I was airlifted off a mountain in Switzerland after a snowboarding accident. High-grade AC joint separation. The doctor told me twelve weeks recovery, minimum.
Every adventure plan I had — indoor skydiving training, climbing in California, paragliding in Portugal — cancelled overnight.
Four weeks later, I was back in the wind tunnel.
When I got grounded, I had a choice. Wait it out and mourn the lost plans, or treat the obstacle as the path itself. I chose the latter. Diet. Physio. Red light therapy. Hyperbaric oxygen. Sauna. I treated my recovery with the same focus I bring to anything I work on.
But those weeks on the ground weren't wasted either. With all the adventure plans stripped away, I had space I hadn't had in years. I went deep on R&D for REALFAST, my fabrication startup. I took on fractional CTO contracts with founders who needed hands-on technical leadership, not just advice. I did the kind of slow, strategic thinking that gets crowded out when you're moving at full speed.
The forced stop didn't derail my year. It restructured it.
I see this pattern constantly in the startups I work with. A key engineer leaves. A product launch doesn't land. A funding round falls apart. The teams that fold under these moments are the ones that treat them as interruptions — something to endure until normal service resumes.
The teams that thrive are the ones that treat setbacks as new information. New facts mean a rebuilding of the strategy. New obstacles require a pivot. Not a reluctant one, but a deliberate one — with the same intensity and focus you'd bring to any problem worth solving.
The obstacle doesn't block the path. It reshapes it. And if you're paying attention, the new path is usually better than the one you lost.
I'm back in the tunnel now, and soon I'll be back in the sky. Faster, more deliberate, and with a clearer plan than I had before the mountain decided otherwise.
If you're a founder navigating a setback that's forced you to rethink your technical strategy, this is exactly the kind of situation I help with as a fractional CTO. Sometimes the best time to bring in outside technical leadership is when the old plan has stopped working.