21. The Behavioral Grovel Begins
Twenty One
The Behavioral Grovel Begins
Sebastian’s POV
Daniel didn’t say anything when I called him into my office on a Monday morning and told him I wanted to make him president, effective the start of the next quarter. He just sat very still for a moment, the way people do when they’re waiting to find out if they heard you correctly.
“President,” he repeated.
“Full operational authority. Day-to-day decisions, hiring, the portfolio company relationships — all of it. I’ll stay involved in strategy and the board, but I want my calendar back, Daniel.
I want to actually have a life outside this building, and I can’t do that if I’m still the person every decision routes through. ”
“You built this company deciding everything yourself. That’s not a criticism. It’s just true.”
“I know.” I turned my chair toward the window, the city spread out below in its usual indifferent sprawl. “It’s also part of the problem. I got so good at deciding everything that I started doing it at home too. I don’t want to be that person anymore. Not here, not with Claire, not with anyone.”
Daniel was quiet for a long moment. “This is going to be hard for you. Harder than you think. You’re going to see me make a call you wouldn’t have made, and you’re going to want to override it.”
“Probably.”
“And?”
“And I’m going to have to sit with that instead of doing it.” Dr. Okafor had told me that naming the difficulty in advance made it slightly more possible to survive when it arrived, so I said it out loud, plainly. “I’m not going to pretend that’s easy. I’m telling you now so you can hold me to it.”
He studied me for a moment, something shifting in his expression — not quite disbelief, but close, the look of a man who’d known me fifteen years and had never once heard me hand away control voluntarily.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll take it. But Sebastian — I need you to actually mean this. Not for three months, until the next crisis makes it inconvenient.”
“I mean it.”
Meaning something and living inside it turned out to be two very different exercises.
The first real test came two weeks later, when Daniel restructured a term sheet on a mid-size acquisition in a way I wouldn’t have chosen — more conservative than I’d have been, protecting the fund’s downside at the cost of a slightly worse multiple.
I read the summary email at eleven at night, felt my hand actually moving toward the phone to call him and walk him through what I would have done differently, and stopped.
I paced my kitchen for twenty minutes, drafted three separate emails I didn’t send, and finally, instead of calling Daniel, called Dr. Okafor’s after-hours line, which she’d told me, half-joking, I was welcome to use if I ever actually needed it rather than just needing to feel busy.
“I want to override a decision,” I told her, the words coming out clipped. “It’s not even a bad decision. It’s just not the one I’d have made.”
“Is the deal going to fail because of it?”
“No. It’s just — smaller than it could have been.”
“So the actual cost of leaving it alone is that Cole Capital makes slightly less money on one deal. And the actual cost of overriding it is that Daniel learns, again, that the authority you gave him wasn’t real.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment.
“You already know the answer, Sebastian,” she said, not unkindly.
“You called me instead of him. That’s the whole exercise, right there.
You’re learning how to sit with a decision you disagree with instead of immediately correcting it.
This is what Claire’s been asking of you the entire time, in miniature.
Can you tolerate someone else’s judgment being different from yours without needing to fix it? ”
I left the term sheet alone. I didn’t sleep well that night. It felt, absurdly, like losing something, even though nothing had actually been taken from me — only handed away, on purpose, by my own hand.
Two days later, Daniel stopped by my office, unprompted.
“You saw the Meridian terms,” he said. “I know you did. You usually would have called by ten a.m.”
“I saw them.”
“And?”
“And I thought you made a reasonable, defensible choice that wasn’t the one I’d have made. And I decided that was allowed to be true without me doing anything about it.”
Daniel looked at me for a long moment, something almost like respect moving across his face. “That’s new.”
“I’m aware.”
“I like it,” he said. “Keep going.”
I didn’t tell Claire about any of this directly.
It felt like it would defeat the purpose if I turned my own restraint into something I performed for her benefit, another gesture dressed up as evidence.
But I wrote it down, in the journal Dr. Okafor had suggested, the habit I’d initially resisted and had come to depend on.
Didn’t call Daniel about Meridian. Wanted to. Didn’t. It felt like failing, and I don’t think it was.
I read that sentence back more than once in the weeks that followed, on nights when the impulse to fix something felt stronger than my ability to resist it. It became the whole architecture of what I was trying to learn.
Not the absence of wanting to control things.
Just the growing, difficult ability to want it, and not do it anyway.