What do a Ph.D, a marathon and a startup have in common?

I’m going to come clean. I didn’t have to really work that hard to get through high school and college to get (relatively) good grades. Don’t get me wrong, I was always doing a lot but I never had to work hard at being good at what I was doing.**

Until I encountered athletics.

Not until I started running in high school (track and x-country) and rowing in college did I know what it meant to really truly push myself.

Running till you almost blackout. Rowing so hard you do blackout. Pushing yourself out of your zone of comfort into a totally new place. A zone of the unknown. Learning that anything can happen (good or bad), but only if you take the leap, and push yourself.

Anyone can go out for a run and push themselves. I will argue though that unless you do it again (and again) it really isn’t pushing yourself all that hard.

And this is why athletics and pushing yourself physically can be a great source of learning for the other parts of our lives.

I often compare my experience getting my Ph.d. in Physics to running a marathon. I had some successes along my path to my doctorate, but more often then not, I had challenge after challenge presented in front of me. Homework, exams, experiments, articles, and cranky advisors each was an opportunity for me to say, “you know what, I’ve had enough, I’m done.” Each mile was a opportunity. An opportunity to fail. An opportunity to excel.

The experience I had defending my Ph.D dissertation was not dissimilar to my experience crossing the finish line of my first marathon. A sense of accomplishment, sure, but more important was the feeling of appreciation for what it took to get to that point. The fact that I pushed myself and understood what it took to get to where I was was the most satisfying part of both experiences.

While I won’t go into it here, my experience with Homefield and Shelby.tv mirrors both of these experiences and the deeper I get ingrained in my professional path in the startup world (with Reece and Dan) the more I feel that this experience is also about pushing myself beyond my normal zone of comfort.

I strongly believe that interesting things in this world are born from people that push themselves past what is comfortable or considered the norm. Interesting things are born from being challenged and the learnings that come from pushing past what is difficult or thought of as impossible.

“What’s dangerous is not to evolve.”

— Jeff Bezos

** I’m not bragging. In fact, my only regret from my time in college is not working harder academically.

UPDATE: Not dating my wife during college was my biggest regret!