Normal Brain vs. Entrepreneur Brain

How to stop your normal brain from sabotaging your startup

Author

Brian Scordato
August 15, 2025

Idea to Startup: Normal Brain vs. Entrepreneur Brain

A 10-day program that’ll help you actually, finally, run proper customer interviews (whether you like it or not). This is a momentum machine - it’ll kickstart your business and make it all start to feel real.

This Episode

Today, we'll help you learn the difference between Normal Brain and Entrepreneur Brain.

When you hit roadblocks with your startup, Normal Brain will push you towards safe, predictable moves. This is a disaster. We talk through four specific situations where you'll be tempted to use Normal Brain and teach you how to use Entrepreneur Brain instead.

Here are the situations:

  • Overwhelming To-Do Lists

    • Normal Brain: Chip away at the safest, easiest tasks to feel productive.

    • Entrepreneur Brain: Identify the one bold move that, if it works, makes the whole list irrelevant—and go all in.

  • Failed Experiments

    • Normal Brain: Retreat to safe, predictable work you’re 99% sure will work.

    • Entrepreneur Brain: Try another high-upside, low-likelihood idea that can separate you from the pack.

  • Feeling Unprepared

    • Normal Brain: Wait until you’ve done more research or feel “ready.”

    • Entrepreneur Brain: Put yourself on the hook for something now, and figure it out in real time.

  • Low on Resources

    • Normal Brain: Hoard and stretch resources to survive a bit longer.

    • Entrepreneur Brain: Use remaining resources for a big swing that could dramatically change your position.

Loved this episode. Hope you enjoy it!

Pod References

Transcript - feel free to read like a long-form article

Today, I’m supposed to be on vacation.

The goal was to send out an old pod, or to record one of the whisper ideas posts I write each Sunday, but instead there was an idea I couldn’t stop thinking about. The second of the Brian’s Three Things episodes we started last week.

Usually when I’m this excited about a podcast idea it’s both helpful to listeners and pretty easy to write, so hopefully we’ll get this up and out fast so I can get into the ocean with the little guy. It’s the first year he’ll be able to splash in the water on his own and really hear the sea gulls and see the pelicans dive and get the magic of it all. I think I’m most excited to teach him that game where you bury your feet in the sand and try to keep them in the same spot as the waves go by. I’ve always thought of myself as one of the top 5 or 10 in the world at that game, so there’s really no one better to teach him.

Anyway, before I go play the feet in the sand game, which really should have an official name because I’m pretty sure everyone on earth has played it, I want to talk about risk. Really, our reaction to risk. And how you’ll have normal brain and entrepreneur brain and you need to calibrate each. The way you react to risk with your startup needs to be significantly different from how you react to risk in any other walk of life. It’s about as important a topic as we can cover.

And to do it, I need to start by talking about a guy who couldn’t get anyone to buy his house for one million dollars, so he sold it for 2.

I’ve probably had 10 people email me this story over the past week - both listeners I don’t know and friends I do. Here it is.

A guy named Dustin Law was apparently struggling to sell his house for a million dollars over in England, but didn’t want to lower the price because he felt that’s what it was worth.

As a side note, I guess this happened in 2017. I have no idea why it got popular now. Probably one of those linkedin posts from someone with the last name pompliano. And I did google to see if it actually happened and the google AI thing said it did. It also said blueberry has three b’s. So take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Back to the story.

A frustrated Dustin apparently tried everything to sell the home before having an idea. He’d create a lottery. He’d sell $1 lotto tickets, with the winner getting his house.

He got a bunch of press and ended up selling 2 million dollars worth of lotto tickets. So, he ended up getting 2 million for his house, and the winner got a house for a buck.

This pod isn’t about this strategy - you almost certainly shouldn’t try to auction off your house and I have no idea if it’s even legal or not. The pod is about our friend Dustin’s reaction to his house not selling.

My old college basketball coach used to constantly stress to us that nothing mattered more than our reactions. Missing a shot, missing a defensive assignment, committing a dumb foul or a turnover - those are all things that happen when you play basketball. What actually matters is how you react to those things happening. Sure, we’d try to not commit turnovers, but our reaction to inevtiable turnovers was what won or lost games. If you reacted to a turnover by immediately trying to make up for it, you’d probably compound it. One mistake is ok - compounded mistakes are what beat you.

For entrepreneurs, this is even trickier. The rules are still the same - what matters are your reactions to certain scenarios - but the right reactions in basketball are obvious - stick to fundamentals - whereas the right reactions in entrepreneurship are very much not. They’re totally counterintuitive. And when you introduce the emotion of a thing not going the way you’d planned, everything gets stickier.

Make a turnover in basketball? Great, next time down focus hard on running the play properly.

Run a customer acquisition test and get zero sign ups? What… do you do next?

To make it all that much harder, you’ll have way more chances to react poorly with your startup. Because basically nothing is going to go as planned. Your whole day will be reacting to things that surprise you, usually on the negative side.

The interesting part about Dustin’s lottery ticket approach to me is that he reacted to a blocker like an entrepreneur, not like a normal person. Which we’ll get to.

There’s a guy named Ali Abdaal, who’s stuff I love 60% of the time and have trouble stomaching the rest of the time, which is actually a pretty good ratio -making me feel stuff either way is a good thing - wrote a post the other day I absolutely loved. It was on the student mindset vs the entrepreneur mindset - I’ll pop it in the show notes. That combined with a new video from our old friend Graham Weaver, which I’ll also pop in the show notes and is an absolute, stop everything and watch spurred me to think about our founders reactions to risk and blockers and led to todays pod.

Your startup is only as good as your reactions to blockers. Most people are programmed to do this wrong and blockers come up constantly. So, we’ve gotta at least help you know what right looks like.

Let’s get to it so I can go back to teaching my son that game in the ocean Sticky Feet. That’s not good a name for it. Maybe Tide and Seek? It doesn’t make any sense but at least it’s kind of a pun? Feet Home Alabama? We’re going the wrong direction.

Let’s just get to how you should react to blockers as an entreprenuer.

After… a little smooth jazz.

  1. The To Do List Monster

The way we’ll structure the rest of the pod is to talk about a blocker you’ll encounter, how your normal brain will push you to solve it, and how you should flip on entrepreneur brain to solve it in a way that doesn’t compound that blocker.

This is a useful exercise, as nearly everyone else will navigate blockers with normal brain and normal brain is not good at entrepreneurship stuff.

There are four situations we’ll go through. The pod consultants loved that there were four situations. Lists sell, I’m told. As does, apparently, repeating that there will be a list and always noting where you are are on said list. So, of the four items on the list, this is the first, on that list of four. Three more still coming your way. List.

The first situation we’ll cover is what to do when you’ve got an overwhelmingly long to do list. Something that happens almost immediately when you’re trying to build something out of nothing.

A to do list is a finicky mistress.

They’re sometimes useful, often overwhelming and usually way better in theory than practice. Like having a relationship in college.

To do lists for entrepreneurs bloat. You’ll have ideas throughout the day and toss them on your to do list until you end up with this massive unwieldy, disjointed mish mash of things you might want to do.

Then, when you sit down to work on your startup, you’ll get overwhelmed by the sheer number of items on it.

When our normal brain gets overwhelmed by tasks, it’s reaction is to bare down and start chipping away. Since it’s already overwhelmed, it’ll pick the safest task to work on first. Our normal brain likes balance.

This type of approach isn’t bad for your job at Deloitte, but it’s a disaster for a startup.

Luckily, the To Do List Monster is here to help. When you feel overwhelmed by a long to do list, this is the idea to cue.

At it’s best, a to do list is a clear set of steps that’ll help you reach a super ambitious goal. But, the obvious problem with a to do list for any ambitious goal is that ambitious goals don’t have an easy to follow playbook. Only non-ambitious goals do. So, your list of to dos is probably moving you towards something more guaranteed and less ambitious - or, less likely to separate you.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say you’re trying to build a digital course that’ll teach beginners how to develop a photography habit.

Maybe your to do list has things like:

  • Reach out to an SEO person on Fiverr

  • Make a website on squarespace that’ll let people pre-sign up for the course

  • Film the first module and post it to social media and the website to get sign ups

  • Start a blog where you talk about photography for beginners

  • Reach out to photography podcasts to see if you could come on as a guest

  • Make an email welcome sequence for people who sign up on the site

This is a reasonable list for someone working on an idea. But… what’s the real, burning question your to do list is trying to answer?

The best way to find out is to ask the To Do List Monster question, which is:

What could you do that, if it worked, would make this entire list irrelevant?

When I look at the list, it seems like a bunch of tasks oriented towards seeing if this is actually an idea people would pay for. But, I’d describe the approach as systematically unambitious. Fine in normal life, not fine in startup life.

So, what could we do that would make it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that people want this thing? What’s ambitious? What could put us on the hook?

Off the top of my head, we could find a photography influencer who has the attention of a bunch of beginners and place an ad in their video or newsletter for a one week photography habit challenge. Or, we could partner with a camera store to run a pilot program with anyone who buys a new camera. Or, we could focus on new parents learning the skill and go partner with local toddler classes.

Once you pick the To Do List Monster, the thing that, if it works, makes all the other tasks look small and irrelevant, you start figuring out how to execute on it. And that becomes your new to do list.

So, for the photography influencer idea, you’re finding the top influencers, reaching out to them, figuring out a way to position your product, and on and on.

Your to do list should be a bunch of things that are helping with your unique, creative, differentiated approach. That’s what an entrepreneurs to do list is for. A set of tasks that’ll hopefully help you make this unlikely thing happen.

And when it doesn’t work, when we hit a fatal flaw with the photography influencer idea or we don’t get the response we’d hoped, we set up the next To Do List Monster attempt.

Which brings us to situation number two. When things don’t work.

—

Situation #2: When Things Don’t Work

Your Normal Brain has a very clear playbook for when things don’t work the way you’d planned: you stop doing that thing and revert to safe ground.

As I said before, normal brain likes balance and the well-worn path.

So, when you try a To Do List Monster approach and it fails, you immediately go back to a safe to-do list. Whatever you’re 99% sure will actually work.

This is great advice in nearly every facet of life - this is exactly what my coach was trying to get us to do after a turnover. The problem is, our normal brain doesn’t understand what works in the startup world.

If you think an approach is safe and likely to work, then everyone else working on a similar idea to you will think the same thing. They’ll all listen to their normal brain, and so they’ll follow that path. And you’ll end up elbow to elbow with a bunch of people doing the predictable thing and you’ll have to, somehow, be better at those normal tasks than everyone else to win. It won’t happen. The normal path is the riskiest thing you can pursue as an entrepreneur.

When you try something and it doesn’t work, you need to try another thing that has a low likelihood of working but a ton of upside if it does.

This, again, probably sounds like bad advice. Because what if that thing doesn’t work, too? Then what?

Well, you try another To Do List Monster approach. You lean into what you know about your customer that other people don’t and try to be creative and ambitious.

The way to rationalize this approach to yourself is to skip to the other side of the journey. Go listen to episodes of that scoundrel guy raz or any other podcast that has guests on talking about their successful companies. Every one of them will have a story where a to do list monster-y type of approach helped them jump from the pool of everyone working on something the same way to a more sparsely populated path.

Your To Do List is a physical representation of your goals and your ambition. If you look at the thing and it isn’t inspiring and a little scary, you’re doing the startup thing wrong. You should be doing stuff that you aren’t totally prepared for.

Which brings us very nicely to..

Situation #3: When You Feel Unprepared

Ali mentioned this in his post and it resonated.

Your normal brain will want to wait until it feels fully prepared before it moves forward. But entrepreneur brain needs to move forward before it’s ready.

This is one of the more important and nuanced shifts.

There is nothing more infuriating to me than when people blatantly lie about progress or customers or partners or previous funding under the all protecting umbrella of “fake it til you make it” or “move fast and break things” or whatever slogan you’d like to choose from one of the companies that had to lie cheat and steal to get the market position they have. Those companies, with Meta as the obvious example, have that mindset injected in their DNA and end up building morally reprehensible products.

But there’s a huge delta between waiting until you’re fully, unabashedly prepared to move forward and actually thinking Instagram for Teens is a thing that’s good for society.

Sorry, didn’t mean to do any soapboxing today. I’ve hopped down off it.

When you feel unprepared for something, your normal brain will tell you to prepare for it. Again, not horrible advice, but preparing in the normal world and preparing in the startup world are very different things. And if you prepare in the startup world the way you do in the real world you’ll be in trouble.

Preparing in the normal world means reading up and researching.

Preparing in the startup world means getting in the mix. Ethnographic research. Watching people solve the problem you’d like to help them solve, speaking with them while they do it, trying to help them solve it.

You can’t “prepare” yourself for starting a business any other way, because, again, the thing you’re starting is novel. That’s why you’re doing it. There won’t be a playbook to prepare from. You need to go out and invent it.

If you feel unprepared to build a tool that helps physical therapists learn new treatment protocols for ACL, MCL, and PCL surgery, the only way to get more prepared is to do a slimmed down version of that thing. To run a one day workshop where you bring in an expert and get physical therapists to show up and gather some patients. Or, something else that helps you see the feedback loop.

Counterintuitively, the way to start preparing in the startup world is to put yourself on the hook for something you feel entirely unprepared for and do it.

Then, your to do list becomes the steps you need to take to make that thing you’re on the hook for work. We end up at our ambitious, unique to do list.

Some of these approaches might sound resource or time heavy. Things you might not have a lot of. Which leads us very nicely into situation number four: where you’re resource scarce.

Situation 4: When You’re Low On Resources

Way back in the early 2010s when I was building Find Your Lobster I ran into a pretty serious resource problem.

Namely, that I was running out of the money we’d raised and we weren’t making any money to replace it.

As our bank account went below 40k, I tried to map out how many months we had left - trying to stretch the money as thin as possible to try to eek out time. So, I hired the least expensive developers I could find to fix an app that had needed serious fixing before it could generate revenue. I whittled down the team to just me. I started looking for consulting gigs that could maybe give us another month. And, eventually, we fizzled out.

That’s how your normal brain deals with resource scarcity. It hoards. It stretches. It tries to survive.

But, most of the time in the startup world, that’s a terrible use of resources. Because it’s very unlikely that just staying on the exact course you’ve been on for an extra 4 months is going to suddenly make your strategy successful. Fizzling is no good.

When your resources get low, think about how you can use them in a way that dramatically amplifies your impact. Try to figure out ways to change your position. Often, that means a big, calculated swing that leverages the resources quickly. And that swing will work or it won’t. But, it’s more likely to work than just bleeding everything away for an extra few months. Fizzling never works.

I spoke with Daina Trout, the founder of Health Aid Kombucha forever ago when we used to have guests on the show. She told me about a story where she was down to like 20k and had a whole bunch of inventory. Instead of hoarding the 20k and cutting costs and trying to scrape by for as long as possible, she put a bunch of ads up for a 20 thousand dollar sales competition. She offered huge commissions for selling her kombucha to retailers and grocery stores with $20k going to the person who sold the most in a month. An enormous amount of Kombucha was sold, she happily paid a ton in commissions, and the person who sold the most got a $20k bonus. This was an inflection point in the business.

When resources are short, particularly at the beginning, hoarding those resources will not help. Figure out a To Do List Monster and execute on it. Take a swing.

The End - lotto tickets

The metaphor of our friend Dustin’s lottery tickets is a good one. It might seem like these strategies are risky - like you’re just setting yourself up for a low likelihood of return.

But you’re not.

The riskiest thing you can do with your startup is to approach it using Normal Brain. You’ll end up with a predictable, safe business that doesn’t find or create any real value.

All of this is easier to say than to do, and, of course, there are a lot of times where you’ve just got to sit and crank out cold emails or make a website or whatever. But, knowing about entrepreneur brain and normal brain, realizing that your instincts are inadvertently trying to sabotage your business - it’s helpful. Maybe toss a post it on your computer with normal brain and entrepreneur brain. Realize when you should leveraging one vs the other.

And now, I’m going to go play sticky feet. Ocean feet? Hold On by Wilson Phillps? Release Me, also by Wilson Phillips? Seems like there are a bunch of Wilson Phillips songs that would be good names for this game. Interesting. Not really. The beach calls.

Have a great week.