Tuesday afternoon, cliff walk near our house. Julia and I, the kids somewhere 50 meters ahead with our dog Ely chasing birds she'll never catch. One of those rare 20 minutes where nobody needs anything from you and you can actually finish a thought.

I couldn't.

I've been stuck on a project at erlich for about two weeks now. One of those situations where you know the direction but can't figure out the next step. It’s something new, so there’s no playbook for it. No strategy deck that magically tells you what to do on a random Tuesday in April.

Julia asked me what was on my mind. I told her and then she asked something that caught me off guard:

Honest answer? Sometimes. Yeah.

For the first phase of my career, in my 14 years at adidas, the path was pretty clear. Hit your targets, get promoted, repeat. Someone always had a plan for you. A development roadmap, a next role, a three-year trajectory that looked great on paper. You didn't have to figure out what mattered most. Someone figured it out for you.

That sounds comfortable and it was. But there's a cost to that comfort I’m realizing more and more, especially this year, with all of the major disruptions happening in all areas.

When someone else sets the direction, you get certainty. You also get a ceiling. Your ambition, your ideas, your sense of what's possible, all of it filtered through someone else's risk tolerance. Their priorities and also their timeline. You're building, sure. But you're building inside someone else's container.

The moment we decided to do the MBO, to buy erlich textil back and go for it, that container disappeared. And with it, the certainty.

What I got in return: the weight of every decision being mine. Ours. Which sounds empowering when you write it in a LinkedIn post. In real life, on a tuesday afternoon when you're stuck and the atlantic doesn't care about your monthly targets, it just feels heavy.

I read something recently from Dan Koe that stuck with me. The idea that the single most important thing you can do right now is to stop operating from the old playbook.

I agree with all of that. And I also know that whoever wrote it probably left out the part where you're standing on a beautiful, windy cliff in Portugal with your wife and your brain won't stop looping on a problem that has no clean answer.

The old way had clean answers. Follow the marketing calendar, worldcup every 4 years, brand campaign every year, new running innovation every season. So you do the job, empower the team, climb the ladder. Number goes up, number goes down. Most steps laid out.

The price of leaving that path is uncertainty. Daily, grinding, the "I have no idea if this is the right call" uncertainty. The kind that follows you on cliff walks and into conversations with your wife about your dreams as a family.

Julia didn't have a solution for my project, obviously. She's not in the weeds of DTC marketing (thank god, one of us is enough). But she said something that stuck: "You're frustrated because it matters to you. That's a good sign."

She's right. I care because it's mine. My game. My name, my family's future attached to it.

It's the only way I want to do this.

I don't have a neat ending for you today. The kids eventually came running back because one of them scraped his knee (nothing serious). We walked home. I made dinner. The project is still there, waiting, grinning at me.

But I'm choosing it. Every day, I'm choosing the uncertainty over the certainty. And most days, that feels right.

Philipp