To Ignite Growth, Break the Frame

In 2024, I was accepted into a highly competitive entrepreneurial bootcamp at MIT.

Over the course of two months, we explored the industry, regulatory environment, and ecosystem of the problems we aimed to solve, and it all culminated in an intense five-day, in-person session at MIT’s Media Lab, where each team was challenged to research, create, and ultimately pitch a commercial venture in just five days.

Despite over a decade of running Thrive and past experience with two technology startups, immersing myself in MIT’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework was at once the hardest and most rewarding experience of my career.

The framework, created and refined by legendary entrepreneur Bill Aulet, moves founders away from chasing the Big Idea and toward solving tangible customer problems. Put another way, it’s about building businesses around real issues faced by real people.

Uncovering and understanding those issues occurs through the continuous and evolving process of primary market research (PMR), a term and methodology I was only generally familiar with before the bootcamp.

Doing PMR the MIT way involves engaging directly with potential customers early and often, asking open-ended questions to help surface insights and uncovering unmet needs or pain points that help guide your business-building progress.

By forming hypotheses and validating or disproving them, we uncover the true issues we aim to solve. Instead of starting with a solution, we begin with the problem—ensuring the venture is grounded in addressing a real and verified need.

This approach minimizes wasted effort and resources, allowing us to build solutions that truly resonate with customers and solve pressing challenges.

As a design thinking practitioner, I’m not unfamiliar with the idea of performing qualitative research to get to an insight, but MIT’s framework forced me to see that the PMR process is continuous and always evolving.

It can also be done quickly and in real-time—I did ten on-the-fly interviews with people in our target market, often late at night, to validate an assumption or elicit an insight— providing opportunities for course correction before we’re too far down the wrong road.

At MIT, over the course of five days, we broke the frame I came there with—the frame that had me thinking that devising, validating, and pitching a commercial venture in five days was impossible. But at the end of those five (long and exhausting) days, that’s exactly what we did—to a room full of our peers, coaches, government representatives, and venture capitalists.

The business models, products, and solutions we came up with were diverse and varied in substance, but they all had one thing in common: they didn’t exist just five days before.

The takeaway for me was this: the frames through which we view our capabilities are self-imposed limitations. Frames keep us confined, often because we’ve convinced ourselves to stay within their boundaries.

It’s as though we need permission to explore what lies beyond the lines we’ve drawn for ourselves.

I entered the bootcamp believing it was impossible to devise, validate, and pitch a venture in that amount of time. But breaking that frame revealed how much progress can occur when I stop assuming what’s beyond my reach.

In Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy’s book, 10x Is Easier Than 2x, they write, “To make a goal effective, you’ve got to test its outer limits. Push it out as far as you can. Only once you make your goal impossible will you stop operating based on your current assumptions and knowledge.” And later, “The easiest way to get 2x growth is by going for 10x, because 10x forces you to stop almost everything you’re doing, which is ultimately a waste of time anyway.”

To make the progress we’re truly interested in—to make a 10x jump—we need to completely break our frame. We need to stop thinking about incremental improvement and instead think about improving by orders of magnitude, just as I discovered during the bootcamp when I realized that breaking my frame of what was possible unlocked a whole new level of growth.

So the real question we should all be asking is this: What frame is currently limiting us? Everything you’re striving for is on the other side of your frame.

It’s time to break it.