When the System Starts Running the Founder: Three Traps for Ukrainian Entrepreneurs

Ukrainian entrepreneurs possess a remarkable creative energy. The past few years have made this impossible to ignore. When electricity goes out, logistics are disrupted, and partners postpone contracts, they do not wait for perfect conditions. They find ways to restore production, explore new markets, continue building in Ukraine, and even expand far beyond its borders.

An entrepreneur’s creative energy is one of the most powerful resources I have ever encountered. At the same time, after more than thirty years in business, I have seen several traps that can drain it. I would like to share the three that stand out most clearly to me — and, importantly, the ones I have experienced myself.

Trap 1: Becoming a Cog in the System You Created

It may seem obvious that the person who creates the rules should be the one who follows them most strictly. That is exactly what I believed for many years, from the moment I founded my company. Every time I failed to follow the rules of the system I had built, I was overwhelmed by guilt. Let me give a specific example. From the very beginning, I required — and still require — that factory employees arrive at work exactly at eight o’clock. Being even a few minutes late was treated almost like a serious offense. During the early years, I followed the same discipline myself. Later, I began arriving at nine or even ten and felt guilty: how can you expect people to follow the rules if you constantly break them yourself?

I found clarity and peace of mind through a training program where the instructor said something that changed my perspective: there is a small group of people who are capable of bringing processes together into a system and making that system work. Their role is not to remain inside that system forever, but to step away and direct their energy toward creating the next one. Otherwise, the founder becomes a component of the mechanism they built — and instead of leading it, they end up maintaining it.

My factory still operates efficiently from eight to five, even though I have long stopped living by its schedule and can no longer remember half the rules I introduced years ago. For me, this is the ultimate test: if a system cannot function without its founder, it has not yet become a true system. But if it can, the founder’s creative energy is better invested not in maintaining an established mechanism, but in building something new.

I apply the same principle to the systems I have created outside of business. The "Happiness System" and the "Conscious Fasting System" fundamentally changed my life at one point, but today I no longer follow their rules with the same dedication I had at the beginning.

Trap 2: Wasting Energy on Chasing Fleas

For an entrepreneur who is used to constantly doing something, free time can feel uncomfortable. It creates the impression that they are not busy enough. The moment a few free hours appear in the calendar, there is a temptation to schedule another meeting, step into a problem, or launch a project that they are not genuinely interested in. This is how that familiar feeling of being in motion returns. I call this “chasing fleas”: spending powerful entrepreneurial energy on tasks that constantly demand attention, create a pleasant sense of being needed and indispensable, but ultimately change very little on the scale of the business or life.

Over the years, I have had at least ten business projects, of which only two are still operating today. I do not consider the others failures or wasted effort, because some of them gave me the experience I needed to learn how to distinguish a truly valuable opportunity from an attractive idea. Early in an entrepreneurial journey, such learning almost inevitably comes at the cost of time and money. But with experience, it becomes important to stop calling every new distraction "learning."

When I began turning my ideas about the Happiness System and my experience with fasting into books, I could not have imagined that these systems would attract so many followers or that the books would actually sell. This creative direction — which initially did not even seem like a business in the traditional sense — turned out to be more sustainable than many of my purely commercial ventures. Although the investments have not yet paid off, the trajectory is clear.

I have learned how important it is to choose what truly inspires you at a particular moment and then give that pursuit enough time to reveal its full potential. Sometimes silence yields far more than intense activity — or, more precisely, restlessness. It helps prevent us from scattering our energy across random pursuits and allows us to Wait for the Right Moment (a concept to which I dedicate an entire chapter in my book Don´t Push Too Hard).

Trap 3: Endless Accumulation and Investing Only in Material Things

To reach the right moment, you need not only free time but also financial security. This is where entrepreneurs often fall into another trap: the moment extra money becomes available, there is an urge to immediately put it somewhere — to launch another business, invest in real estate, or spread funds across multiple accounts, currencies, and reserves. I know this impulse well because I followed the same pattern for many years.

During a training program in the early 2000s, participants were asked to count all their financial stashes. Some of them had more than a dozen: accounts in different banks, cash in several currencies, a safe deposit box, money kept abroad. Behind this kind of diversification was not just a desire to spread risk, but also anxiety — what if one bank collapsed, a currency lost its value, or something entirely unforeseen happened?

Added to this is a belief familiar to people of my generation — a Soviet-era mindset that money should always be invested in something tangible: an apartment, a piece of real estate. A financial cushion is certainly important, but no number of bank accounts or square meters can provide absolute security, and constant accumulation can easily turn the present into nothing more than a waiting room for the future.

Sometimes money is better invested in personal growth: education, health, or experiences that help us break out of familiar patterns. Transformative learning programs provide not only knowledge but also significantly expand our networks, reshape our worldview, and allow us to see new opportunities from a higher perspective.

Creative energy cannot fully express itself within old rules and outdated notions of security. It needs the freedom to soar. And sometimes, simply realizing this becomes an elevator to an entirely new level of awareness.