Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.
Happy Monday, founders,
Over the past year, I’ve sat across from quite a few founders with a camera rolling, and the stories that stay with me are the raw and brutal, yet everyday encounters of a business owner’s life: a supplier who cheated them, a cash flow issue caused by a contract cancellation, or a co-founder fallout from a ‘justifiable’ betrayal.
What surprised me was how often the solution that saved these founders seemed to come from somewhere unexpected, like a skill picked up years earlier or a conversation that seemed pointless at the time.
Is it experience, intelligence, connections, or just luck? How can one founder solve the scaling puzzle when another had to close down and call it a day?
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Outksill
AI is changing every job, and the people using it well are finishing work 5x faster. Join Outskill’s free 3-Hour AI Workshop, live this Saturday at 10 AM EST. Master prompting, build AI agents and voice workflows, and use 15+ top AI tools, plus get $5000+ in bonus resources. Worth $395, free for the next 48 hours.
🤝 We partner with a select group of brands we use or admire, which keeps this newsletter free and independent. Reach out for your campaign here.
The rats that learned for nothing
In 1930, Edward Tolman and Charles Honzik at the University of California, Berkeley put three groups of rats through the same complex maze once a day. The researchers left food at the end of the maze for the first group every day, and never gave the second group any food at all. The third group was treated like the second for ten days, then from day 11 onwards found food at the end, just like the first group.
As expected, the rewarded rats learnt to find the way out quickly, while the two unrewarded groups wandered into dead ends and made slow progress. The third group changed as soon as food appeared. On day 12, they made far fewer wrong turns than before, and within a few days they found the way out as quickly as the rats fed from the start.
Most rats couldn't learn the way out of a complex maze in a single trial, so Tolman argued that the third group was building what he called a cognitive map, a mental picture of the maze's layout they formed simply by exploring it. Because this learning stayed invisible until the rats had a reason to use it, he called it latent learning, meaning learning that happens without any reward and stays hidden in behaviour until it is needed.
A map for when the route is blocked
Tolman then tested what rats would do with that map when their usual route disappeared. In a 1946 experiment with Benbow Ritchie and Donald Kalish, rats first learned a single winding path to food. The researchers then blocked that path and offered a choice of many new ones fanning out in different directions. The most common choice was a path pointing roughly towards where the food had been, a route the rats had never taken before. Later attempts to repeat the result have been mixed, so it is best read as an early hint.
In a paper on cognitive maps published in 1948, Tolman suggested that people build these maps too. He argued that a broad map, built through exploring, lets us find a new way when the familiar one closes, while a narrow map that contains only one route leaves us stuck.
Turning a crisis into a new route
A crisis in a business often looks like that blocked path. Our biggest client didn’t renew the contract, or the platform that brought in most of our customers changed its rules overnight. When the route we relied on is gone, we’re left with no choice but to explore the surrounding maze we know.
This is where latent learning becomes useful.
The conversation with a customer outside our niche, the side project we tested and dropped, and the afternoon spent learning how another part of the business works may all have looked like wasted effort at the time. Like the third group of rats, we were building a map with no reward in sight, and a crisis is often the first time we have a reason to use it.
The trouble is that we rarely explore on purpose. When the business is going well, we walk the same route every day, so our map stays narrow.
Shadowboxing for founders
Shadowboxing is a way to explore the maze before anything is blocked. Boxers use it to train alone against an imaginary opponent, and founders can use it to rehearse a crisis that hasn't happened yet.
The simplest version is to pick one route the business depends on, such as our largest client or our main sales channel, assume it will be closing tomorrow, and talk through out loud what we would do in the first week with our team.
The first attempt is usually vague. By the third or fourth, we start finding options we hadn't considered and start to look at the parts of the map we normally ignore.
The second version is to explore a little without expecting a reward. That could mean spending an hour a week with a part of the business we don't usually touch, or asking a customer outside our usual market how they solve the problem we solve. It won't pay off this week, and Tolman's rats suggest it doesn't need to.
Key takeaways
List the three routes the business depends on most, such as a client, a sales channel, a supplier, or a team member.
Pick one and talk out loud about what we would do in the first week if it’s no longer a route tomorrow.
Each week, spend an hour exploring a part of the business or market we don't usually touch.
How's the depth of today's edition?
Tolman's third group spent ten days in a maze with nothing waiting at the end, and on day 12 they barely took a wrong turn.
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Lavena
P.S. If you want to get a founder feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.
If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.
✨ Insane Media is more than one voice
Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and Human resources.
