In this candid, single‑speaker video, entrepreneur and former physician Luke Murray recounts two painful but parallel experiences that occurred within a single week: firing an employee from one of his companies and ending a romantic relationship. He walks through the behind‑the‑scenes work that preceded each decision, emphasizing four core values his team strives to uphold—100% responsibility, curiosity about the other person’s perspective, candor, and clear agreements. Murray explains how, despite trying to manage how others perceived him, both the employee and his ex‑partner ultimately saw him as the “bad guy.” He reflects on the discomfort of losing control over others’ opinions, the insight that endings reveal one’s true colors, and the importance of staying aligned with one’s deepest values rather than compromising to preserve a relationship. The video concludes with a call to viewers to consider whether they have ever sacrificed their values to keep a connection and to recognize that the most meaningful metric of a relationship’s success is value alignment, which can generate gratitude even amid loss.
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If you're a founder who needs to fire someone or end a business relationship with a person that you really care about, then this video is for you. I'm gonna share how we let someone go at one of our companies a couple days ago and how I ended a romantic relationship literally yesterday, and then explain why I think that even though both of those endings were pretty uncomfortable, I think they were successful according to the most important metric. If you don't know who I am, my name's Luke Murray. I am a former physician, been an entrepreneur for about 20 years. During that time, I've done about $100 million in revenue. I currently have a portfolio that does about $3 million in revenue, and I make these videos because I would like to have ambition without the bullshit, and I'm guessing that you would too. So as I mentioned, a few days ago we fired someone at one of our businesses, and it stirred up a lot of emotion in both me and my team. which we discussed openly, and I talk about exactly how I did that in another video. But one thing I didn't talk about in that video was how much work we did behind the scenes before making that decision. Now, let me be clear that I'm not saying that we worked our way through some perfect official HR checklist. We actually didn't, and I'm not a huge fan of those. What I am saying is we worked hard to stay true to our own values. Which were first, taking 100% responsibility for how we co-created this situation. Second, staying curious about where she was coming from. Third was speaking with candor. And fourth is holding clear agreements and acknowledging where we failed to keep those agreements and needed to make them clearer. And that was super hard because underneath all that values language, which we strove to operate by, She wasn't doing what we wanted her to do. We wanted her to see the role in a certain way, and she just didn't. We wanted— like, we were choosing between the vague, mild ongoing discomfort of the team and the specific big discomfort of letting someone go that we really liked and we really cared about. And while we were trying to live by our values, we also wanted her to not see us as the bad guys. In other words, we were trying to control Her opinion of us. And guess how that worked? I don't think she or the dozen or so other employees that we've let go in the past year are sitting at home talking about how fairly they were treated. In their story, we were probably the bad guys because I want credit for the intention. I want credit for how much I cared and how much we thought about it and how hard we tried to do it in a way that had compassion and truth. But the end of a relationship is not the place where you get to control how someone sees you. It's the place where you get to find out who you are and can see yourself. So you've probably heard this phrase, people show their true colors at the end of a relationship. And usually the subtext is some version of like, yeah, he seemed cool, but then when it ended, he was totally a dick. But that interpretation Doesn't make me better, it just protects my ego. The more useful version, at least for me in these last couple days, was I show my true colors at the end of a relationship. And what I do have control over, and what I want more than people to like me, is to act consistent with my values and my priorities. Now, that does give me less room to be a victim, which sucks because victimhood is like the snuggliest blanket that your ego could ever cuddle underneath of. But it gives me a much bigger opportunity to grow. Actually, per the title, it is the biggest opportunity. I saw the same thing in my romantic relationship that ended yesterday. Similar to the employee that we let go, she wasn't doing what I wanted her to do. I wanted her to see her role in a certain way, and she didn't see it that way. And I had to choose between the vague, mild, ongoing discomfort of an unaligned connection And the specific big discomfort of letting a connection end with someone that I really liked and cared about and still do. And while I was trying to live by my values, I also wanted her to not see me as the bad guy. In other words, I was trying to control her opinion of me. And guess how that worked? I was disrespectful. I'm an asshole. I was a waste of her time. And I wanted her to not feel that way because from my side, I was living by my highest values— honesty, transparency, growth over comfort— and doing that, at least in my book, doesn't make me an asshole. But she wasn't wrong. I was a disrespectful asshole and a waste of her time according to her value system. And those values aren't wrong, they just weren't mine. Values are a trade-off sometimes. You can't say that you have all of them in equal amounts all the time. You can't be 100% honest, for example, and 100% diplomatic at the same time. So that's why relationships end or become miserable when there is a values mismatch. It just don't make sense, not because one side's right and the other side's wrong, but because the 2 parties are headed in just like different trajectories. So when I saw in both cases That our paths were not going in the same trajectory, and I called it out, and they said I was wrong for doing so. They're both just right. They were both saying, hey, the path I'm going down, the values I have, are the right path. Otherwise, I would be going down a different path. So don't try to convince me to go down your path. If I thought those were the right ones, I would be living them. And we probably wouldn't be having this argument or ending this relationship in the first place. So the opportunity, this most important metric that I mentioned at the beginning, was to stand by what I believe without needing them to agree with it. And as I went to bed last night, I felt the sadness, obviously, of this disconnection and the disappointment of not getting to know this woman any better and not having this team member on our staff anymore. But as I continued to sit with that sadness of like, and then just the hurt of being misunderstood and made into a villain by these people, I also started to feel like a deep, even deeper gratitude because I'd given myself the gift of being the man I want to be and building the kind of organization I want to have when it's like super expensive. The most important metric in in my opinion, is how aligned you are with your deepest values. I mean, think about it. If you get to hang out all the time with someone you deeply respected, admired, someone who stood for what you believed in and acted in a way that was consistent with that, even when it was hard, that would be incredible. Because you've at least given yourself a chance to send a clean signal to yourself and to the world that you don't just talk about honesty, for example, you pay the relational price for that honesty by letting other people be repelled by it to the point of you being alone, or at least having one less member on your team. And in doing so, you create space for those that are attracted instead of repelled by it to come into your orbit. And you don't find that out— like, you don't find out if you're that kind of person until you're asked to choose between the two. So that's why the end of a relationship is the biggest opportunity. What do you think? Have you ever had to compromise your values to keep a relationship, or have you ended something and then collapsed into defensiveness and accusation when the other person made you a villain? Where are you at on this journey? Thanks again for listening.
