What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Entrepreneurs run on urgency, deferred rest, and a belief that any problem yields to enough hustle. Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes follows a young mortician into a crematory and shows a culture that has quietly agreed to hide death from view, handing it to specialists so no one has to think about it. That same instinct shows up in how founders run companies, postponing succession planning, ignoring burnout, treating their own limits as someone else's future problem. The book's real argument, that avoidance costs honesty and control, applies directly to a founder's relationship with risk, health, and what happens to the business if they are suddenly gone.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The company that outsources its own mortality
Just as families hand a body to strangers the moment it becomes inconvenient, founders hand off hard planning conversations, succession, key-person risk, what happens if they burn out or die, to some vague future date. Doughty's crematory workers had to face what everyone else avoided; a founder who avoids the same questions leaves employees, investors, and family exposed.
Founders tell themselves that thinking about incapacity or death is bad luck or bad optics, so the topic never reaches a board meeting or a written plan.
This week, write a one-page memo naming who has authority and access if you are unreachable for thirty days, and share it with one trusted person.
Proximity beats abstraction in high-stakes decisions
Doughty argues that direct contact with a hard reality produces better decisions than distance from it. Founders who actually sit with a failing product line, a toxic hire, or their own exhaustion make sharper calls than those who let dashboards and secondhand reports stand in for reality.
Founders build layers of reporting specifically so they never have to look directly at the uncomfortable thing, mistaking distance for delegation.
Pick one metric or relationship you have been avoiding and spend thirty minutes this week examining it directly, not through a summary someone else prepared.
Your advisors are not automatically on your side
Doughty shows funeral homes upselling grieving families who have no way to judge what they actually need. Investors, lawyers, and vendors operate under their own incentives too, and a founder who never asks plain questions about fees, terms, or what happens in a downside scenario can be steered without realizing it.
Founders assume trusted-sounding advisors are automatically aligned with founder interests, and skip the blunt questions out of politeness or time pressure.
Before your next advisor or investor meeting, write down three direct questions about incentives and ask them out loud, even if it feels awkward.
Memento mori as a founder's daily discipline
Doughty treats memento mori, remembering you will die, not as morbid indulgence but as a daily corrective that sharpens priorities. For a founder, that means periodically asking whether this quarter's frantic pace reflects what actually matters, or just what feels urgent. A founder who keeps mortality in view tends to make calmer, more honest choices about time, team, and what the company is actually for, rather than chasing growth for its own sake.
The instinct toward radical proximity, examining every hard number and hard conversation yourself, can collide with the reality that founders cannot personally verify every advisor's incentive or plan for every catastrophe. At some point you have to build systems and trust people, which looks like the outsourcing this book warns against. The difference is choosing delegation deliberately, with clear questions asked up front, rather than drifting into avoidance because a conversation feels uncomfortable.
Name one thing, honestly
- What planning have you postponed specifically because it required imagining your own absence? - Which advisor relationship have you never questioned about incentives? - If you were gone for a month starting today, what would actually break?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Before your next advisor or investor meeting, write down three direct questions about incentives and ask them out loud, even if it feels awkward.