Do you know where your startup is heading?

The #1 killer of startups isn't what you think it is. It's not bad ideas. It's not lack of funding. It's not even bad execution. And as much as team & founder dynamics impact the success of a startup, it isn't that either.

The #1 killer of startups is aimlessness, and we don't talk about it enough.

It's obvious: if we don't know where we're going, we'll never get there. It's easy to end up dazed and confused and wandering in the dark.

As illustrated by Damien Newman's design squiggle, our path starts by walking toward a vision, but we quickly end up turning every which way in a mess of uncertainty. It's easy to get lost, to forget our "true north", and to feel stuck.

The key is to keep the present & future in tension.

Let's say you want to lose 100 pounds.

Without surgery you can't "just lose" 100 pounds. That's not a thing. But what if you added a time constraint? Can you lose 100 pounds in a year? With the future in mind, we can draw a path from here to there — let's lose 2 pounds per week. Is it doable? I don't know, but I know how to find out!

But the goal can't just be to lose 2 pounds this week. If that's the only goal, this week is no different than next week or last week. It only works if we keep this week in tension with this year.

Tension tells us exactly what to do — and what not to do.

Just because we set the goal doesn't mean we can lose 100 pounds this year. Our startup may fail — and the goal may even be the wrong goal. There isn't always a "there" there to get to.

But we can form an iterative loop between the now and the goal, and when we fail to lose 2 pounds, we can ask ourselves the most important question: what does this mean?

Experiment, adjust, and iterate until you find a "there" that's there — and get there.