What if your greatest opportunity is something everyone else sees as a problem?

Two people can look at the exact same thing and see something completely different. As a founder, what you see shapes everything: the problems you solve, the critics you listen to, and the story you tell.

In this issue, I'll share a parable about a cracked clay pot. A farmer saw wasted water. A woman saw a garden. Plus:

Enjoy finding the flowers along your path... LG

In a small village at the edge of a dry valley, a woman carried water for her family every morning.

Before the sun cleared the hills, she lifted a wooden pole across her shoulders, a clay pot hanging from each end, and walked the narrow dirt path to the river.

It was a long walk. Uphill on the way back. Every drop mattered.

One pot was perfect. Smooth, round, and sealed tight. The other had a thin crack running down its side.

One morning, halfway home, she glanced down and saw it. A line of dark, wet spots trailing behind her in the dust. Drip. Drip. Drip. All the way back to the river. By the time she reached her door, the cracked pot was half empty.

A new pot cost more than she could spare. She had no way to repair this one. She stood in her doorway and looked back at that long line of wet earth, knowing half of what she worked for would never make it home.

LOOKING BEYOND THE CRACK

The next morning, she lifted the pole onto her shoulders again. Same two pots. Same crack.

But as she watched the drops fall into the dust, something shifted. She stopped thinking about how to stop the leak and started thinking about where the water was going.

The pot wasn't just losing its water. It was sharing it with the earth.

And that gave her an idea.

That evening, she filled a small pouch with flower seeds. The next morning, she scattered them along the path, only on the side where the cracked pot hung.

She did it again the next day. And the next.

WE SEE WHAT WE FOCUS ON

At the edge of the village lived a farmer who watched her pass every morning, water dripping from the cracked pot onto his doorstep.

One morning, he called out. "Your pot is broken! You're wasting half your water!"

She nodded and kept walking.

The next week, he tried again. "Why keep carrying a damaged pot? Fix it or get a new one!"

She smiled and kept walking.

Every morning, the same drip. Every morning, the same shake of his head.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

Then one day, she spotted tiny green shoots poking through the dirt. Then stems. Then buds.

By the end of the season, that side of the path had come alive. Yellow. Purple. Red. A ribbon of wildflowers stretching from the river to the village.

The next time the farmer called out, she stopped.

"Walk with me tomorrow," she said.

The next morning, they walked together to the river and filled the pots. Halfway home, he went quiet.

He looked to his left. Bare dirt, dry and hard, the way the path had always been.

He looked to his right. Flowers. Thousands of them. Bees moving from bloom to bloom. Color as far as he could see.

"I don't understand," he said. "Why is only one side of the path blooming?"

She pointed to the drops falling from her cracked pot.

"I knew my pot was leaking, so I planted seeds along this side of the path. Every day, the crack waters them."

WHAT THE GARDEN GAVE

"At first, the flowers were just for me," she told him. "But then I realized I had more than I could ever use."

She gave them to sick neighbors, celebrating friends, and families preparing for weddings and festivals. What started as a way to brighten one home had spread across the village.

"If I had fixed the crack," she said, "none of this would exist."

The farmer had spent his whole life growing things. Every morning, he had watched the water fall. He never once asked where it went.

He had seen a broken pot. She had seen a garden.

[Reference & Origins of the Story - The Cracked Pot parable is often attributed to Indian and Chinese storytelling traditions, though its true origin remains unknown. Regardless of where it began, its lesson is just as powerful today.]

Same pot. Same path. Same water. The only difference was what she chose to see.

As founders, we face limitations. Less money. Less experience. Fewer resources. And there will always be someone telling us what we can't do.

But what if the very things holding us back could become our greatest opportunities? Sometimes, all it takes is asking a different question and planting seeds where others see nothing but dirt.

#1. Your Crack Can Become Your Signature

"If I had fixed the crack," she said, "none of this would exist." The crack wasn't a problem in her system. It was the system. Without it, there are no flowers.

Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's, has anosmia, a condition that leaves him with no sense of smell and very little sense of taste. When he and Jerry Greenfield started creating flavors in the 1970s, Ben couldn't tell them apart. So Jerry kept adding more flavoring until he could. And Ben focused on the one thing he could experience: texture. "Ice cream, to me, is about texture," he has said. That's why Ben & Jerry's is loaded with big chunks of cookie dough, brownies, and candy. His limitation became the brand's most recognizable feature.

ACTION: Write down the one thing about you or your company that you keep trying to hide or fix. Then ask: what does this force us to do differently that our customers love? That answer belongs in your story.

#2. Let the Garden Answer Your Critics

The farmer called her pot broken. She didn't argue. She nodded, smiled, and kept walking. When the flowers bloomed, she didn't tell him he was wrong. She showed him.

Jamie Kern Lima had her own farmers. She had rosacea, a skin condition that left her face red and blotchy, and she built IT Cosmetics to cover it. When she pitched investors, one told her he didn't believe women would buy makeup from someone who looked like her, with her body and weight. QVC turned her down for three years. She kept walking. When she finally got on air in 2010, she didn't hide behind a perfect model. She showed her own rosacea on live TV and covered it with her product. It sold out in 10 minutes. In 2016, L'Oréal bought IT Cosmetics for $1.2 billion.

ACTION: Write down the loudest doubt anyone has ever thrown at you or your company. Then find the proof that answers it: a customer result, a number, a moment. In your story, don't argue with your critics. Walk them down the path and let them see the flowers.

#3. See Where the Water Is Going

The turning point came when she stopped asking how to stop the leak and started asking where the water was going. Same water. A different question.

In 2005, Hamdi Ulukaya, a Kurdish immigrant from Turkey running a small feta cheese business in upstate New York, spotted a flier in his junk mail. A fully equipped yogurt factory was for sale. It was an 84-year-old plant in South Edmeston that Kraft was getting rid of. Ulukaya threw the flier away. The next day, he toured the plant. Against the advice of his attorney and his business advisor, he bought it with a Small Business Administration loan. Where Kraft saw a plant to unload, Ulukaya saw a way to bring the thick, strained yogurt he grew up with to American shelves. By 2012, Chobani passed $1 billion in annual sales.

ACTION: List the things your industry treats as waste, weakness, or leftovers. Then ask which one you could plant seeds next to. Your best positioning often lives right where everyone else stopped looking.

My niece Erin Roy runs Blooms and Bunnies, a commercial flower farm in the mountains of New Mexico. With a master's degree in agriculture and six years of hands-on flower farming experience, she knows a thing or two about growing things.

Erin had beautiful plans for a greenhouse, imagining the flowers and harvests to come. But before she could plant a single flower, a hailstorm tore through its plastic covering. She remembers standing there crying, wondering how something she'd worked so hard for could go wrong before she'd even begun.

The greenhouse sat unfinished. But that winter, it became shelter for goats and puppies, then eventually storage. She joked that she'd built a $10,000 storage unit.

For years, she saw what the greenhouse wasn't, rather than the value it was providing.

Eventually, she repaired it, planted her flowers, and in its first growing season, generated almost $7,700 in revenue.

But what stayed with her wasn't the money. It was realizing she'd spent years mourning what the greenhouse hadn't become while overlooking the value it had provided all along.

As she put it, "Sometimes, as a flower farmer, you have to be reminded that not every flower grows where you intended to plant it."

When I asked my niece Erin about her own “cracked pot,” she shared her greenhouse story. It got me thinking: most founders have something that went wrong but eventually led to something good.

In Kintsugi: Broken is Beautiful, we explore the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, turning cracks into something worth celebrating. Rooted in the philosophies of wabi-sabi and acceptance of change, the film offers a different perspective on beauty, imperfection, and the passage of time.

What I particularly like is its reminder that the goal isn't to break something just to make it beautiful. It's to appreciate the history, character, and value that come from what it has been through. Watch here:

Need help with your story? I got you.

Send an email to [email protected] and someone from my team will circle back with you.