In Spain, some shop owners close at two and don’t come back till five. No guilt, no apology, no LinkedIn post explaining why they’re prioritising wellness. Just a locked door and the sound of lunch happening somewhere nearby.
I used to think that was lazy. Now I think it’s the only sane business model left.
Momentum is overrated. Everyone talks about it like it’s proof of life, movement equals progress, speed equals relevance. But half the people talking about momentum are just scared of stopping long enough to see what’s really going on.
Last month I tried the opposite. No meetings, no launches, no forced networking. Two days of nothing except the things I’d been avoiding. I looked at numbers properly, answered emails slower, deleted a few projects that weren’t going anywhere. It wasn’t relaxing. It was uncomfortable in the way truth usually is.
When you stop, you start hearing things again. The sound of the business breathing, or not. The gaps between noise. You notice that some of the people shouting about growth aren’t actually growing, they’re just louder.
Standing still doesn’t mean giving up. It means refusing to move for the sake of optics. It means letting silence be data. When you run everything on adrenaline, you can’t tell the difference between momentum and panic.
I watched a bar owner in Dénia last week serve the last coffee at 2:15. People were still walking in, but he shook his head, wiped the counter, and went. No explanation. Just done. He’ll open again later, same spot, same customers. Business fine. He understands rhythm better than most founders with pitch decks.
There’s courage in stopping. It’s the moment when the algorithm stops making sense and you start trusting your own read of the room. You see what you’ve been chasing, and half of it isn’t worth catching.
We talk about disruption like it’s always noise. Sometimes it’s quiet. Sometimes the rebellion is not posting, not selling, not pretending you’re scaling. Sometimes it’s a locked door at two in the afternoon.
If you work for yourself, try this. A full day without progress. No new emails. No productivity apps. Sit still long enough to see what comes up. If your business depends on you running flat out, it’s probably running you.
Spain taught me that the work gets done anyway. People go home, eat, nap, come back, and finish what matters. Everything else can wait.