A Concept to Challenge Your Status Quo
“Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in five years.”
This time of year, leaders do the opposite: they underestimate what 6 disciplined weeks can do, and overestimate how much they “have” to lose to the holidays.
Think of the next few weeks like the final 400 meters of a race. The stadium noise gets louder, runners get sloppy, and most people slow down just slightly without noticing. The winners are not sprinting wildly; they are the ones who keep their form when everyone else lets theirs go. The holidays are not about working more hours, they are about keeping your form when the field mentally checks out.
Teams do not drift in December because they are weak; they drift because the environment changes. End‑of‑year emotions, school breaks, travel, illness, and social commitments pile onto already full calendars, and attention fragments.
At the same time, the market starts telling itself a story: “Everything slows down now. No one is buying. No one is deciding.” When enough people believe that narrative, pipeline, recruiting, and outreach all slow just enough to make it true.
Top performers in sport call this window “separation season”, the part of the year where consistent, focused work quietly creates a gap the competition will spend the next 6–9 months trying to close.
For CEOs, separation season has two fronts:
Separate from competitors who let the holidays become a multi‑week excuse.
Separate from your own previous standard, so you enter January with momentum instead of a holiday hangover.
Tool 1: Pre‑decide your focus days
The best athletes do not avoid holidays; they plan around them and know exactly which days are for celebration and which are for training. Treat your calendar the same way.
Look at the next 4–6 weeks and explicitly mark “Focus Days” where you and your core leaders will be fully on: clear start/stop times, meetings that actually move revenue, recruiting, or strategic initiatives, and no “busy work.” Everything else is either true time off or low‑stakes admin, by design.
Tool 2: Think big, act small
Keep the big ambition, market dominance, category leadership, a culture of elite execution, but shrink the unit of progress to “win the day.”
For each Focus Day, answer one question in advance: “If we only accomplish ONE thing today, which one would move us furthest ahead of our competitors by January 15?” Then architect the day so those three outcomes happen before anything else.
Tool 3: Protect culture, not activity
This season magnifies whatever culture you have. Leaders who go missing create resentment and drift; leaders who are present, clear, and human create loyalty and discretionary effort.
Use the holidays to double down on clarity and standards:
Simplify: strip non‑critical projects so the team knows exactly what matters during this window.
Model: be the person who honors family time fully and then shows up on Focus Days with intensity and calm.
A brief ask: If this lens on “Distraction Season vs. Separation Season” is useful, forward this to your leadership team and one other CEO. The biggest performance unlock is when an entire organization makes the same quiet decision: while the world gets comfortable, we get clear.
