Invisible Asymptotes Limit Your Potential
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." — Arthur Schopenhauer
Despite of all their training, chess masters sometimes miss simple wins. But when researchers place them in front of a board with a familiar pattern, something strange happens. Their performance drops by three standard deviations. Statistically, they become mediocre players.
“The eye movements of expert players show that the first idea that comes to mind directs attention toward sources of information consistent with it and away from inconsistent information.” — Bilalić et al., Why Good Thoughts Block Better Ones
When experts see a familiar solution, their eyes lock onto it. Eye-tracking data shows they literally stop seeing alternatives. The first idea that feels familiar directs their attention toward confirming information and away from contradictory information. They can’t unsee what they know. They are conditioned.
This is called the Einstellung effect. And it explains why it can actually be harder to succeed as a second-time founder.
The Expertise Trap
We all tend to default to what is familiar and avoid what is unfamiliar. A founder who scaled Company A through SEO can’t see that Company B needs community-led growth. Not because SEO is wrong — because their pattern-matching from past success has become rigid. What worked before feels like “how it’s done.” The mental model that enabled the first win becomes the cognitive cage for the second.
“Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” — Bruce Lee, Longstreet (1971)
Jeff Bezos understood the danger of limited and rigid beliefs. He tried many times to launch Amazon’s marketplace before landing on the right approach. Amazon Auctions failed. zShops failed. Some founders would have developed learned helplessness around third-party selling.
But Bezos compartmentalized. In his 2016 letter to shareholders, he wrote: “I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins.” He didn’t let domain failure generalize. When Marketplace (third-party sellers on the same product pages) worked immediately, he wasn’t surprised. He’d treated each failure as insight, not identity.
Success validates your mental models, which then calcify into asymptotes — invisible ceilings you can’t see past. The better you get at something, the blinder you become to alternatives. Expect to have to unlearn and relearn many times in your entrepreneurial career — any piece of knowledge or insight sooner or later becomes obsolete. Constant reinvention is crucial, and it starts with the willingness to begin again, and again — perpetual self-reinvention.
Invisible Mental Asymptotes And Self-Growth
Eugene Wei, the first analyst in Amazon’s strategic planning group, wrote in 2018 about “invisible asymptotes” in business — growth ceilings companies hit before they see them coming. Amazon’s was shipping fees. Customers hated paying $5.99 at checkout, no matter how good the selection. It capped purchase frequency and customer acquisition. Prime didn’t just solve this; it reframed the cost as a subscription.
Wei’s system’s thinking framework is brilliantly simple: identify the asymptote before you hit it by asking, “What would prevent 10x growth from here?”
Now the real insight: the way Eugene answered this question is brilliant. He didn’t only interview current (happy) customers. He found the ones that did not buy — those that had the intention but somehow got turned off.
Unless you actively seek this kind of interaction, it will be entirely invisible to you. Of course existing customers’ input can be valuable, but if you want to reach product-market fit, your time is best spent uncovering the silent killers of your product — those things that stand in the way of potential customers giving you their money. Go find what the data won’t tell you.
In other words, the steep and direct route to product-market fit is to talk to almost-customers and ask them what was missing for them to convert. Everyone knows they should talk to their users — but I rarely see anyone trying to learn from someone who didn’t buy. And with them lies all the invisible blockers you can’t see.
The asymptote also applies from the inner side of entrepreneurship.
How will you know what stands in the way of 10x-ing your own personal growth if you don’t honestly try to surface and debunk your own imposed beliefs?
Most of the ceilings you’re hitting aren’t real constraints. They’re mental models that served you in the past - and so you’re attached to them. They prevent you from seeing clearly what is needed. They are conditioned patterns — the opposite of thinking from first principles. Your job is to make the invisible blockers visible, so you can make a plan to address them.
Mental Asymptotes
1. Capability Asymptotes
“I’m not technical.” “I’m not a salesperson.” “I can’t do accounting.”
Carol Dweck’s later research acknowledges that people can hold different mindsets about different attributes — growth-oriented about product but fixed about fundraising. Some founders who master one domain (engineering) unconsciously install fixed mindsets in adjacent domains (sales, hiring) by treating them as innate talents rather than learnable skills. Under pressure, even growth-minded founders slip into fixed thinking. Stress amplifies domain-specific ceilings.
2. Reference Point Asymptotes
Kahneman and Tversky’s anchoring research shows initial reference points disproportionately shape what feels “realistic.”
The YC batch effect works because it shifts reference points. When your batchmates aim for unicorns, $20M exit offers stop feeling like “great” and start feeling like “small.” You’re not more capable — your ceiling was anchored.
Geographic asymptotes work the same way. A Montreal founder vs. a San Francisco founder observes different peer groups and adopts different ceilings. Ambition is contagious, but so are asymptotes. One might come to believe they can’t build anywhere outside of SF, while others come to believe they can totally build a great company from anywhere. A lot of this isn’t about the ecosystem per se, but the places you have been exposed to.
3. Borrowed Asymptotes
Most of your limits aren’t yours. You internalize social constructs as ground truth.
“Solo founders can’t scale.” “B2B SaaS needs an LTV/CAC of 5 and a 12-month payback.” “You need an elite pedigree to raise from top VCs.” “Consumer social is dead.”
These feel like thoughtful wisdom. They’re asymptotes disguised as data points. They might be correct — but recognize the risk of not challenging them first. I’d bet a lot of startups regret taking large amounts of funding at high valuations, not understanding this meant a death warrant if interest rates rose and multiples compressed.
Listen to any successful founder’s story and there is almost always a time where they seemed crazy to not listen to others - and that pushback led them to success directly. That’s why a lot of the entrepreneur’s role is to be an astute contrarian: to be willing and able to go against the convention - thanks a heavy dose of independent thinking and earned insights.
Many founders tend to raise with a mimetic mindset: X raised $ from Y, so why not us too? It takes a different type of founder to shy away from doing what they can and focus on what they should.
Albert Bandura’s research on vicarious experience shows seeing someone “like you” succeed expands your self-efficacy ceiling. But it works in reverse: seeing people accept limits installs those limits in you. You don’t consciously choose these beliefs — you internalize them from investors’ mental models, industry “best practices,” accelerator gospel, peer group consensus. None of this is great for original thinking.
Edwin Land wasn’t from the photography industry, so he didn’t know what was “impossible.” When Polaroid’s engineers said instant photography couldn’t work, Land treated it as an engineering puzzle, not a ceiling. His outsider status was an asset. As he once said: “From then on, I was totally stubborn about being blocked. Nothing or nobody could stop me from carrying through the execution of the experiment.” He refused to accept industry asymptotes he’d never learned. And he won.
Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, had the same advantage. No business school meant no MBA asymptotes about “how to scale consumer products.” So she just went for it.
4. Learned Helplessness Asymptotes
Martin Seligman’s research on learned helplessness shows repeated failure in one domain can create either domain-specific helplessness or generalized helplessness, depending on your explanatory style.
Pessimistic explanatory style: “I failed at fundraising” becomes “I’m bad at business” becomes “I’m not cut out for this.” The domain-specific failure contaminates adjacent domains. Permanent, personal, pervasive.
Optimistic explanatory style: “That pitch sucked” (specific, temporary, external). The failure stays contained. Try again with a different approach.
Even successful founders develop learned helplessness in small domains — hiring, media, partnerships — from repeated early failures. They come to hate that part of their jobs and so they more or less avoid dealing with it. The asymptote feels like reality: “I’m just not good at X.” But it’s always learned, not inherent. You impose that belief on yourself, it just isn’t reality.
Breaking Your Asymptotes
Find Peer Groups
Bandura’s vicarious experience mechanism: seeing someone “like you” succeed expands your ceiling.
Solo founders without peer groups develop artificially low ambition because they lack reference points. Join communities not just for resources but for reference point expansion. Watch how other entrepreneurs navigate constraints you thought were immovable. Read biographies or listen to the Founders podcast to build a diverse set of tools and models as inner resources, so you can more easily see when your views are conditioned — you’ll have a contrasting background to compare your own patterns against (e.g. what would X, Y, or Z do in my situation?).
For me the sweet spot is a peer group who is around your own stage / life situation, so they can related, and also people who are able to give you 1:1 direct, relevant feedback that helps you address what you don’t see.
Question the Patterns from Previous Success
After a big win, the dangerous move is assuming your approach is universal. Instead, take a detached stance and identify:
What worked because of that specific market, moment, or team?
What might work differently in a different context?
Where am I pattern-matching when I should be thinking fresh?
Reframe Domain Failures
When you fail at something specific (fundraising, hiring, media), don’t let it generalize.
Not: “I’m bad at this” (permanent, personal, global)
Instead: “That approach didn’t work” (temporary, external, specific)
Compartmentalize. A failed pitch doesn’t mean you can’t raise — it means that pitch didn’t land. A bad hire doesn’t mean you can’t hire — it means your process needs adjustment. Keep the failure contained to the domain so it doesn’t install a global ceiling.
Only by shedding light on your invisible asymptotes can you understand and address them. Don’t focus on what you can see — focus on what is left unseen, what is missing, what you don’t know that you don’t know. Like Wei did, you can learn from what is (your customers) but more importantly from what isn’t (non-customers) — and remain open to wherever that leads you.
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Have a nice weekend ✌🏼
Thought provoking article…I will sit with these ideas some time.