quietly edits out some of the confusion because confusion doesn't make much of a story.

But real life rarely feels like that while you're living it.

When I think back to some of the biggest decisions I made, good and bad, I don't remember feeling decisive. I remember feeling uncertain, sometimes frightened and sometimes convinced I was doing the right thing in the morning and wondering if I'd fucked up by mid-day.

The thing is when you’re in the trenches, all there is is uncertainty. But you still have to make a decision. 

Years later it's surprisingly easy to forget that.

I think that's one reason founders often struggle to explain what they actually did.

Ask someone about the company they built and they'll usually tell you a nicely tuned story where the turning points arrive at just the right moment and the difficult decisions fit neatly into the narrative. Looking back, everything seems to flow towards the outcome.

But that's hindsight talking and we all know it. It’s just easier to tell than to grapple with the context. 

When you're inside the story there are no chapter headings. You don't know which decision will matter or whether this customer, that meeting or this conversation will change everything or be forgotten in a week. You certainly don't know whether the business will still exist five years later.

The more I've thought about it, the more I believe the most valuable part of any founder's story isn't what happened. It's what they thought was happening.

One tells you the outcome. The other tells you how somebody judged risk, weighed incomplete information, coped with pressure and carried on when there wasn't an obvious answer.

That's the part we rarely preserve. And that’s what really matters. I've noticed it in my own life.

Some of the stories I've told over the years have become smoother with every telling. Not intentionally. They've simply become easier to explain.

Part of that is just time and part of it is repetition. Every time you tell the story, you're not just recalling it, you're reshaping it. Trimming what doesn't land, sharpening what does. After enough tellings, you can end up with a sharp and logical story rather than a true memory. Which is fine for an after-dinner speech. Less so if you're trying to pass on something genuinely useful.

It’s only when I stop and really think that I remember the parts I'd almost or entirely edited out. The person or conversation that changed my mind. The opportunity I nearly ignored. The really tough decision that kept a business going but still makes me wonder whether I'd make the same call today.

Looking back now, I can explain those moments in a couple of minutes. Living through them took days, weeks or months. Those are usually the moments that taught me something.

And they're also the moments most likely to disappear first.

That's why I've become interested in recording not just what people did, but how they

arrived there. Because I think that's the most valuable thing any founder or business builder can leave behind. 

It's a record of judgement. Why someone made the call they did. What they believed at the time. What turned out to matter far less than they imagined. And, if we're all being honest, the occasions when luck did more work than we'd like to admit. 

That's the inheritance future leaders, families and successors can actually learn from.

Annual reports tell us what happened. A thoughtful record tells us how somebody thought while it was happening.

I my view, context matters far more than conclusions. Because it's context that future generations can still learn from, long after the conclusions have become history.