Is This a Real Idea or Just an Exit Plan? For the business idea you keep coming back to when your current situation feels unbearable

You can't tell anymore if this is a thing you actually want to build, or just the nearest way out wearing a good costume.

It gets loudest on the worst days, the ones where staying where you are feels unbearable. That's exactly when you can't trust it.

There's a famous experiment about this. Economists Colin Camerer and Dan Lovallo let people choose to enter a market where winning depended on skill. So many confident people entered that most of them lost money. Not because the market was bad. Because everyone was sure they'd be the exception. An exit plan only has to look better than the job you dread. A real idea has to hold up in the world where it has to live.

Honest questions. No advice. No verdict. They separate the idea you'd build on a good day from the one that only shows up on a bad one, and they make it compete against the market, not against your inbox. Wanting out and having a real idea can both be true at once. These questions tell you which one is doing the driving.

Find out which one you've got before you give it a year of your life.

Email below. It's free, and it's five minutes you owe yourself before you owe this idea a year.

When you've answered the one that stopped you, here's where it goes next:

• When you're ready to make the call: Before You Decide
• For the year-long version of this honesty: Real Growth (journal)