I watched A Big Bold Beautiful Journey recently. Two strangers. Magical doors. Each one opening to a moment from their past that shaped who they became. Some doors they walked through eagerly. Others they hesitated at, afraid of what they’d find on the other side.
The film made me think about something we rarely acknowledge: every day, doors close behind us and new ones open ahead.
The door that closes when you sell your business. The door that opens when you finally delegate what you’ve been clinging to. The door that shuts when a key employee leaves. The door that appears when you admit you need help scaling.
We notice the closed doors. We grieve them. We stand there looking backward, wishing we could return to what was comfortable and known.
But we rarely pause to appreciate the door standing right in front of us, waiting.
2026 will present you with doors. Some will be obvious – an acquisition offer, a pivot opportunity, a chance to finally implement that system you’ve been avoiding. Others will be subtle—a conversation with a founder three steps ahead of you, a book that challenges everything you thought was true, a moment of clarity after months of grinding.
The question isn’t whether the doors will appear. They always do.
The question is whether you’ll walk through them.
Most leaders I work with are brilliant at analyzing what’s behind them – when they choose to. They can tell you exactly why the last quarter didn’t meet projections. They can explain in detail what went wrong with that hire. They’re experts at the autopsy.
Far fewer are willing to stand at the threshold of something uncertain and step through.
Here’s what I’ve learned working with mid-market founders: the doors worth walking through rarely feel comfortable. They require you to be someone you haven’t been yet. They demand you trust what you don’t fully understand. They ask you to believe in a version of your company that doesn’t exist today.
The film’s characters had magical GPS guiding them to their doors. You won’t. But you’ll know them when you see them, because they’ll make you feel something—excitement mixed with fear, possibility tangled with doubt.
2026 is coming. With it, doors you cannot yet imagine.
The real courage isn’t in finding them. It’s in walking through when everything inside you wants to stay where you are.
What door is standing before you right now that you keep walking past?
