"Just had a brutal conversation with a founder who's been grinding for 18 months with no traction. He asked me the question that kept him up at night: 'Am I just not cut out for this?' Here's what I told him (and what I wish someone told me in 2019): Your first 100 failures aren't failures. They're data points. I bombed my first 47 sales calls. Literally. Hung up on, laughed at, told I was wasting people's time. Call #48 changed everything. Not because I got better at pitching, but because I finally learned to listen. That founder? He just closed his first enterprise deal last week. Sometimes the breakthrough is hiding behind the breakdown."