I started long endurance racing in 2009 when a very close family friend was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. In an attempt to curb the helplessness i felt signed up to run the New York City Marathon for Team Fox and raise money for to aid research against the disease. That first foray into endurance sports was a blast. i overtrained, developed ITB syndrome, was unable to train the last 45 days up to the race and ended up getting a 3:44 which was quite a bit slower than planned. It was all worth it though because i was able to raise money and awareness for a cause i believed in, showed someone that i loved them through my actions and was lucky enough to tap into something that would become a major part of my life. Since then i have grown into triathlons and have been asked over the years my reasoning for competing in increasingly difficult events. I’ve always had trouble answering, in part to a combination of my inability to verbalize my internal motivation and a desire to not sound too intense.
This summer i am participating in two new distances - olympic and ironman - and during my training I’ve had lots of time to reflect, which i love. most of the time i’m mentally working on my current project (showw.me) and how effectively i am improving myself as a young man and bringing my life goals closer to me but my thoughts often return to my reasoning for shaping so much of my life around triathlons and marathons. Last October, during a long run in preparation for the inaugural Brooklyn Marathon i found myself reflecting on why i do this and as i crossed over the brooklyn bridge i began to realize that the reasons for training and competing are also the core reasons for my professional aspirations to create and build a software product that improves or enriches peoples’ lives.
The quick answer is that i have a consistent and very intense passion to test myself and find my limits in life while simultaneously attempting to be a conduit for good. In an effort to not come off as an endorphin junkie that is so intense i can’t focus i’ll try to explain further so bear with me.
In my mind both endurance sports and being an entrepreneur are very similar in a few respects: they require unwavering dedication, countless hours of work that wake you up early and put you in bed late. your life becomes solely about your goal and most importantly you follow your heart. training and building a company are both slow and initially solitary endeavors (teams can be solitary too) and both come down to your individual execution. both are continuous internal struggles where one minute you’re flying high, living your dream and full of pure happiness..then half a mile down the road you find yourself out of gas, questioning everything decision you’ve made up to that point. proper management of resources are a huge aspect in both worlds as well - go too fast and you’ll burn out, go too slow and you waste resources and time. quick but not rushed, relaxed but not lethargic, excited but not off the charts. carry just enough with you to get there but don’t over indulge. while largely independent, having proper support networks, mentorship and companions can make all the difference in the world. Both come with demons - i’ve even developed a mental representation of this for training which might sound odd but when things get dark and my resolve wavers its helped a lot (training pro tip?).
my final reason is very basic: they bring me joy and make me a better person contributing to the world. Lucky for me, both can not only coexist but have a symbiotic relationship - the harder i work at one, the better i am at the other which in turn improves my level of happiness, motivation and passion. I’m exhausted, hungry and sore most of the time but its absolutely worth it. if anyone ever reads this i’d like to hear if i’m off my rocker or not but in the mean time its helpful that i’ve been able to answer the question of why, which is very important to me personally. tonight’s run was the trigger for this post and details on the run can be seen on Strava here .
One normal February morning i woke up and got into my daily routine that i’d adopted since that November: went to gym, reading emails as i walked. Get back and dive right into working on my projects. I was a few months in to a decision that pointedly would define the next 6 months and hopefully the rest of my life by deciding to dive in fully and work on developing my own ideas with no financial support. By this morning the allure and jittery excitement that goes with that initial decision had faded but i was still waking up every morning and going to bed every night feeling fulfilled because i learned many years ago that productivity and self-fulfillment is not necessarily tied to an income from the outset. I was doing what i love, and i love building apps and web-based software so i was happy and thankful to have the opportunity to explore my personal visions.
One such idea centers around the desire to showcase myself and allow people - be it grandmother, friend or potential client - to see who i am, what i’m about and what i have worked on by displaying my activities and experiences from my various feeds. the problem i kept running into is that i use specific services to post activities in different locations, which i love. twitter for ideas and articles i find provoking, instagram for cool images i capture, foursquare for locations and events i attend and nike+ to track my progress for my ironman triathlon training. Not to mention my professional experience on linkedin and my portfolio work on behance. while i highly value the specificity of segmentation, i found that the walls between each aspect of my life had become blurred: potential clients wanted to see who i was as a human (professional, personal, social) and friends and family are interested in my amorphous and fast-paced professional life so i set out to build something that would let me show myself as a whole human rather than the fragmented version you might find on one or two networks.
pretty simple concept: show people who you are through the actions and experiences you’ve put online. Show me holistically - Show me Noah - show.me domain taken, brainstorm - showw me noah. showw.me domain not taken - sounds good and works individually and when applied to other people - cool, lets go with it.
Back to that morning in February: i saw Singly had opened their platform to developers, awesome! i had been tracking their activity through the locker project and had suspected it could be a perfect compliment to showw.me. in my excitement i hit them with a tweet
by the end of that same night i was meeting with Jeremie and Jason at the Ace, they happened to be in the city and wanted to chat about the idea - awesome!
Meeting went great. i was pumped and i kept in touch with them after deciding to use their platform to power our app. Fast-forward one month and team showw.me decides that Anthony and I should pack up and head to San Francisco. One month after that and we had uprooted our lives and shipped to the other coast while keeping part of ourselves in NYC as well both metaphorically and literally because most of our stuff is still there, as is the third teammate, Josh.
I had just ripped open my comfortable, fun and extremely social life in NYC to come and commit to this goal one thousand percent. i love new york, i love the passion and energy the tech community is gaining with each activity and bump from the nyc public and private community but we are two weeks into the relocation and now that Anthony and I are situated i can say with conviction that we are in the right spot and moving here for what we’re trying to build and grow was absolutely the best thing to do. as i mentioned, we’re two weeks in and we’re flying through development as we navigate a very tight collaborative association with Singly and optimizing our bi-coastal development environment - which i can enthusiastically say is working quite well so far - props to @joshkehn to holding it down in nyc!
I plan to track my experiences while building an interesting idea with two cool dudes and the friendship and support of another really great start-up.
