Mark MacLeod explains how small, persistent problems called tolerations drain energy and slow growth. One CEO found 93 tolerations, cleared quick wins in a week, and hit 30% growth in three months. The fix: a three-tier system for quick wins, 30-day projects, and quarterly goals.
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The things you tolerate are killing your growth and sapping your life. Your company is slower than it should be. Not because you're not working hard enough. Not because your team isn't talented enough. But because you're tolerating 100 small things that are dragging you down. The broken process no one's fixed. The underperforming hire that everyone knows about. The tool that doesn't work, but you keep using it anyway. The meeting that wastes an hour every week. Each one seems small, but together they're killing your momentum and sapping your energy. I'm Mark MacLeod. I help CEOs and founders become limitless. And the fastest way that I've seen companies accelerate isn't adding more. It's removing what's slowing them down. If this helps you, hit subscribe. I share videos every week on scaling without limits. Here's what I want you to do right now. Grab a piece of paper or download the template at the link below. Set a timer for 10 minutes and write down everything you're tolerating in your business and in your life. Don't filter, don't judge, just write everything. Big, small, personal, business, write it down. The product bug that's been in backlog for 6 months, the salesperson who's missing quota, but you haven't had the hard conversation. The office lease that costs too much. The vendor who's always late. The Slack channel that's pure noise. Everything you're putting up with. Everything that makes you wince when you think about it. Everything that drains a little bit of your energy every single day. I guarantee you'll hit 20 things in the first 5 minutes. If you keep going, you'll find 100. These are your tolerations, and they're expensive. Let me show you how expensive. Every toleration costs you 3 things: energy. You think about it, you work around it, you explain it to new people, you apologize for it to customers or investors or your team. That's mental bandwidth that you're not spending on growth, on strategy, on the decisions that actually move your business forward. One toleration might cost you 1% of your daily energy. At 100 tolerations, that's half or more of your capacity gone before you even start real work. It's costing you speed. Every broken process slows down execution. Every underperforming person creates bottlenecks. Every inefficient tool adds friction. You think you're moving fast, but you're actually fighting drag and gravity the entire way. Remove the drag and watch what happens to your velocity. Costs you culture. This is the big one most founders miss. When you tolerate something, you set the standard. You signal to your team what's acceptable. If you tolerate mediocre work, you create a culture of mediocrity. If you tolerate broken processes, you create a culture of inefficiency. If you tolerate bad behavior, you create a toxic culture. The slow employee you tolerate tells everyone else that it's It's okay to just mail it in. Good is good enough. Your team watches what you accept more than what you say. Your tolerations become your culture. Now here's what to do with your toleration list. You can't fix everything at once. That's overwhelming and it leads to nothing getting done. So rank them. I use 3 categories. Quick wins. Take less than an hour to fix. Just do those immediately. Cancel the useless meeting, unsubscribe from the email list, delete the Slack channel, fire the vendor who's not delivering. These give you instant momentum and momentum creates more momentum. Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, periodically writes a script that deletes every recurring meeting in his company. Why? Because he knows that many of those meetings are no longer needed. He stops tolerating them. Look for high-impact wins. These take more time but create massive value. Schedule these in the next 30 days. Have the hard conversation with the underperformer. Fix the broken process. Switch to the better tool. Renegotiate the bad contract. Enlist your leadership team. Assign these high-impact wins to them. These are where the real acceleration happen. The long-term wins, these require significant time or resources. Put these on your quarterly roadmap. Migrate off the legacy system. Restructure the team. Move to a better office. Rebuild the part of the product that's held together with duct tape. Don't ignore these. They compound over time, but don't let them distract you from the quick wins and the high-impact items. Let me give you an example from a CEO I coach. He made his list. 93 tolerations. Everything from a broken onboarding process to an underperforming exec to an office noise that made deep work impossible. We ranked them. He knocked out 15 quick wins in the first week. He canceled recurring meetings. He fired 2 vendors. He cleaned up 3 broken processes. Processes. Immediate impact. His energy shifted and his team noticed. Then he tackled the high-impact items. He had the hard conversation with the exec. Either level up or move on. The exec leveled up. The exec appreciated the second chance. Next, he rebuilt the onboarding process. New hires now ramp 50% faster. He moved the team to a new office with focus space and deep work time doubled. 3 months later, the company's growth rate increased 30%. Same team, same market, same product. They just removed what was slowing them down. That's the power of eliminating tolerations. Here's what stops most founders. They know what they're tolerating, but they tell themselves stories about why they can't fix it. We don't have time. It's not that bad. We'll deal with it after the next fundraise. Person's been with us since the beginning. They're all forms of avoidance, and avoidance compounds. The longer you tolerate something, the more expensive it becomes, the harder it is to fix, the more it spreads through your culture. Here's the truth: you don't have time not to fix it. Every day you tolerate that broken process, you lose productivity. Every week you tolerate that underperformer, you lose your A-players' respect. The The best people don't need to tolerate anything. They can just leave. Every month you tolerate that inefficiency, you lose competitive advantage. The cost of fixing it is always less than the cost of continuing to tolerate it. Always. Alright, let's talk about the hard ones. The tolerations that involve people. The co-founder who's not pulling their weight anymore. The early hire who's been loyal but can't scale with the company. The executive who's great at their job but toxic to culture. These are the hardest to address. They're emotional. They're complicated. They feel personal. But they're also the most important. Because people tolerations spread faster than any other kind. Your team sees it. They lose faith in your leadership. Your best people start looking for the exit. Here's what I tell the CEOs I coach. Kindness isn't keeping someone in a role they're failing at. It's not compassionate, it's cruel. Real kindness is having the honest conversation, giving them a clear path to succeed or helping them find something that's better suited to their strengths. And if they can't succeed in this role, at this company, at this stage, then the kindest thing you can do is help them transition out with dignity. Your job as CEO isn't to make everyone comfortable. Your job is to build a company that wins. And winning requires removing what's slowing you down. Even when it's hard. In fact, especially when it's hard. Here's your action plan. Today, make your tolerations list. 10 minutes, everything you're putting up with. This week, knock out 5 quick wins. Cancel something, fix something small, create immediate momentum. This month, tackle your 3 highest impact tolerations. Schedule the hard conversation. Fix the broken process. Make the change you've been avoiding. This quarter, address one major long-term toleration. The big structural thing that's been nagging at you. Do this consistently and watch what happens. Your energy increases. Your speed increases. Your culture strengthens. Your business accelerates. Because here's the secret that most founders miss. Growth isn't just about adding more—more people, more features, more capital, more customers. Growth is about subtraction, removing friction, eliminating drag, cutting what's not working. The best CEOs are just as good at saying no as they are at saying yes, just as good at removing as they are at adding. They understand that a fast company isn't a company doing more things. It's a company doing fewer things with less resistance. So stop tolerating, start accelerating. Make your list, rank your tolerations, remove them systematically. Your business is waiting on the other side. If you want help identifying and removing your tolerations, join our Limitless.ceo community. We help founders eliminate what's slowing them down so they can scale faster. Limitless CEOs put energy first, and they know that tolerations kill their energy. See the link below.
