Morning, day, and night
Originally, I was going to share my experience of completing the first weeks of fitness boot camp, but the connection between exercise and determination runs farther (pun intended) than that. Getting into a routine of being in the park by 6am, 4 days a week, in the cold before sunrise, is one that you can only force on yourself into by just starting, then you find out you can really do it.
I don’t know what you’ve been told, but the only times I’ve found true success in my life is when I didn’t give myself a minute to fail. Morning, day, and night is the only schedule that has worked for me. When you’ve been broken down by running 5 miles before 7am, your day can go nowhere but up. Dropping to the ground to do pushups and sit-ups anywhere becomes nothing. You tell yourself that you’re not embarrassed, you’re ready to prove yourself, and at the very minimum, you can support your own weight.
After boot camp comes the full day of work, but now your outlook has changed. Your 9 to 5, your cushy 40 hours a week has new meaning now, it’s only part of your day. By 3pm your tolerance for what’s not important drops to zero. The day is yours and if it’s not, you see the inefficiency of the status quo. The best way I’ve been able to describe my startup life is, “When you’re at a startup you want processes and when you’re at a large corporation you hate the process.”
Boot camp turns out to be the easy part, you don’t have to do think, just do. It’s outside of boot camp where I have to watch myself. Your first instinct is to say no, to ice cream, to losing your cool, but finding patience to look at the opportunity cost is where you can shine. Dashes of genius happen but often go unnoticed.
The piece I’m working on now is how to focus my energy on my own time, after the day is complete. Dinner, drinks, a date, a night of rocking out at a concert, tech schmoozing, – these are all viable options in the city of San Francisco. In fact, my last 6 months were a blur of them and it was excellent. My next adventure has a vision, a name, and a long to do list in order to lay the foundations. I know what I have to do to execute, it’s now a matter of focusing.
Hey by the way, that’s it, Heybtw.com. Much more to come on this soon. I’m as excited about this as I once was when I said to a friend, “we have to do this!” when founding my first startup, ImThere.
I don’t know what feels better, taking off my new non-broken in shoes after a long run or focusing on building something that no else in the world cares about yet, but somehow they’re connected.