go bold

I’ve never been good at exercising regularly, despite lots of reminders, from many different sources, in various formats, explaining just how necessary exercise is for your { mental well-being, life span, quality of life, focus, self-image }. The last period of time in which I exercised regularly involved several very regimented systems (From Couch to 5K, Hundred Push-ups, and Groupon-spurred bikram yoga) and lasted for a total of about six weeks. This was a year ago. Before that, the last time I got regular exercise was the summer of 2006, during which I was interning in another city, and living with people who had much better habits than I.

After beginning a startup and doing very little between working and sleeping, I’ve finally (about six months in) reached a point where my schedule has stabilized a bit, and I’ve found a routine / set of incentives that I feel like I’ll be able to stick to for awhile – at least, I’ve followed it for the last seven weeks (one week longer than my last attempt) and am still going strong. I’m tired of having the phrase “disgustingly sedentary” float up in my mind when people ask me how I’ve been, and I’m looking forward to maintaining my newfound awesomeness. Below, the usual excuses I use to avoid working out, and how I’ve managed to skirt around them.

Typical Excuse #1: My schedule’s too fluid, and I can’t find time to exercise at the gym

My schedule is a bit eccentric, but once I discovered that I have a 24 Hour Fitness one block away from my office, I’ve found that I tend to come to a natural stopping point at around 1am each night. With a 24 hour gym, I can rarely find a reason to skip the gym before heading home. Plus points: I hate working out around other people, and there are rarely more than 3-4 other people at the gym between 1 and 4am (sometimes, I have the place all to myself!)

Typical Excuse #2: Cardio bores the pants off of me

My most successful stint at exercising regularly (summer of 2006) involved reading lots of Ayn Rand on a stationary bike, also late at night. I realized recently that, by bumping up the font size on my Kindle, I could easily read while running on a treadmill – and can now run for a previously unimaginably long time without noticing. (And then go for another 20-minute jog because I need to know what happens next!)

Typical Excuse #3: I know exercise is good for me, but man it’s such a time sink

When you’re running a startup, you work. A lot. And one of the things that I’ve lost (or have been unable to justify) as a result is my time to read for pleasure. By combining something that’s good for me and feels productive (cardio/gym) with something that makes me really happy and that I always want to do more of (reading for pleasure), I genuinely look forward to going to the gym and will often spend way more time exercising than I planned.

I was surprised at first with how much happier I’ve been as a result. I’m not sure if it’s actually the endorphins, or the “badass”-ness I feel from coming back to the office at 3am and sitting down for another hour or two of work (I mentioned my schedule was nutty), or finally being able to move books off my reading queue, but I’ve noticed a definite uptick in my mood and body image as a result. I’ve run something like 75 miles over the last six weeks (I make it to the gym an average of three times a week), and I’m looking forward to my numbers (I love you, Runkeeper!) going ever upward.

I saw this line recently in the middle of a job posting, and I had a strong reaction – two, actually, in opposite directions. First, one of amusement and being mildly taken aback. Sure, they’re honest, but that’s a bit of an aggressive and unrealistic requirement, isn’t it? I almost wanted to scoff, ‘Who are you to demand to rearrange my priorities?’

But of course, the other side had its say as well – why, after all, shouldn’t these founders (who were looking for their third) hold any new teammates to standards as high as those that they themselves adhere? At least they list their expectations out for everyone to see, and hopefully avoid problems further down the road.

I’m torn – what is the right way to handle your pet project? I came into this summer wanting a ‘real startup experience,’ one with late nights and young techies bonding over their mutual misery labor. I complained about most people in my office heading home by 7, despite the smaller and otherwise generally ‘startup-y’ feel. But then, faced with an opportunity to interview with a company that would expect more of me – expect me to make it the primary (only) focus in my life. And I don’t know, after all, if that’s what I want anymore.

I do want to care a lot about my work, be heavily emotionally and professionally invested in my product, and I wouldn’t mind it if everyone stuck around until 9 or 10 most nights… but I also appreciate having good friends outside of the company, and coming home to a roommate who cares more about my personal and emotional health than necessarily the health of my professional career.

In any case, I think this is going to be something I’ll be revisiting over and over again in the coming years, and something that will be heavily dependent on my professional focus. We’ll see what happens… and I’ll leave with a quote from a serial entrepreneur’s thoughts* on “Rules for Web Startups”:

#10: Be Balanced

What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can’t be all the time. Nature requires balance for health—as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I’ve found than David Allen’s GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you’ll have a secret weapon.

* I actually hate the term ‘serial entrepreneur.’ But I suppose Evan Williams has done pretty damn well for himself, and while I want to resent him for trashing this style of working, some part of me supposes he can’t be entirely wrong about everything.

I was at the SF MoMA this past weekend – and if you’ve ever been, you’ll (hopefully) know that in their standing collection is a set of art from a number of particularly interesting artists, one of whom (Duchamp) is known best for a work photographed here. This is Fountain:

It’s a urinal. It’s a run-of-the-mill, yes-he-really-did, urinal. Made into art (and thus deserving of a spot inside the MoMA) simply by declaring it as such.

Of course, some amount of reputation was required to pull that off, and some other, more traditionally respectable work had to be done to acquire said reputation, but in the end – he’s able to pull something someone else technically “made,” and enhance it for his own purposes.

In the software world, there are those who seem to find it unthinkable to use off-the-shelf products to help with the engineering process in-house. While this attitude has certainly led to plenty of innovation (thank you for Cassandra, BigTable, etc), these special cases seem to really only be the extreme of the “there’s nothing out there just for us” attitude. And, I suppose, to play devil’s advocate, in their situation, off-the-shelf tools probably aren’t quite right for their incredibly unique case. (Or maybe they just had too many engineers and not enough game-changing projects?)

In any case. One of the things I’m getting used to at Aardvark – and starting to really appreciate the wisdom of – is utilizing existing and established solutions when necessary. We need bug/ticket tracking? There’re tons of solutions out there – done! Better log analysis? Found, installed, done. System and cluster monitoring? Perhaps not entirely ideal, but good enough – done. It lets the team know what we need to know, and gets us free to focus on what we really need to get done – the core product and infrastructure.

I joined a conversation this past weekend with a couple of people just starting to get their startup off the ground, and they were embroiled in a CouchDB vs MySQL debate – are relational databases really outdated, or are document-based databases just overhyped? Which is the better to start with for their startup? My answer – whichever makes your actual job easier. There are lots of cool toys out there, but there’s a careful risk vs. reward tradeoff you have to make – and when you’re focused on startups, can you really afford an awkward risk down the line with your data or architecture?

I suppose this is a long, elaborate rephrasing of “Worse is Better.” Take shortcuts and the quick, easy, established route to change the world, first – then figure out how to make it happen better.