#AlwaysGoTooFar: I failed to walk 200 Miles in September, so I escalated the goal to 350 in October. I walked 363.
September is a complicated month for me: Some of the most difficult experiences in my life occurred in September; Some of the most joyous events in my life also occurred in September.
This year, I felt particularly restless emotionally and mentally. So, I set myself a goal of walking 200 miles in aggregate over the course of the month. I failed. With no real plan, no discipline, no dedication, no commitment, and a complete lack of organization I only made it to 181 miles. I also fell sick around the third week.
As you can see in the image below, I failed to hit my minimum distance goal for walking on 13 days.
That’s not a formula for success in any endeavor — and I know that. I know that very well. As luck would have it, I was talking to Giacomo Diana on September 30 and I told him about what had happened. After laughing with me about the entire thing, he challenged me to try again in October.
That was all I needed — that’s all I have ever needed; A challenge worthy of my abilities.
I hit 200 miles of walking on September 20, during a trip to Atlanta. After I’d hit that goal, I was chatting with Jamie Adams. He looked at me in amazement and said, “Brian, you could walk 400 miles in one month.” I laughed and told him to stop it with the crazy talk. But, I had already decided I was going to escalate my goal and try to hit 300, and my friend Averi Thomas-Moore helped by egging me on.
I hit 305 miles on October 26 (Instagram Post). That week was pretty eye-opening for me because: I walked a total of 121 miles during the week — including driving to and from Washington DC from NY after the trip to Atlanta; and up till that date I had reduced the number of days on which I failed to hit my minimum daily target for walking from 13 in September to 3 in October; I walked 20.8 miles on October 24, 22.5 miles on October 25, and 30.3 miles on October 26 — I drove back from DC to NY that day. I walked 20.2 miles on October 27 and mowed the lawn at home in NY too.
Naturally, with 4 days to go and 300 well and truly behind me, I decided to escalate the target yet again; I decided to shoot for 350. I’ll cut a long story short; I ended the month with a total of 363 miles of walking in October. For those who are not good at arithmetic 363 = (181 x 2) + 1; Twice the distance I walked in September, plus an extra mile. Why not?
I was at 352 miles on October 30, and I briefly flirted with the idea of not walking on October 31. However, my friends Tahira Dosani and John Azubuike pointed out that I would be selling myself short if I did not walk on October 31. So my final walk was in the evening on Thursday, October 31 and I walked an easy 11.3 miles.
On Friday, October 25 while Tahira and I were walking around Washington DC in the evening she asked me “Brian, what have you learned from this?” I answered in the moment, but it’s a question I have been thinking about since then. I brought it up briefly while I was walking with Iliriana Kaçaniku early in the morning on Saturday, October 26.
I have been thinking about what it takes to accomplish goals that initially seem impossible. This isn’t something I started thinking about just this year — I have been thinking about it since I graduated college in 2001 and picked up a copy of How to Become CEO: The Rules for Rising to the Top of Any Organization by Jeffrey J. Fox as a gift to myself. One of the rules that has stuck with me is one in which he says one ought to learn how to do something “hard and lonely” and since then each year I make sure I attempt to do something that will push me outside my comfort zone and that will require me to dig deep into myself.
I happened to sit next to Joe Gagnon during VCs-on-Tees 2024. Joe is the author of Living The High Performance Life: An Ordinary Joe’s Guide To The Extraordinary. He and I got to talking about some of his exploits. I mentioned to him that I’d set a target of walking #75MilesIn48Hours (Instagram, LinkedIn) and we got to comparing notes about what it takes to accomplish personal goals of that nature, he encouraged me to go for it. To give you a sense of some of the goals Joe sets and accomplishes, here’s a note he sent me via DM on LinkedIn after I sent him the post about hitting 363 miles; “Brian — nice! I love the goals, the drive to consistency, the stretch to do more and the challenge to others. This year, I will run an average of 60 miles a week, 3,000 for the year. I did a few years of 10 miles a day (540 days in a row), so I know what it takes to get to the levels you are talking about. I am rooting for you to do more than you ever thought you could.”
One morning while I was up very early in the morning walking, these words came to me;
“I approach the task at hand with purpose and passion and enthusiasm and intensity and zeal, and I stick with it to the end. I don’t quit. I don’t give up. I don’t retreat from a challenge. I don’t give in to fear or discouragement or adversity or despair. I keep a firm and unyielding grip of my wits and emotions. I turn setbacks and handicaps into extreme and unassailable advantages. I am extremely optimistic. I pursue the task to completion. I pursue industry, creativity, and excellence, mercilessly. I do what others say is impossible. I embrace uncertainty. I am not afraid to be different. I intend to win. I take the initiative. I always go the extra mile. I am indomitable. My faith in God is unshakable.”
I call it my personal credo. It also occured to me that some of the reasons I failed to accomplish my goal in September included these: I hadn’t made an ironclad promise to myself that I would give it my all; I was indisciplined; I was disorganized; I did not have even a rudimentary plan; I failed to optimize for the things within my control while minimizing for the things out of my control, and; I left too many things up to chance. As Benjamin Franklin said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Indeed.
We are our own worst enemies when it comes to accomplishing big goals. In this case there was no tangible difference between September and October: I did not have new equipment. I did not have a new group of people at every turn making things more convenient for me. I did not have a fancy training regimen or a coach guiding me along the way and helping me avoid pitfalls. The difference is that I decided cut out my own bullshit, get my shit together, and go for it with everything I could muster. As it turns out, that small adjustment enabled me to exceed my target by 81.5%. Even more interesting my plan was insanely simple; “Minimize the number of days on which I fail to walk my daily minimum, also known as #NoZeroDays.” I did not need a complicated plan. In fact, a complicated plan may have become a distraction in-and-of-itself.
Jamie Adams wasn’t crazy after all; With a little foresight I could easily have hit, and perhaps exceeded 400 miles of walking . . . . On 3 days in October I failed to walk even 2 miles (1.7, 0.9, and 1.2 respectively). Of course, I have amazing and highly convincing excuses to explain away why I failed to walk even my minimum goal of 3 miles daily on those days — it’s all just bullshit, my own bullshit. Had I walked 10 miles on each of those days, and kept everything else in October the same I’d have been at 393 miles. knowing myself I’d have just kept going to get to 405 or 410 or 420 or something like that. So I know I can walk 400 miles in a month, no question. This means I need to set myself a more challenging goal, one worthy of my abilities, one that will force me to marshall, organize, and measure my best mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual resources. Next fall, I am going to try to walk 600 miles in one month while keeping up with everything else in life.
One of my favorite quotes is this one by President John F. Kennedy, during his address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort; “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Last year I walked 64 miles in the span of 2 days, so my target of walking 75 miles within 48 hours is not as crazy as it appears, and I know that failure or success is very much within my grasp. The question is; How badly do I want to accomplish it?
I had told myself I would walk 27 miles today, November 3. But I spent some time yesterday reflecting on my motivation for setting that goal — none of it was intrinsic. Instead, I wanted to be able to say I’d walked a longer distance than those participating in The NYC Marathon had ran. I have never been primarily energized by extrinsic factors: I know I can walk 27 miles — I just walked 30.3 miles in one day, and several times over the past few years I have very easily exceeded 27 miles in one shot. Also, I’m developing blisters along my achilles tendon — I don’t want to exacerbate it while I gear up for the 75-Mile walk. I am not saying extrinsic motivators are irrelevant — Giacomo, John, Jamie, Tahira, Iliriana, Averi, Joe, Jeffrey Fox, and others Like Dyci Manns Sfregola — who sent me a bottle of an immunity boosting herbal formulation when I told her I’d fallen sick in September prove that extrinsic motivation matters, a lot. My son lives with my ex-wife and his step dad and siblings, and now that he’s a teenager preparing for his first semester in college I find myself wondering when he’ll have room in his busy schedule for his old man. Finally, my wife mostly manages things on the home front and doesn’t complain too loudly when I am up at 2:30 AM (Instagram #1, Instagram #2, Instagram #3) and walking till sunrise, before heading out to get in some extra miles or other crazy things like that. All that said, I believe that for really big, hairy, audacious, goals, extrinsic motivators have to come a distant second to one’s intrinsic motivation.
Another thing I have learned over the years, and one I have always known, but that bears repeating is that the path to accomplishing big goals starts with first accomplishing small goals. As St. Francis of Assisi puts it, “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” Too often we psyche ourselves out by focusing too much on the enormity of the whole task instead of focusing on the smallest atomic unit of accomplishment we can complete while we keep working towards the big picture goal. How does one eat an elephant? How would you move Mount Fuji? How does one build a cathedral? Definitely not all at once.
In the blog post I wrote about walking 64 miles last year, I said “As an immigrant, building a new early-stage Industrial Transformation & Supply Chain Technology venture capital firm from scratch with 43 startups now in our portfolio since July 2021, some days I feel as if I have embarked on a journey of a million miles.” That portfolio now holds 56 startups — with 4 in the pipeline, in final due diligence. This is definitely my personal Mission Impossible, especially since my partner and I did not start making progress on building the fund until the most difficult fundraising market for startups and venture funds in recent history.
I also wrote, “Everyone building something from scratch experiences moments of doubt, moments of extreme uncertainty. Whenever this happens to me, I recall that many times in my past, through sheer will, determination, tenacity, grit, obsessiveness, stubbornness, and courage, I have accomplished things other people around me have found incomprehensible given what they knew about me, the resources I had at my disposal, and their assumptions about what I am capable of.”
“ In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.” ― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
“Anxiety is fear about what may happen in the future, and it occurs only when the mind is imagining what the future may bring. But when your attention is on the here and now, the actions which need to be done in the present have their best chance of being successfully accomplished, and as a result the future will become the best possible present.” ― W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance
As difficult as the years since the COVID19 Pandemic have been for everyone, the time between 2023 and now have been the most challenging for me personally. But I find strength in my belief in God through my Catholic faith. I often take strength from my late grandfather’s favorite verse in the Bible;
“Then he said to me, “This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.”” — Zechariah 4:6 ESV
Then once I have prayed, I go back to the basics: Stop believing my own bullshit; Get my shit together; Go after it with all you’ve got, Laung, and; Then, let’s see what happens.
We are each capable of a lot more than we think.
“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” — 1 Corinthians 15:10 ESV
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.” — Antonio Gramsci, 1931 Letter from Prison to his Mother
“Look, I’m just a little nervous. But if I say I can do it, I can do it.”- Edgar Stiles, 24, “Day 4: 1:00pm-2:00pm”
“ For God did not give us a spirit of timidity (of cowardice, of craven and cringing and fawning fear), but [He has given us a spirit] of power and of love and of calm and well-balanced mind and discipline and self-control.” — 2 Timothy 1:7 AMPC
#PersonalMantra: High Expectations are a gift, and unreasonably high expectations are an invaluable gift.
#PersonalMantra: When you find people who believe in you do not let them down.
Originally published at https://innovationfootprints.com on November 3, 2024.
