In this solo, first‑person video, former physician‑turned‑entrepreneur Luke Murray addresses entrepreneurs who have experienced a major setback in their business. He recounts two recent “blow‑ups” at portfolio companies—a long‑time middle‑manager who resigned, revealing that a top‑performing frontline worker was a poor fit for a managerial role, and widespread competence gaps across sales and production at a distillery. Murray uses these anecdotes to argue that self‑blame and the instinct to immediately “fix” every symptom are unproductive. He advises viewers to adopt a more compassionate perspective, recognizing that they acted with the information and resources they had at the time. He emphasizes the importance of prioritizing the most critical fires, accepting that less important issues may burn out, and only revisiting problems when they truly warrant attention. Murray warns against learning the wrong lesson—fixing a symptom that isn’t the core issue—and stresses that acceptance of the current reality, combined with honest assessment of talent and competence gaps, enables wiser strategic changes. The video concludes with a call for viewers to share their own experiences of self‑judgment after a business failure.
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Hey, if you're an entrepreneur that has recently messed something up or had a big blowup in your company and you're worried like, shit, I shouldn't have made that mistake, you're beating yourself up, or you're like, I want to make sure I never make this mistake again. I want to learn from this mistake. Then this video is for you. In it, I'm going to talk about how what's recently happened at 2 different portfolio companies of mine, um, that where things have blown up, uh, the lessons that we've taken away from that. And, uh, the most important one I hope we land on is you recognizing that there might not be a lesson. If you don't know who I am, my name's Luke Murray. I am a former physician. Uh, I've been an entrepreneur for about 20 years and, uh, I've done about $100 million, uh, of revenue during that time. Uh, currently I have a portfolio that does about $3 million a year. And I make these videos just because I'd like to have ambition without the bullshit, and I'm hoping that you would too. So in the last week or so, we've had someone that's been with us for years resign, and she's kind of been the first level up in middle management over the most people. She has the most direct reports, the folks providing our service. And what we have found out is as she's left, just how much of not a good fit she was for that role. The things that were happening on the front line that we didn't know about that were getting filtered from her, the amount of just micromanaging or not delegating. There's always more stress than it seemed like there needed to be. And now we're kind of finding out why. And the point of this is not to shit on her or honestly even to shit on us for putting her there. She was the best frontline worker, so that's the one you naturally would make into a manager. The point is that my first response to that mistake and most of the mistakes in my life is beating myself up of like, I should have known that. And it's not useful. I mean, as much time and energy as I have spent hating myself for doing the wrong thing or making the wrong decision, none of it has improved my wisdom in any way. I've never self-flagellated myself into lasting wisdom or behavior change. And so because you can choose how you view events, you can just consciously change your perspective. I've just come to tell myself, that I did the best I could with the resources and wisdom and information that I had at the time. So that's the first thing I would tell you is it's not been helpful to me and it probably isn't helpful to you if something blows up. Now, the one pushback I would give to myself, and that's kind of where I want to go next in this video, is yeah, However, you could have spent more time on that problem. You knew it was a problem, so you could have just— if you would've just spent a day or two, in this case, if myself or my manager would've spent 2, maybe 3 days just on the front line with this manager, I think we would've been able to see things very clearly. However, my second point is that I don't want you to learn the wrong lesson. When something bad happens, I don't think the answer is always, this is the thing you could have done instead. And for us, for example, I don't think that fixing the issues around this manager and the things that she needed help with was the right move, not because it wasn't a problem, but because it wasn't the most important problem. So when you choose to let less important fires burn because you're putting out the top 1 or 2 fires, that means those fires are going to burn. And sometimes they will burn enough until something explodes. And if that happens, if something just happened to explode, it doesn't mean that you were doing the wrong thing or that you should have been prioritizing it differently. If you're going to beat yourself up and say, I should have focused on this. Now, what I would ask is that you kind of look back in time and you're like, well, what If it's possible, what was I doing a week ago that was more important than this? Or before that, that was more important? Or before that, that was more important? And if you can't find something, then maybe it does warrant, uh, it would've wanted more attention. And that is a lesson that you can learn. But just because something blew up doesn't mean you made the wrong bet. I mean, to be honest, if you spend $100 On a lottery that has a payout of, like a 10% payout of $1 million, that's called an expected value, 10% of $1 million, of $100,000. So yeah, you could spend $100 9 times and look like an idiot. Who the hell is buying $100 lottery tickets? So it doesn't mean you were gambling wrong though, or that your decisions were unwise. It can just look messy when you're $500 deep and all you've done is scratched off zeros. I want to tell this other story. At the distillery, we've got a lot of folks that are just not at levels of competence that we hoped that they would be in any department. Sales, we would like for them to be more competent. In production, we would like for them to be more competent. And of course, we are realizing that we would like to be more competent, our ability to spot talent, to grow talent, to give our people feedback so that they can become more competent. And I'll just— this is my brother-in-law that I work with, and I just finished a call with him a couple hours ago. And so I'll leave you with this because this is how we ended our call. We as entrepreneurs, Are right where we're supposed to be, given the amount of information, knowledge, wisdom, access to financing, access to knowledge, our own, the limits of our own intelligence. Like, we're just right where we're supposed to be. We couldn't be anywhere else other than where we are right now. That isn't some surrender to the circumstances as if they will never change, But it certainly is a surrender to how things are in this millisecond and this millisecond. And honestly, it's only from a place of complete acceptance and complete surrender to the actual truth of your situation that you can make the most wise decisions about how to change any of it. What do you think? Have you been judging yourself for a decision that blew up and thinking, ah, I'm just mad at myself, or like, I'm going to do it differently this time and actually learned the wrong lesson and applied it. If so, let me know in the comments. And as always, thanks for watching.
