Why Viable Doesn’t Always Mean Worth Doing

One of the hardest shifts investors make isn’t learning how to spot opportunities. It’s learning when to walk away from them.

Most opportunities that cross our desk aren’t “bad”. Many are perfectly viable. The numbers work. The structure is possible. With enough attention, they could be made to function.

That’s exactly why they’re tempting.

The problem is that viability is a very low bar. It only answers the question: can this be made to work?

It doesn’t answer the more important one: should it be carried at all?

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Early on, it’s easy to underestimate what a project will quietly demand over time. The ongoing decisions. The follow-ups. The mental bandwidth it occupies long after the initial excitement has worn off. Viable projects often rely on continued involvement to stay viable, and that requirement doesn’t always show up clearly at the start.

A common pattern we see is opportunities that work only if several things continue to go right. Nothing is impossible, but nothing is simple either. Complexity creeps in gradually — an extra assumption here, a workaround there, a reliance on someone else’s flexibility later on. Individually, those compromises don’t feel significant. Collectively, they create friction.

This is usually the point where discipline matters most.

Walking away at this stage can feel counterintuitive. On paper, it looks like progress is being rejected. In reality, it’s often clarity being protected. The projects that end up feeling clean and manageable tend to be the ones that didn’t require constant justification at the outset.

There’s also a behavioural element that’s easy to miss. Once time and energy have been invested, walking away becomes emotionally harder. The opportunity starts to feel “owned”, even if nothing has actually moved. That attachment can pull investors into projects they wouldn’t have chosen if they were evaluating them calmly from the outside.

This is why saying no early isn’t conservative. It’s selective.

The projects that are genuinely worth doing tend to stand up without persuasion. They don’t need optimism to feel workable. They don’t rely on future fixes to feel comfortable. They make sense early, and they continue to make sense as more detail is added, not less.

Over time, we’ve found that the easiest projects to live with are rarely the ones that looked the most exciting at the beginning. They’re the ones that asked the least of the investor once they were underway. Less attention. Fewer decisions. Fewer moments where something needed rescuing.

Viable opportunities are common.Projects that are worth carrying are not.

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Being selective isn’t about slowing down or missing out. It’s about preserving clarity, momentum, and headspace for the things that actually deserve it. Most of the discipline happens before anything moves. And that’s usually where the long-term outcomes are decided.