What Strategy Consulting Taught Me About Managing a Chronic Illness in Austin
The frameworks I learned in consulting turned out to be survival tools for building a business while chronically ill. Hypothesis-driven, 80/20, MECE, applied to a body.
- Consulting frameworks (80/20, hypothesis-driven, MECE) apply directly to managing limited capacity.
- The 80/20 rule is the single most useful tool a chronically ill founder has.
- Structured thinking turns an overwhelming illness into a set of solvable problems.
I spent formative years in strategy consulting, and like a lot of ex-consultants I have a complicated relationship with the frameworks, half eye-roll, half deeply grateful. Here's the part I didn't expect: the toolkit they drilled into me turned out to be exactly what I needed to manage a chronic illness while building a business. Same frameworks, new problem. Let me show you.
80/20: the single most useful tool you have
The Pareto principle (roughly 80% of results come from 20% of activities) is consulting 101. It's also, I'd argue, the most important idea a chronically ill founder can internalize. When your energy is cut in half, you cannot do everything, so the entire game becomes identifying the vital 20% and ruthlessly protecting your capacity for it.
Look at your business honestly: which fraction of your activities actually drives the results? Protect the energy for those. Cut, automate, or delegate as much of the rest as you can bear to. A healthy founder can afford to spend energy on the low-value 80%. You can't, and that constraint (painful as it is) forces a focus most founders never achieve. McKinsey built an empire partly on teaching companies this discipline. You get to apply it to your own life.
Hypothesis-driven thinking, applied to your body
Consultants don't boil the ocean; they form a hypothesis and test it. Your capacity is a system with variables, and "I feel bad and I don't know why" is the boil-the-ocean version. The consulting move: hypothesize. Is it the late meetings? The back-to-back days? The specific kind of work? Test one variable at a time. Keep what the evidence supports. You'll learn your own patterns far faster with structured testing than with vague suffering, and unlike a provider guessing at you, you actually have the data.
I couldn't fix my illness. But I could treat my capacity as a system to understand instead of a mystery to endure. That reframe alone gave me back a sense of control.
MECE: make it a set of solvable problems
Chronic illness overwhelms because it feels like one giant, formless weight. The consulting instinct is to break a mess into parts that are Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive, distinct, non-overlapping, complete. Do that to your situation and the monolith becomes a list: energy management, business structure, boundaries, community, logistics. Each of those is a solvable problem with its own tactics. (It's roughly the structure of this whole blog, not by accident.) A list of solvable problems is a fundamentally more workable thing than an undifferentiated sense of doom.
Structure is a form of hope
That's the real gift the consulting toolkit gave me, not any single framework, but the reflex to impose structure on chaos. When you can decompose an overwhelming situation into components and attack them one at a time, you replace helplessness with agency. That's not spin. That's the same rigor you'd bring to a client's turnaround, aimed at the most important engagement you'll ever run.
If you've got that same background, you already own these tools. Come point them at the same problem alongside people who speak the language, that's a lot of the conversation at the monthly downtown gathering.