It was a cool, September morning in Lake Tahoe. It was about 5:30am and I had just completed my warmup. I was getting prepared for a very long day. I had been training for years for this moment and while I was slightly nervous about how I would do, I knew that I could do it. I put on my wetsuit, walked down to the water, and then, suddenly, I wasn’t going to compete. This was Ironman Lake Tahoe in 2014 and the race was cancelled due to wildfire smoke. I admit, it was pretty bad. I had been living up there for three weeks in order to train and acclimate and the smoke had continued to get worse. But what I hadn’t planned on was that it was going to be cancelled. I had a lot of salt in my system, no way to exercise it out of me, I just had to drink a lot of water and try to let the horrible feeling pass.
I wasn’t always a triathlete, and I am not anymore. But if you told me at almost any point in my life that I would swim, bike, and run absurdly long distances, I would have said you were crazy. I grew up a golfer, quite a different sport. Ever since I could stand, I had a golf club in my hand. There was something so fun about trying to whack a tiny little white dimpled ball with a plastic club that little Steve found fascinating. As I grew older, I did what most of my friends my age did — soccer, little league baseball, and basketball. Although, I wasn’t particularly tall as a kid. I wasn’t even an average height. My parents have been taking the VHS tapes from when my brother and I were kids and converting them to digital files. When I look back on when I was in middle school playing basketball, you could always find me on the basketball court because I was the shortest. Yet, I was always pretty fast and very persistent. However, golf remained my strength and that became my main focus. It was this game that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t “win.” There is no such thing as a perfect round, only managing the mistakes that are made around the golf course. My dad always told me, “It is just you against the course, and you have to play it one shot at a time.” And this was my first lesson in entrepreneurship.
Until recently, I never really understood entrepreneurship as a career path. I knew it just as the thing that people did who build an idea that they had into a real company. But entrepreneurship, much like an accountant, is a career path. I have been grateful to have some pretty outstanding mentors in my life and every time that I run into a big problem in my journey, it is always met with an, “Oh yeah, I’ve been there. Welcome!” Only after it happened for about the eighth time did I begin to question why everything I had experienced, my mentors had too. And then it hit me, nobody actually teaches you how to be an entrepreneur. For most traditional positions, you start at an entry-level job, work your way up to management, and then, if all goes well, executive. And at each one of those benchmarks, there is a new skillset that accompanies that new responsibility. Most of the time, it is pretty clear what those skillsets are: people management, project management, customer relationships, budgets, etc. And most of these had some sort of guidebook to go along with them.
If you are an entrepreneur, there is no guidebook. Sure, there are A TON of books about somebody’s success story, even some stories about their failures, but there isn’t a guidebook to navigating entrepreneurship because it is actually impossible to write it. The path of each venture is mostly uncharted. You have reference points from similar startups but most likely, it will be much different than how it was planned. But there are a few skillsets that I believe are invaluable to building a successful company. The first is understanding how a product is made, no matter what type of product you set out to make. As an entrepreneur, you have to know how the sausage is made. Otherwise, you don’t know how your own product functions and it will never have an opportunity to be optimized. The second is understanding people. How can people help build your organization to your vision? But more importantly, how can those people become part of that vision, not just build your vision for you. The third, finance. No, you don’t have to be a Patagonia vest wearing LP with a venture background to run a startup. Sure, it might help with getting some capital but it is more about learning how to turn a dollar into four. They always say your first million is your hardest but I think it is not because of the million dollar mark, but learning how to take a dollar and make it four. Once that is solved, and it is different for everybody, that is when entrepreneurs find multiple ventures to be successful. They are not just lucky and lighting struck twice. And lastly, you need to be slightly crazy. If you have an idea that you believe in, you have to be crazy enough to take it on against all odds. But at the same time, you have to know why you are doing it.
When I first started triathlon, I thought it was a little bit crazy to do the sport. I was working out with a friend of mine and he said that I should try triathlon. I didn’t own a bike besides an old Peugeot mountain bike, I hated running anything over a mile, and I swam for two years in high school doing super long distances that I mostly didn’t enjoy. But for some reason, I said yes when he said he would give me a bike for $500 and I could join the triathlon team. So there I was in my first race, an Olympic distance triathlon in Tempe. I couldn’t tell you what my final time was but I can tell you that I was hooked after that race. It wasn’t because I was standing on the podium, but it was because I was testing to see how much my body could handle. As the years passed, the distances that I did in triathlon continued to increase. Half-Ironman became my favorite distance, especially as I was juggling this sport with trying to build my own creative agency. With every race I accomplished, I realized that my body could be pushed even more.
When the race in Lake Tahoe was cancelled, I was gutted. It felt as though my company had failed. I had spent time training, optimizing my plan for the race, and I felt like all of it was for nothing. I honestly thought about quitting the sport because I didn’t really see the point of going through that much training to not even do the race. But something told me that it still had to be done. I set out to do it, so I should accomplish it. So when I was given the opportunity to do Ironman Arizona in 2014, where I went to university, I couldn’t decline. I did finish the race and, much like entrepreneurship, it didn’t go as planned. However, I had pushed my body and mind more than I ever thought possible. I stayed moving for just under twelve hours and also managed to do pretty well, despite feeling I could have done better.
The lesson from that race has stayed with me whenever I come up against challenges in my professional life — just put one foot in front of the other. If you think about how far you still have to go to the finish line, it destroys you. You question yourself, those questions become concerns, and then those concerns lead to an overall worse result. But when thinking just one more mile per hour on the bike for just five more minutes, or one more mile until another round of water and nutrition, it becomes easier to tackle almost anything. Just one step at a time. Just one shot at a time.
