The Self Lobotomy

One pattern I’ve noticed in myself—and in others who take on higher-risk entrepreneurial undertakings—is a peculiar ability to turn off parts of the brain when needed.

It’s not denial. It’s not laziness. It’s something more like a self-inflicted lobotomy. Faced with a problem that could otherwise spin us into obsession, frustration, or burnout, we learn to switch it off. To let it fade into the background rather than dominate every waking thought.

At first glance, this might seem maladaptive. After all, aren’t entrepreneurs supposed to be relentless? But this capacity to selectively forget is a kind of sanity maintenance tool. It gives breathing room. It creates space for recovery. And paradoxically, it’s often what makes it possible to keep going in the face of persistent challenge and a status quo that feels intolerably slow to change.

I sometimes wonder if this “switching off” is simply adjacent to burnout—a cousin to exhaustion, born from frustration and the limits of endurance. Or perhaps it’s something more intentional, a hard-earned skill in learning when not to care, at least for a while.

In the long game of building things, that ability matters. Because the alternative is to carry every unsolved problem at once, a crushing mental weight. And that rarely leads anywhere good.