What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from What to Expect When You're Expecting
What to Expect When You're Expecting, by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel, built its reputation on a simple insight, that most fear carried into an unfamiliar season of life is fear of not knowing what comes next. Its answer was to replace vague dread with concrete, stage by stage knowledge of what is ordinary. Four ideas make that move work. Knowledge converts free floating anxiety into a specific, answerable question. What counts as normal is a wide range, not one narrow benchmark. Small, sustainable daily choices, repeated over a long stretch, do more than any dramatic overhaul. And the material is meant to prepare you for a real conversation with someone qualified, not replace their judgment. This edition adapts those four mechanisms to the uncertain early stretch of building a company, where founders face their own version of not knowing what comes next.
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
Turning a vague worry about the business into one answerable question
When a founder feels generally uneasy, the unease usually hides a specific question. Is this slow week typical, or a real signal. Naming it turns formless dread into something investigable.
A founder, mid launch, spends a weekend convinced the idea is failing because sign ups slowed, without naming what pattern would actually indicate trouble.
Once a week, write the vaguest worry on your mind and rewrite it as one checkable question for data or a person.
Normal founder progress is a range, not a single funding headline
Every founder's path differs by market, team, and timing, yet it is easy to hold your company to the pace of whichever peer's story crossed your feed. Normal early progress covers a wide band, and most ventures that eventually work spend real time inside its middle.
A founder compares their small user base to a competitor's viral launch and decides the company is behind, without knowing that competitor's runway.
Before comparing your progress to another founder's, ask what you would need to know to make it fair, then notice how little you know.
Small repeatable founder habits instead of an all or nothing sprint
The founders who last are rarely the ones with the most dramatic weeks. They build a short list of habits, a customer call, a numbers review, a check in with a co-founder, and keep doing them when the news is unremarkable.
A founder alternates between all night sprints before investor meetings and weeks of avoidance, so nothing improves steadily.
Pick one habit small enough for a bad week, and protect it for a full quarter before judging whether it works.
Why the book, or any resource, cannot replace an actual advisor
No article or framework knows your specific market, team, or numbers the way a trusted advisor, mentor, or experienced operator does. Reading widely sharpens the questions you bring them, but it cannot substitute for someone who has seen your situation and can push back on your blind spots. Treat this material as preparation, never a replacement.
The four ideas can pull against each other. Knowing that normal progress covers a wide range can become an excuse to skip the habits that actually move a company forward, since almost any pace can be rationalized as within range. Keep the two jobs separate. Use the range to judge outcomes with less panic, but hold your habits to a consistent standard regardless of where this week lands.
Name one thing, honestly
- What is the vaguest worry about your business, and what question is hiding inside it? - Whose progress have you been measuring yourself against, and how much do you know about their path? - Which one habit, kept up for a full quarter, would matter more than any dramatic week?
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
Pick one habit small enough for a bad week, and protect it for a full quarter before judging whether it works.