Fantastic words from Canadian men’s rowing coach Mike Spracklen:
We all have a point of which we stop, we give up. We all have a point where we back off. It doesn’t matter how determined, what ambitions we have, how much we want to get there, there are times where we will back away from it… We create an environment where the goal is to retard that point, push it further down the line until it becomes that last stroke in the race.
Big thoughts for the weekend: what kind of environment is going to keep both me and my team going forward (and to what goal?) What am I doing to construct that environment?
As an entrepreneur who’s made some strong decisions to go a different way than most people I know, I’m fond of saying that I’m busy constructing my own reality, but recent rumblings have turned into a strong wakeup call: is this the reality I want to live in? In other words, if I’ve given myself the power to make my life whatever I want it to be (funding issues notwithstanding,) am I comfortable looking at myself in the mirror (or my family) and saying yes, I chose this?
I spent most of this year without a clear definition of where I wanted to be 18 months from now, which meant I didn’t have a vision of that “last stroke of a race.” That makes creating an environment like Spracklen describes very difficult to do – it devolves into assembling likely components without clear congruence, so I’ve got an office, I have some systems in place (with more on the way, thankfully) and so on.
But now that my goals are clearer, it’s time to think about my environment a little lot more. What can I do to my physical surroundings, my interactions, my processes, and my workflows to defer that natural tendency to back off that Mike Spracklen is so focused on avoiding?
Like I said, this weekend’s gonna be deep.
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