I recently restarted going to the gym after a long break. I wasn't completely sedentary before. I do short runs, some push-ups, and small movements here and there. But structured, regular exercise had been out of my life for quite some time. So I have been trying to get back to the gym.
When I finally managed to restart after several false attempts, I knew I had to start slow. Build gradually and avoid hurting myself before finding my rhythm. Moreover, I remember the pain I experienced the first time I went to the gym many years ago when I unwittingly pushed myself too hard in the initial days. I was young, and the body weight regimen my trainer suggested didn’t feel like much to me. Naturally, I overdid it. Two days later, I couldn’t literally move because of pain. So I had a reference point when I restarted this time about what not to do, which should have made it easier for me to be measured. And I wanted to be measured. In fact, I had this conversation with myself on day one that I wouldn’t repeat my old mistake and overdo it this time. I want to slowly build my strength without injuring myself, which would put me out of exercise before I find my rhythm.
So I was careful.
Then two days in, I woke up on day three with DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) so severe I couldn't go back. My legs ached. My arms protested every movement. I had to sit the day out. The gym had punished me for trying too hard.
The strange part is that I didn't even feel like I'd overdone anything during those two days. I was deliberate. I kept the intensity modest, stopping before I felt tired. I mostly did body weight reps. Nothing in those sessions signaled that I was crossing my pain threshold. Day one went very well. I felt great afterward. The mixture of first-day excitement and the beautiful sensation you feel after meaningful physical exertion.
The second day went well as well. While I took a paracetamol after day one as a precaution for potential pain, I didn’t feel the need to do so after the second day. I felt good and not at all over-exerted.
Then the next morning, a quiet pain arrived and took over my body totally. It took me two days to recover, and ruined my rhythm.
After that, I spent some time thinking this through, trying to understand what actually went wrong. I came up with two lessons.
The first is that growth requires the right amount of force. Not too little. Not too much.
Too little and you just go through the motions. You stay exactly where you are. With too little force, it is hard to build momentum.
Similarly, too much, and your structure breaks down before it can adapt. Your body gives up. Your system falters.
As I was thinking through the experience lying down on the bed with extreme DOMS, I realized that understanding this distinction is the key.
You can’t afford to put in too little effort. Too little effort is unlikely to produce any meaningful momentum to help you achieve your goals. Similarly, too much effort can break you and your organization to the extent that you will have to sit out the days, rendering your initial efforts meaningless. At the end of the day, any meaningful result demands sustained efforts. One-off hard work never works. The purpose is to put sufficient effort consistently enough for long enough time so that it leads to momentum. It means you have to find a sweet spot of effort where your effort is not too little but also not too much, which will force you to quit halfway before reaching your goal because you become exhausted.
The problem is that the gap between these is narrow. And knowing that the right amount of force matters is completely different from knowing what the right amount is in your specific situation.
In fact, these are two separate problems. One is understanding a principle. That you have to put in the right amount of effort for a sustained period of time.
The other is developing a feel for it in your specific body/situation, on a specific day, with a specific history. That intuitive sense takes time and attention to build. It cannot be borrowed from someone else's experience.
I thought I had an intuitive sense about my limit and the right amount of force I needed to put when I started working out a few weeks back. I was wrong. I had the principle but not the calibration.
This is true in many areas of life.
In business, the same logic applies to almost every decision, from how fast to grow to how many bets to place to when to expand. Over the years, we've seen that getting this wrong is one of the most common ways serious companies fall apart. It is also one of those things that separates the ones who eventually make it from those who don’t.
The biology of how the human body works offers a useful insight.
A muscle, when stressed appropriately, experiences tiny tears. The body repairs those tears and builds back stronger than before. That process—stress, repair, adaptation—is where growth happens. Stress is the mechanism of growth.
The same is true for organizations. The right pressure is not a cost you pay on the way to building something. It is how building happens.
But the mechanism has a ceiling. Push too hard, and the tissue doesn't repair cleanly. You get damage, not adaptation. The body tries to protect itself, and the result is inflammation, a shutdown response, not a growth response. DOMS is just the visible sign of that.
In business, the equivalent shows up as overreach and premature expansion. Revenue growing faster than cash flow, headcount growing faster than systems, geographic expansion outpacing operational depth, and expanding into new verticals before building a solid foundation in the current one.
Companies that fall into this pattern look fine in the growth numbers until the breakdown hits all at once.
Chaldal is an example we've seen of this from close range.
We've covered Chaldal at Future Startup since its early days. For most of its history, Chaldal was a company doing nearly everything right. Founded in 2013 by Waseem Alim, Zia Ashraf, and Tejas Viswanath, it built a lean micro-warehouse model, in-house technology, and a supply chain that went all the way back to the farm. By the time it raised its Series C in 2021, it was delivering thousands of orders daily and had built genuine operational depth. It was a company that had been properly stressed and had adapted.
Then, over the following years, it changed its character. It acquired two companies — Cookups and BangaMeds — that brought entirely different operational requirements. It expanded to multiple cities outside Dhaka. It grew its headcount from around 600 people to over 3,300 in a few years. As we noted in our analysis of the company, the evidence suggests Chaldal scaled its headcount faster than it built the systems to manage it. It added force far in excess of what its operational musculature could manage.
By early 2026, employees at its Jashore facility had gone unpaid for months. The workforce had been quietly cut from 3,300 to 2,200. The company was sitting on a significant working capital shortfall and had written to the state-run Startup Bangladesh fund for emergency bridge financing. The pain arrived on the morning of day three.
Chaldal’s story is meaningful partly because it explains the importance of understanding the right amount of force.
Each move Chaldal made had reasonable logic at the time. Acquiring Cookups might have made sense as a category extension. Multi-city expansion might have made sense given the Series C. Growing the team might have made sense when you're trying to build at that speed. The missing piece was the calibration. The sense of how much the organization could actually manage, at what pace, before the stress stopped producing growth and started producing damage.
bKash offers a different version of the same principle. Bangladesh's largest mobile financial services provider became the country's first tech unicorn by doing something that sounds almost boring. Staying focused on a narrow core for years, resisting the pull toward adjacencies, and executing what it had already committed to with extreme doggedness.
As we've written in these pages, what makes bKash genuinely remarkable isn't the unicorn valuation or the first-mover advantage. It's the extraordinary discipline in avoiding distractions while remaining focused on its core mission. The company applied consistent, calibrated force to one thing until that thing was unassailable.
While many tech startup burned their fingers chasing the super app ambition, bKash, the most deserving candidate to chase such an ambition, stayed away from it for years until recently. bKash didn’t even push into the payment space until a few years ago, although it was apparent from the outside that the company should have done so. That strategic patience has paid off for the company. It has not only built a solid foundation. It is now well on its way to becoming a superapp, while many others who tried it prematurely out of overexcitement are out of the game.
There is a theory in organizational research that partly explains this. It's sometimes called the zone of proximal development in learning. The idea is that the most effective development happens in the space just beyond what you can already do, where the challenge is real but not overwhelming. In that zone, the learner is stretched but not broken. In that zone, adaptation occurs.
Organizations work much the same way. The most effective growth happens in the space just beyond what you've already mastered. Close enough that your systems can handle it, far enough that you're genuinely building new capacity.
The hard part is finding and staying in that zone. Because the zone is not a fixed coordinate. It moves as you grow. And you can't see its edges from the inside. You only know you've crossed into the wrong territory when the pain arrives, sometimes weeks after the decision that caused it.
What I didn't have, lying on my bed that morning, barely able to move, was the sense to know what the right amount was for my specific situation. I knew the principle. But I didn't know where the line was — in my body, at this age, after this long away from regular exercise. That knowledge only comes from paying close attention across many iterations.
This is the second lesson, and it's the hardest one.
It's not enough to know that the right amount of force matters. That’s just information. You have to develop what I'd call situational awareness, an acute, specific feel for how much your particular organization, in its particular stage, with its particular people and systems, can productively manage right now.
That sense doesn’t come from strategy documents. It's built from watching, experimenting, and active sensing. From reading the signals before they become crises. From asking, constantly: is this producing adaptation, or damage?
The founders who build enduring organizations seem to have this sense. It's not that they avoid force. Instead, they apply it deliberately. They read feedback loops. They know that the pain doesn't always arrive in the moment; sometimes it shows up on the morning of day three, and they've trained themselves to look for earlier signals.
I'm back in the gym now, lighter than before. With a keener sense of balance.
The principle remains the same. Growth requires force. The right amount of force. But I'm learning the calibration. The difficult, specific, never-quite-finished work of understanding what that amount is. This is perhaps the main problem. Understanding the threshold between low and the right amount.
