Marathons, Success Metrics, Confidence, and Doing Hard Things

I'm writing this as I fly back to New York after spending four wonderful days in San Francisco. While many long-time friends, former colleagues, and new Twitter pals in the city are always a reason to visit, my primary purpose for this trip was to run the San Francisco Marathon. My last trip to SF occurred almost exactly one year prior when I flew out to run my first marathon. Twelve months later, this year's SF Marathon marked my fourth in total – New York and Paris being the other two if you're curious – so one could claim that I have officially caught the marathon bug. While I've had exposure to marathon running for as long as I can remember – my mom and stepdad have run close to 100 marathons combined – and considered myself a runner since my elementary school days, I am nevertheless surprised by the level of seriousness and the velocity to which I have gravitated to (voluntarily) running 26 miles.

In all honesty, I could not have caught the marathon bug at a better time. Since the start of 2022, I have been diving head-first into the incredibly uncomfortable and unpredictable lifestyle of being a startup founder. Not to focus this blog too intently on the mistakes I have made or the challenges I have faced tackling the zero-to-one phase of company building, but for a number of reasons, the past 18 months have been unimaginably challenging. Even if my decision to begin working on Wove full-time had not coincided with rising interest rates, the collapsing of tech stocks, and the most severe tightening of the private capital markets in a generation, I know this journey would never have been remotely easy. But those factors, combined with a precise lack of clarity around the product we initially wanted to build and the problem we intended to solve, created the perfect storm for my own feelings of deep confusion, inadequacy, and low self-confidence.

Again, the point of this essay is not to ruminate on whether trying to start a company in this environment was a mistake – it was not – or to dissect precisely why we aren't yet a unicorn two whole years after incorporation – if anything, we now recognize that speed of incorporation to unicorn status is not the success metric we thought it was and is most likely negatively correlated to eventual real success. A more important topic (and one I am far more qualified to write about) is how running marathons has provided me with a source of tangible validation – and thus a source of self-confidence – that I so sorely lacked in my professional life.

Most workers in what I would describe as 'conventional' roles can tie their performance to some relatively tangible success metric: be it deals closed if you're in sales, lines of code written, features shipped, or bugs fixed if you're a developer, products manufactured or efficiency increased if you're an engineer, you get the point. Even in roles where success may appear more opaque such as consulting or legal work, performance can still be measured by billable hours or the satisfaction of the client. And having these metrics available is a massive positive because they provide a reasonably balanced and objective picture of how well someone is performing in their role and a basis for making important company decisions such as promotions, raises, and new hires. And whether we like it or not, we largely live in a world in which many people tie their self-worth to their professions, and tangible success metrics therefore serve as a de-facto source of personal confidence.

The issue I have faced over the past 18 months is that these tangible metrics do not exist for companies at the earliest stages – and I genuinely mean the earliest stages rather than the $100k in ARR that some investors seem to define as the earliest stages of company building. Of course, many companies in the earliest stages do (somewhat logically) measure early success based on the amount of money they have raised from investors or perhaps the number of users who have expressed cursory interest via a waitlist on a landing page. But despite the headlines we might read in TechCrunch or the stories we see on Twitter, raising money from investors in a frothy, bull market environment is incredibly challenging and rare, let alone trying to raise capital amid the most severe funding decline in 15 years and lingering questions not just around the real terminal value of many software businesses but even around the viability of the entire VC model – or at least as it has existed for the past decade. Perhaps we have finally realized that building durable, generational businesses takes incredibly methodical and arduous decision-making (and frankly luck) and that investing in early-stage companies not to actually see them through to exit but merely to package them for the next round of buyers for a paper markup as if they are some mortgage-backed-security creates a perverse incentive structure capable of collapsing like a house of cards. I digress.

The point is that so far in my founder journey, aside from the occasional inkling that something might finally be working – whether it's a potential customer resonating with the problem or an investor friend telling me that the story is finally coming together – I have mostly lacked any tangible metrics by which I can measure my success and thus assess how well I'm utilizing my most precious resource, which is my time. While the absence of these metrics has created challenges within my professional life, the effect of this prolonged absence on my confidence has been far more profound. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that for better or for worse (mostly the latter), we live in a world where people tie much of their self-worth, confidence, and purpose to their work, and I am no exception. And while this may feel especially true in New York City, where I currently live, workism – or what The Atlantic's Derek Thompson elegantly defines as the emerging phenomenon of work as a kind of religion that imparts its followers with a sense of purpose, identity, and community – continues to permeate American life unabated. Workism is why one of the first questions we typically ask someone in a social setting is 'What do you do?' – one that I dread and try to avoid because I hate answering it myself – or why so many of our friends never miss an opportunity to mention the number of hours they worked last week or what status they've achieved on Delta or Marriott this year.

I don't find workism an especially corrupt or detrimental phenomenon – it is only natural for people to derive a sense of identity and achievement from the activities and people with whom they spend so much of their time – but when you are constantly struggling to articulate the work you do or the career you ultimately want to pursue and have collected few tangible signs of achievement, the idea of tying your sense of self-worth to nearly anything else becomes quite appealing.

Okay, so I've made the case that early-stage entrepreneurship lacks tangible success metrics and that this lack of metrics can create a persistent sense of confusion, uncertainty, and diminished self-confidence for those living through it. But our work does not consume our entire day – even for those starting companies. If we assume that the average person works six to ten hours per day (or at least pretends to), that still leaves another four to six hours for non-work activities on weekdays and even more time on weekends. The point being that while work represents a significant chunk of our time, it by no means represents all of it. And while as a founder, work and life often come to mean the same thing, I have found solace, comfort, and confidence in my pursuits of non-work activities – primarily running and physical fitness – and it is no coincidence that both of these activities possess concrete indicators of progress and success.

As I have begun running marathons over the past year, I have realized that the success metrics are both binary – completing the entire distance versus not – and dynamic – setting time goals and challenging myself to meet or surpass them. I have also recognized that running 26 miles challenges me far more mentally than it does physically. Running is not a complicated activity in and of itself; it's something that nearly every non-disabled person has been doing since the time they could walk. But the mental toughness and will to finish on race day combined with the discipline to train and stay in shape throughout the preceding weeks and months are the pieces that very few seem to possess, which is evidenced by the exclusivity of the marathon club (it's estimated that around 0.01% of the global population complete a marathon each year). Becoming a repeat member of this club has materially improved my confidence not only as a runner but also as a founder, friend, son, and just everyday person.

I have also found the familiarity with the experience of running a marathon to be an invaluable preparation tool. As in much of life, novel experiences are both exciting and scary since we often have no baseline to set our expectations. In startups, we often claim that we are building the plane as it flies – a not totally inaccurate metaphor to explain how in high-growth companies, processes are often developed on the fly since so much of the operation is one giant novel experience to all involved. One year ago, I had no clue what to expect in my first marathon, but as I prepared for my fourth last week, I felt like I now had enough prior experience to adequately set my expectations both before and during the run. Rather than building the plane as it flew, as odd as it may sound, I could coast on autopilot for parts of the run since my mental muscle to complete the journey had already been assembled and tested. I possessed the confidence to do this because of my lived experience, and that lived experience enabled me to not only achieve the binary goal of completion but also to finish nearly 30 minutes faster than last year. If that’s not material progress and success then I don’t know what is.

I have been repeating a phrase over the past 12-18 months as I have embarked on my respective founder and marathon journeys: 'Do Hard Things.' What I love about this phrase is that its vagueness almost renders the words meaningless, yet when people hear it, they often know exactly what it means and how it might apply to their lives. Each of us has our own interpretation of what is hard and what is not so hard. While I am embodying the 'Do Hard Things' mentality by trying to start a company, which, if you have read this far probably now realize is seldom a smart idea, moving to a new city, and running marathons, your version of hard probably looks completely different (as it should). The magic in doing hard things is the delayed gratification we feel after the fact and the sheer satisfaction in accomplishing something we thought we were physically or psychologically incapable of doing.

As cliche as it may sound, so much of what we do in life looks and feels like a marathon. Modern life presents us with endless sources of pressure – personal, professional, romantic, familial; you name it – and no shortage of reasons to make us feel inadequate in any given moment. We must remember, though, that just as a marathon is measured by the sum of its parts and not just the parts individually, the progress that we make in our own lives should be measured not by the ups and downs of the hours and days but on the trajectory of the years and decades.

If you have made it to the end, it means the world to me that you have given this a read. I don't write here as often as I should, and I assume your inbox is already flooded with things you will never read, so I won't ask you to subscribe for future essays. If you would like to share this with others in your network, please do feel free. You are also more than welcome to reach me directly by email here.

Until next time.

Jay Edlin is a co-founder of wove.com and an active marathon runner and frequent Barry's attendee. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.