Run the mountain, not the hill.
If I had one word to describe my emotional state at VGKids between 2002 and 2007 it would be desolation.
As long as I am being melodramatic, let me say that the 2nd definition really speaks to me, “anguished misery or loneliness”. I was young and inexperienced. 40% year-over-year growth meant I was continually in over my head. Every day felt like a new but inevitable disaster. I was learning, but the staggering mountain of what I didn’t know made the business feel like quicksand, where every step to advance the company took us further into the pit.
Of course, VGKids wasn’t dying, and neither was I. Both myself and VGKids are alive and healthy ten years later. But it did feel that way sometimes, and it felt that way often enough that it colors my memory of the era.
Here is a scene that captures its essence: On a sweltering, humid Michigan summer day, we are standing next to a 500º conveyor oven that dries t-shirt ink. A team of three has been working flat-out for eight hours, printing hundreds of two sided t-shirts for a local fair. The fronts are done and look good, and we are just finishing the backs. For the printers out there, it’s black shirts with white-flash-white-flash-red, which means the shirts are on press for three rotations and we are standing around 1/3 of the time. It is agonizingly slow work, but we are almost done, barely scraping in under the deadline. The festival is starting the next morning.
As the last shirt comes off the conveyor, sweat soaking through our clothes, we pause to look at the last shirt closely and relish in the pride of a job well done. Why is it that we paused at the last shirt, and not the first? We stand back to take it all in, and someone says, “That’s not how you spell experience”.
Goodbye, profit.
Goodbye, reputation.
Goodbye, morale.
You know how the last 100 miles of a roadtrip seem to stretch on forever? It’s because our attention is focusing on the goal. We are fixating on being stuck in the car and have a heightened awareness of every pain, every discomfort we are experiencing, fixating on the fact that we are here and not there. Goals are good, but not if they are making us miserable because we are in the process of achieving them. If you are on the freeway barreling towards home, what is gained by our anticipation and impatience? Why were we not this uncomfortable the entire time?
The difference between the first 2,900 miles and the last 100 is our mindset.
On the first 2,900 miles, we have an expectation of driving for days on end, so we let our attention wander. For the last 100, we have razor sharp focus on getting home. In these moments, that focus is exactly what makes our pain accute.
In the roadtrip of running a business, that fixation on the goal can cause so much misery that we quit under the pressure. It is a shame, because there is not a correlation between difficulty and success. If anything, difficulty tracks positively with success. Your business is making you miserable because at least some part of the business is working. If customers are angry, that’s proof that you can get customers!
I never put it together that my mindset was creating at least some of my misery at VGKids. I figured it out years later while I was running up a mile-long hill that my body thought was total bullshit.
I would try to run this hill regularly, and what I eventually figured out was that if I focused on running up the hill, I’d quit partway up. It was just too hard. The trick that worked for me was imagining the top of the hill to be a magnitude farther away than it actually was. I would pretend I was not running to the top of the hill by my house, instead I was running to the opposite coast. I was crossing the Rocky Mountains. I was running Kilimanjaro. The hill I was on right now was just a foothill on the path I was actually running. So when I got to the top of this mile-long climb, well hell. That was easy compared to what I was bracing myself for.
I’ve heard from other distance athletes that it doesn’t matter too much what you actually think about. The thing that makes the trick work is thinking about literally anything other than the finish line. You have to put yourself in a mental state of acceptance. You have to be at peace with the fact that this hard thing you are doing is going to be happening for a long time, so settle in.
And that “settle in” mentality needs to be matched by a strong belief that you will complete the task in the end. Not soon, so let’s not think of it. But someday, we will achieve our goal.
The people with this mindset, the people who are running a mountain so ignore the hill; those are the ones that make it.
And if you are running a mountain, the hill of redoing the monster pile of shirts you just finished ruining doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.
