There is a particular kind of operational failure that looks deceptively productive.

You have 13 projects moving. 5 products in development. 7 websites. A half-built media engine. A new idea every week. Everyone is busy. Nothing is technically dead. And yet, very little is truly alive.

That is the peanut butter problem: you spread yourself, your money, your systems, your attention, and your energy across too much surface area. Everything gets a thin layer. Nothing gets enough to become excellent.

I know this problem because we have spent the better part of 10 years fighting it.

For too long, Heroik looked like the guy with 7 unfinished cars sitting on the front lawn - just killing property values in the neighborhood. Each one had promise. Each one had some work done. Each one could theoretically become something valuable if we kept crawling it forward.

So that is what I did. I tried to lurch each one forward - inch by inch. I tried to advance everything intermittently, watch for relevant signals, and push whichever project looked most promising in the moment. It felt flexible. It felt entrepreneurial. It even worked often enough to keep the behavior alive.

The “hidden” cost was brutal.

Every project carried its own architecture, infrastructure, accounts, files, domains, workflows, maintenance, context, decisions, and unfinished business. The visible work might have been modest. The cognitive overhead was not.

I was championing this. I was the only one keeping these going. The team saw the unfeasibility, I just thought it was a stretch challenge. I was spinning too many plates, and every plate demanded mental RAM simply to remain spin-able.

The result was something close to 10x the overhead, materially and cognitively, compared with what the useful output justified.

The lesson took too long to fully accept:

Unfinished things still consume resources.

This sounds obvious, but this lesson creeps in on you. A project does not need to be active every day to tax you. It only needs to remain mentally open. Think of all the hobbies you gear up for, think about regularly, but never actually do? Think of garage full of expensive neglected gear. Maybe you cleared your garage and are paying for the storage unit… still thinking about those aspirations… and paying to carry all that gear. Same thing applied to business initiatives.

The True Cost

The real cost was not that these projects failed to move fast enough. The real cost was that they were stealing resources from the things that actually mattered FAR LESS.

Every hour, dollar, decision, system, and ounce of attention tied up keeping those initiatives technically alive was a resource Heroik could not put against its core business.

That meant the core business was effectively operating on a fraction of its available capacity.

Think about that for a second. You can have the same number of people, the same number of hours in the week, the same revenue, the same founder, the same talent, and still starve your primary business because all of those resources are quietly being shared with a dozen side initiatives.

That is exactly what I was doing. I was asking Heroik to perform at full strength while continuously siphoning resources away from it.

Worse, I was doing the same thing to myself.

The projects were not only competing with Heroik for my professional attention. They were competing with the work required to make me better at leading Heroik.

Reading. Writing. Studying. Thinking. Training. Building relationships. Developing new skills. Exploring deeply enough to actually learn something. Taking care of my health. Growing as a father and husband. Creating enough margin to think strategically instead of reactively.

Those things do not usually scream for attention the way an unfinished project does.

So they get postponed. And that creates a nasty compounding problem.

The business gets less of the leader, and the leader gets less opportunity to become the person the business needs next. Oh and my wife gets less of a husband, and my kids, less of a dad.

The peanut butter problem was hitting the company twice and me on like at least 4 different levels.

It was starving the company of resources while simultaneously starving me of the space required to grow, lead, think, and operate at a higher level.

That is not diversification.

That is self-imposed resource deprivation.

At some point you have to stop asking:

“Can I technically keep all of this alive?”

And start asking: “What could the core become if I stopped making it share everything?”

Reduce the Surface Area

Solving the peanut butter problem requires more than making a prettier priority list. You have to reduce surface area.

Start with triage.

Ask which projects are producing real value now, which have credible evidence that they can produce meaningful value soon (3-6 months max), and which survive primarily because you care about them, once cared about them, or have already spent too much to let them go.

That last category is dangerous.

Discernment means separating a good idea from a good idea for right now.

Some projects deserve execution. Some deserve incubation. Some deserve a shelf. Some deserve a respectful funeral.

Then look at the real cost.

Do not count only dollars or visible hours. Count your TEA: Time, Energy, and Attention.

Where are you pouring your TEA?

Attention is often the expense people forget. A $20-per-month project can be more expensive than a $2,000 tool if it keeps stealing decisions, tabs, mental space, and repeated reorientation.

Then make the hard call.

At Heroik we use a simple principle: Live It Or Leave It.

Cultivate what serves the mission, and unapologetically hit the EJECT button on what does not.

The Eject Button Has Several Settings

Hitting eject does not always mean deletion.

Sometimes it means mothballing a project.

Freeze development. Export the important files. Cancel unnecessary subscriptions. Redirect the domains. Document where you left off. Leave yourself enough breadcrumbs to restart intelligently, then stop paying rent on the idea every week.

Sometimes it means reducing scope by 80%.

That has become a major part of our own answer.

We did not kill every offshoot. We consolidated the core, dramatically reduced the footprint of secondary projects, cut costs, stripped away duplicate infrastructure, and most importantly, reduced the cognitive overhead required to keep those projects alive.

The architecture changed from a collection of independent little kingdoms into a more centralized and connected hub, where everything paid homage, dues, and TEA to the core before proceeding any further.

Pro-Tip: Everyone has a Persistent Digital Universes (personal and professional)- You need to decide what your center of gravity is for your life and work. What does everything need to swirl around and feed?

Reconnecting to that core, and refining the galactic orchestration of gravity of Heroik’s universe to constantly draw in what’s critical was a major lift for us (my fault and responsibility honestly).

Now the core gets fed first.

Smaller experiments can still exist, but they live as scoped offshoots on smaller timelines, renting slices of infrastructure from their CORE landlord. They remain lightweight until they earn the right to grow.

They are not allowed to quietly become another full-time business wearing a side-project costume.

Coming Back to Life

That change has felt less like optimization and more like coming back to life.

There is more room to think. More capacity to finish. More energy for the few things that actually matter.

The work connects again. Momentum compounds instead of leaking through 15 small holes.

Quick Fixes and Pro Tips

If you suspect you have a peanut butter problem, AI can be useful because it can force you to confront the portfolio as a whole instead of defending every project individually.

Try these prompts:

“List every active project, product, platform, subscription, initiative, and recurring commitment I am maintaining. Estimate each one’s cost in time, money, energy, attention, and maintenance overhead. Rank them by strategic value versus total burden.”

“Assume I am only allowed to actively advance 3 major initiatives for the next 12 months. Which should survive, which should be mothballed, which should have their scope reduced, and which should be killed? Explain the opportunity cost of keeping each one alive.”

“Identify projects I may be protecting because of sunk cost, identity, nostalgia, or fear of missing out rather than current evidence. Challenge my reasons for keeping them.”

You may hate the answers. Good. The point is to preserve enough of yourself and your resources to fully build the things that matter now.

Spread too thin, everything survives badly.

Concentrate deliberately, and something finally gets enough to win.