1:59:59

Each Monday we take our favorite day of the week as an opportunity to whip up a tasty dish of weekly motivation. Bon appétit.

Early Saturday morning, around 1:45 AM EST, perhaps the greatest failure the world has seen took place. Well, at least one that was broadcast live on Twitter. Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon in a ludicrous 2:00:25. The failure came only because his goal was to run 26 seconds faster.

There was a lot going on here. To recap, this was a part of Nike’s “Breaking2”, an attempt to break the 2-hour marathon barrier that some experts estimated would not be broken until the year 2075. The event also showed that Nike’s massive marketing machine is operating at full force. The company announced the event back in December 2016, calling it, “an innovation moonshot designed to unlock human potential” and “an opportunity to envision the future of sport.” Damn.

Leading up to the race, they dropped this promo:

Damn. Nike knows what they are doing.

Positioning yourself as the brand powering humans to break the limits of what is possible is generally a good way to go.

Oh, I almost forgot. The 3 runners were wearing Nike’s Zoom Vaporfly Elite’s, a running shoe so good is has caused controversy for creating an unfair advantage for runners. Nike calls the shoe “an unprecedented combination of cutting-edge technology and historic ambition.”

Damn. They really know what they are doing.

Okay, enough gushing over Nike. This is Monday, meaning there’s got to be some motivation coming, right? Right.

At 1:35 AM, the Twitter live stream brought on Shalane Flanagan, a 4x Olympian with a pretty damn good running resume in her own right, to give her analysis. Shalane spoke beautifully:“Every person, not even just runners or athletes, everyone has a sub-2 barrier in their life in whatever they want to achieve. So, I think this inspires people to think, ‘What is my sub-2 and how can I start to dream and think bigger than I thought was possible.’”We all have our own sub-2.

But, the fact is that none of us will ever approach running a 2-hour marathon. Evidence suggests genetics is at least partly responsible for why the best distance runners blow away the competition.

This question has always intrigued me. How much of our success is under our control and how much of it is up to outside forces? I think we are often apt to think it is more of the latter, and that can limit our ability to dream bigger — to think about our sub-2.

This reminded me of a recent talk (That link is to the entire event. It checks in with an incredible 111 views.) hosted by Y-Combinator at MIT, which we were fortunate enough to attend. Y-Combinator alums include the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, and Twitch. We were lucky to hear from one of the co-founders of Twitch (formerly Justin.tv), Michael Seibel. Michael’s message was unique.

Their company began by having another co-founder, Justin Kan, strap a camera to his head and live broadcast his life 24/7. Michael called it, “the stupidest business idea ever.” Despite this, their sub-2 was to build a billion-dollar company.

Michael described an epic tale in which they almost went to 0 multiple times, had run-ins with the police, fought Congress, and, eventually, figured out that people really liked watching other people play video games on their site. They took that concept and ran with it, eventually selling Twitch to Amazon for almost $1 billion.

Throughout their journey, even when they knew they had a shitty idea, they never stopped dreaming of reaching their sub-2, despite having no reason to believe they could do it. Michael’s take away message that day was inspiring, yet cliché, “If we could somehow build a billion-dollar company, anyone can do it.” The thing was, it didn’t feel cliché when he said it. He really believes it.

I recently heard an interview with fellow co-founder, Justin, and you know what? He believes it, too.“‘Yeah, I actually — I mean, I believe that (anyone can be successful building a company on the internet). I don’t think we were anything special…I didn’t start off with any skills. I wasn’t a good programmer. Definitely wasn’t a good manager. Wasn’t a great communicator. I was decent at like convincing people to do stuff, you know. That’s basically it. So like, I really, really, really do believe, and I think there are countless examples, of, you know, people who have figured it out over time. And the unifying factor to me is that they all continued learning…”Twitch’s story is an important take on what goes into building a successful company or successful anything for that matter. I don’t think you need to be a genius or even the smartest kid in the room. It is not as tied to genetics as, say, running a marathon in under 2 hours.

Finding success is a combination of a lot of things — hard work, luck, and the willingness to learn continuously, for sure. But that extra piece? That X-factor? It might be the ability to dream bigger than most would think possible.

What’s your sub-2?