The subtle art of never giving up
"When you finish a marathon you can achieve anything in life" - Eliud Kipchoge (Marathon WR runner)
(Exceptionally, I decided to write about something unrelated to Origins or to venture. hope you still enjoy it)
Running is like coffee. You hate it the first time you try it until you become addicted to it.
Exactly two weeks ago, on 5th November, I had the chance to run my first marathon: the NYC marathon.
Prior to my run, I had this entire post-marathon post completely laid out in my head: It would describe how “with hard work, mental toughness, and insane preparation, someone that never ran more than 2k in his life up to a few months ago was running his first marathon”
But it didn’t go as well - I decided 2 minutes before the race that I wanted to run it in less than 4 hours ( vs. the 4h15 minutes planned) - a terrible idea - and came out too quick (5’25/km vs. the 5’55/km planned for the runners) in the first 18 kilometers.
The crowd didn’t help. The spectators in NYC carry you - 2M people come out in the street to cheer on runners that day so you are feeling particularly great and run faster than your usual training time.
My body gave up at the half-marathon mark. Never in my preparation did I feel the desire to stop at the 21km mark - usually, the wall comes around the 30th kilometer.
A marathon is split into 3 parts - you run 1/3 of it with your legs, 1/3 of it with your brain, and the last 1/3 with your heart.
Nothing is worse for a runner than knowing that your body is not able to follow through with what your mind wants to achieve/accomplish.
But giving up was not an option.
I am a firm believer, that “resilience” is a muscle that you train over your lifetime. The more you learn how to deal with challenging and tough situations, the more you are willing to fight when tough times come around.
When reaching the wall at kilometer 18, that resilience muscle kicked in. Despite knowing that my race finish time was not doable anymore, despite all the odds going against my ability to finish the race, the “resilience” muscle had been so trained over the past years, that giving up was not even on the table. And just like that, one step after the other, I was crossing the 42,1km NYC marathon finish line.
As I was running, I was thinking about how to turn the post-race post and a few lessons came to mind:
Someone can fail at something that you worked so hard for, but you can still find so much joy in the accomplishment itself. An entrepreneur will learn ten times more starting, scaling, and failing at launching a company vs. someone that worked in corporate for many years. Enjoy the process even if the end goal is not the desired outcome
When running, you need to find your pace and retain it for as long as possible instead of trying to go faster - the same applies for consumer/prosumer products
Consumer social apps or mobile app subscriptions know that very well. Prioritizing retention in the long run holds greater significance than focusing solely on growth. Despite the fact that initiatives geared towards growth often yield immediate and more apparent advantages, companies often place excessive emphasis on growth, neglecting the retention of their current customer base.
‘No’ means work harder: If you are not successful at raising your round, not successful at raising your VC fund, not successful at finding your first customers, etc… it just means that you need to work harder.
One of the blog posts that I read every week, recently displayed the below chart - it displays the pathway of successful founders.
One comment that struck me when looking at it, was the number of successful US founders that migrated to a unicorn country. When migrating somewhere new, you need to be resilient to adapt, learn, and integrate into the new culture. It requires resilience for most.
That resilience is what, according to me separates the average founder from the successful ones.
If you read up until here, I will confess… I finished the marathon in 5 hours and 15 minutes but I will confess also that the day after the NYC marathon, I signed up for the Paris one because at the end of the day; running is like coffee. You hate it the first time you try it until you become addicted to it….
Much love,
Salomon
PS: For those hearing about Origins for the first time, Origins is a VC fund where we invest $100 to 500k checks in B2C or B2B2C companies. Origins LPs are for the majority of athletes, celebrities, and investors with very large social media influence. Together they represent a very strong community of 160M followers. We use the power of our LPs to bring awareness to the start-ups we invest in to help them grow faster. We have invested in 13 companies to date across Europe & North America. You can reach out to me at salomon@origins.fund.