The joy of running 🏃♀️
The joy of running, literally? Or the joy of running a company?
WARNING: this post will talk PRIMARILY about runner’s high. It’s not suitable for people who don’t run.
As a founder of a fast-growing technology startup, I recently picked up a hobby called Running. The people who run are called Runners.
Running is generally great for your fitness. Running long-distance requires both physical stamina and mental strength to continue even when your body feels unable to. We all know that. But running also has a surprising benefit on our social and emotional life.
We become calmer, more patient, more compassionate towards the people we interact with. We become the cheerleaders of our families, friends and our company. We encourage people to achieve the impossible. We set high standards and high expectations for our team, our brothers and sisters. We make them make the tough decisions and let them own up to their mistakes. We credit them for their mini-wins and give them candid feedback when we think they did a bad job. We encourage them to think harder, to learn continuously and to further advance their personal skills and growth.
Running long-distance is a lot like running a company.
You suck at it at first and no matter how excited you are, the first run always made you run out of breadth, feeling exhausted and defeated. And it’s only the first 1KM!! You thought running is not for you, it’s for the athletes out there with the god-send genes.
But then you get better with training everyday, and you get a mini-mood boost at the end of each training session, especially when you have broken your previous record.
You get distracted once in a while on crowded streets, people staring at you like an alien so you start walking instead. But these distractions reduce over time as you do not care about what other people think about you running alone while everybody walks anymore.
You feel incredibly excited when the people you encourage to run with you reach their new heights. Whether they cross that finish line with a smile, a frown or a cramp, we all give them a big high-five to congratulate their new milestone. They didn’t give up. We never give up.
At LOGIVAN, there’re approximately 60 runners, together we completed 852 KMs in the last two marathons. We also completed 2 years, 3 months and 28 days of building LOGIVAN blocks from the ground up. The people who run LOGIVAN are the long distance runners of the trucking industry.
I look forward to the runners today reaching their full potential in near future, so ten years later we can say:
Been there run that 🏃♀️
