Hardi Põder
Your revenue is a mirror. That’s why you can’t stop checking it.
New here? One line of context: this series is about what it actually costs a leader to be the person everyone can count on. Part 1 was about how the mask gets built. This one is about who pays the rent on it. You don’t need Part 1 to use this.
I sat in a café in Tallinn a while back and watched two successful men compete over who was destroying himself faster for his company.
One was chasing a €100M exit. The other was dreaming about escape and had already decided it would never happen.
Grey skin. Swollen eyes. Knees shaking from too much coffee.
They weren’t bragging about money. They were bragging about damage. Each one waiting for the other to be impressed.
Neither of them was afraid of dying.
↳ They were already dead and they were showing each other the receipts.
I recognized it instantly, which is the only reason I’m allowed to write about it.
The ledger nobody put on your balance sheet
Somewhere in your business you have a number you check more often than is reasonable.
Revenue. MRR. Followers. The Slack or Pipedrive channel where deals close. The share price. The inbox.
You’ve told yourself it’s diligence.
Try something. Next time you reach for it, catch yourself half a second before your thumb lands and ask what you’re actually going to feel if the number is good.
Relief.
Not satisfaction. Not pride. Relief.
That’s the tell. Relief is what you feel when a threat passes and a good number should not be a threat passing. Unless the number isn’t measuring your business at all.
↳ It’s measuring whether you’re allowed to exist this week.
This is the Approval P&L. Every leader I’ve ever worked with is running one and none of them have ever seen it written down.
Revenue: every reflection that comes back confirming you’re valuable. The nod from the investor. The employee who says you changed their life. The comment section. The term sheet.
Costs: everything you spend to keep those reflections coming. Hours. Honesty. Your Saturday. The opinion you didn’t voice in the board meeting because it would have cost you the room.
The problem with this business: it has no retained earnings.
You cannot bank approval. Yesterday’s confirmation doesn’t cover today. Whatever you built last quarter, the ledger resets at 3 AM and the question is on the table again, exactly as loud as it was before.
That is not a mindset issue. It’s the structure of the thing. You are running a company whose only product is proof that you’re real, sold exclusively to an audience that never remembers the last delivery.
Your body has been keeping this ledger too
If you think this is soft-skills territory, I have some numbers for you.
In 2004, Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny went through 208 laboratory studies of acute stress, looking for what actually drives a cortisol response. Not what makes people say they feel stressed - what measurably floods the system.
The answer was very specific.
Difficulty didn’t do it. Effort didn’t do it. Time pressure alone didn’t do it.
What reliably lit up the stress axis was a task that was uncontrollable and socially evaluative - where your performance could be judged badly by other people. Those conditions produced a large effect (d = .93). Stressors without them produced almost nothing at all.
Read that again.
↳ Your physiology does not respond to hard. It responds to being watched while it might go badly.
Which is a fairly precise clinical description of the job you applied for.
Then there’s what the performing itself does. Two decades of research on emotional labor separates surface acting - displaying an emotion you don’t feel - from actually processing the emotion. The meta-analyses are consistent and unkind: surface acting tracks with emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and worse health. Deep processing doesn’t carry the same cost.
The exhaustion isn’t coming from the work.
It’s coming from the gap between your face and your insides, maintained for nine hours a day, for years.
And the part I wish more men knew
In 2007, researchers on the Framingham Offspring Study published ten-year follow-up data on 3,682 people.
One finding has never left me and still fascinates me. Women who self-silenced during conflict with their spouse - who swallowed it, kept the peace, stayed pleasant - had four times the risk of dying during the follow-up period compared with women who didn’t.
Four times. For being agreeable at the wrong moments, for a decade.
That study was about women in marriages. I’m not going to pretend it was about founders in boardrooms.
But I’ve sat with enough leaders now to tell you what I believe, plainly: the mechanism doesn’t care about your job title. Something happens in a body that holds the truth in, month after month, in the one relationship it can’t leave.
For a lot of the men I work with, that relationship is their company.
The mirrors always go dark eventually
The exit closes. The round doesn’t. The kids leave. The board replaces you. The product that defined you gets commoditized in a quarter.
And you discover something that will genuinely frighten you:
↳ Without the reflection, you’re not sure you’re there.
I watch this happen in real time in our program. A leader gets a week with no calendar, no team, no deals, no phone, no one to be impressive for. And on about day three, something shows up that has been standing outside the door for twenty years, quietly waiting for the noise to stop.
Some of them cry for “six hours.”
They usually apologize for it afterwards, which tells you everything about how deep the training goes.
What actually breaks the loop
Not confidence. Confidence is the same currency in a nicer wallet - it still requires the market to agree with you.
Two things move the needle and neither is glamorous.
First: find one room where the ledger doesn’t apply. One relationship where you are not useful, impressive or in charge. For most leaders this room does not exist.
The number everyone reaches for here is that half of CEOs report loneliness and 61% say it hurts their performance. I have quoted it myself. It is from 2012 - fourteen years old and still the most-cited statistic on leadership isolation there is.
↳ That is the actual state of the evidence on the most common condition in senior leadership.
You cannot think your way out of this. You have to be physically somewhere, with people who have no stake in the version of you that performs.
Second: separate the number from the verdict. When you check the metric, say out loud what it actually measures. “This is monthly recurring revenue.” Not “this is whether I’m enough.”
It sounds absurdly simple. Do it for a month and tell me it’s simple.
Where this lands in the work I do
At INLIBRIUM, Monika Jakobson and I built a six-month program around this exact problem, because the standard interventions don’t touch it.
A retreat gives you a week off the ledger and drops you straight back onto it. A coaching package optimizes how you run the ledger. Psychedelic-assisted therapy - which we do, under full medical supervision, in structured residencies - can show a man the ledger with a clarity nothing else achieves.
And then he flies home to the same board, the same inbox, the same wife who’s been waiting years for him to show up and none of it has changed.
↳ That’s why we spend weeks on preparation and months on integration around every session. Insight is cheap. Reorganizing a life around it is not.
The compound is about 20% of it. The other 80% is what we do before and after.
Your move, leader
Open the app you check most.
Look at the number.
Now answer honestly:
If that number dropped 40% next quarter through nothing you did wrong — who would you be?
What would you have to feel that you have successfully avoided feeling for years?
And who in your life would still be there, at full volume, on the worst day of it?
If you have to think hard to answer, that is information.
If you can’t name a single person who’d still be there for the unimpressive version of you - that is the loudest information of all and it’s the most fixable problem in this entire series.
You built something real. I’m not taking that away from you.
I’m asking who you built it for.
P.S. — That fourteen-year-old number bothers me, so we are running the study to replace it. The Executive Loneliness Index asks founders, CEOs and board members the questions this episode ends on — including whether they have ever said any of it out loud, and to whom. Seven minutes. No name, no company, no email. The full anonymized dataset is published free in November, including whatever it says that we would rather it did not.
About the author -
Hardi Põder
For clients carrying the strain of sustained responsibility, Hardi Põder helps make INLIBRIUM a disciplined, coordinated six-month process rather than a collection of disconnected interventions. As CEO & Co-Founder, he brings an operator’s understanding of what performance can conceal and what it takes to build a structure capable of meeting a client over time.
Before founding INLIBRIUM with Monika Jakobson in 2021, Hardi spent roughly two decades building nine companies across agriculture, IT, retail, and biotech. His work included leading sales teams of more than 600 people across Scandinavia and the United States, as well as building an outdoor medicinal-mushroom plantation. That background informs a practical standard for the company: complex work should be organized clearly, individualized carefully, and carried through consistently.
Hardi’s search after burnout clarified a gap he had seen in the field. A powerful psychedelic experience can create insight, but insight alone may not alter the conditions and habits that shape daily life. He and Monika founded INLIBRIUM to build a more complete model around preparation, clinical screening, psychological care, health review, and sustained integration.
The model Hardi helped establish links three private residencies with months of planned work. Psychological, health, and leadership specialists remain connected around the same client. As CEO, he leads the company responsible for that model; clinical decisions and care rest with appropriately qualified practitioners.
He is clear about the limit of any single element. The substance may be a catalyst, but preparation, judgment, and disciplined follow-through determine whether insight can be carried into a life.
