On Running and Failing
Three Things #93: November 12, 2023
Other than building Spacemesh, the hardest thing I do is distance running. In fact, the difficulty is why I started running. The idea of running a marathon, all 26.2 miles, felt totally absurd and impossible when I was younger. I decided to run my first marathon 11 years ago because I somehow knew that, if I could accomplish something that seemed truly absurd and impossible, then I could accomplish anything I put my mind to.
They may not seem related but there is a direct line from my first marathon to Spacemesh. I’m absolutely certain that, if I hadn’t taken on that challenge, I wouldn’t be taking on this one today (and I wouldn’t have taken on many intermediate challenges along the way). As I wrote before, finishing that first marathon gave me enormous confidence in all areas of life. Lack of confidence had been the main missing ingredient, the main thing holding me back, and having confidence has been a huge factor in everything I’ve done since then.
Launching Spacemesh in 2023 is also an act of confidence. The blockchain landscape is increasingly crowded and complicated and even projects that have raised tons of money, have huge teams, and have very high valuations are struggling to define themselves and attract and retain users and developers. Today Spacemesh is a shrimp among much bigger, better resourced and more well known projects. That may not always be the case, but it is for now. Launching Spacemesh today is a bold statement that the existing blockchain landscape, crowded and complex as it is, is incomplete and dissatisfying in some key ways, and as I wrote two weeks ago it’s also a statement that things like good tech, community, and decentralization still matter.
Since that first marathon I’ve run around 10 others and dozens of shorter races. This year I decided to try something different, and a bit harder: to run a marathon in three hours. That’s an absurd thing to do at my age, and given my busy schedule—with a toddler in the house, and being on the road a lot—but running my first marathon my first semester of grad school was also absurd. I decided to spend the past 6-7 months training for a three hour marathon, which has long been a sort of “pie in the sky” dream. It’s an arbitrary, round number, and a serious stretch goal, but I trained really hard for it. It’s even crazier trying to do this in New York, rather than a flatter, easier course such as London, Chicago, or Berlin. My goal was to qualify to run the Boston Marathon.
The marathon finally happened last weekend. I ran the first 15 or so miles perfectly at my target pace, and in retrospect it was one of the peak experiences of my life. As long as I live I’ll never forget crossing Brooklyn with the fastest pace group of the race, listening to the crowd screaming. Then everything fell apart shortly after this when I had a breakdown due to dehydration, and I struggled through the rest of the race. In the wake of the race and of failing to achieve my objective after training so hard for so long, I’ve been reflecting on running, on failure, and on what it means for Spacemesh.
Here are three ways I deal with failure.
Thing #1: Look on the Bright Side 🌝
Of course I’m disappointed that I failed to achieve my marathon objective. It’s especially frustrating given how hard I trained and prepared for it. But running a marathon (especially the NY marathon!) is like trying to launch a rocket: lots of things can go wrong, and absolutely all of them need to go right in order to succeed. Right after the race I briefly considered giving up on marathons entirely, but by the next day I knew I’d run another one soon, so there will be future opportunities.
It’s cliche but true: every cloud has a silver lining. In reflecting on my failure I can’t help but consider the good. And there’s plenty of good. Yes, I made a critical error and failed to achieve my objective. But I learned a lot about myself, about running, and about how to achieve that objective. I will be much better prepared next time. It’s hard to learn from warnings and from other people’s mistakes. I won’t make that same mistake again.
I’m also in the best shape of my life thanks to my training. The race provided a clear, concrete objective at a specific point in time, and it provided necessary structure for that training, but the real value is in the training, not the race. I’ve done things this year that I never thought were possible: running farther, faster, and in more difficult circumstances than ever before (e.g., running 12 hard miles on foreign soil immediately after getting off a transcontinental, redeye flight a few days ago). I’ve run nearly every day this year and missed only a small handful of days due to sickness.
And as hard as the breakdown was, I actually managed to recover. I had three or four impossible miles, miles when it was literally just one foot in front of the other. My entire world shrank down to those few footsteps, to the mile remaining to the next fluid station. Initially I promised myself I’d run fast. When that was no longer possible I promised myself I’d at least keep running. When that was no longer possible I walked, but only briefly. I then promised myself I’d keep moving forward, and I kept that promise. I drank amply at every fluid station and gradually began to feel better and pick up my pace. Eventually I was jogging again, then running again. I never got back to my original, fast pace, but the last couple of miles were quite solid and respectable, and the first half was so spectacular that, in spite of the abysmal second half, I still finished with a PR that was much, much better than my previous best time. That was down to my training, too, and to recognizing when I had pushed too far, and dialing it back as necessary in order to sustain and recover.
The bright side is I finished. I have yet another marathon medal to add to the collection—and an excellent story to tell about earning it. I made a mistake, I suffered for it, and I learned a lot. That’s not such a bad outcome, is it?
Spacemesh had something of a breakdown, too—several, actually—before the race even started, but we finally made it to the start line when we launched in July. The first few miles were bumpy but we made very rapid progress. Now the first part of the race is over and we’re entering the difficult part. The initial burst of enthusiastic energy is gone. The easy growth is gone. We’re in the part of the marathon—and it is a marathon—when we need to sustain the improvements and the growth for the long haul. We’re basically out of money, it’s difficult to raise more money, and people keep suggesting that we do things that are against our values, such as issuing more coins for ourselves or bribing people to list the coin. Spacemesh hasn’t failed, not by a long shot, but we’re facing some strong headwinds.
But there is also a lot to celebrate. Most obviously, the network is still alive and healthy. The growth is steady and impressive. The community is small but extraordinarily high quality, full of missionaries who are here for the marathon as we are. And we have a uniquely talented team to lead the way.
When things get frustrating I remind myself of these things, and of how lucky I am to be working on this problem set in this place and at this time. Just as I reminded myself how lucky I was to be running the NYC Marathon in beautiful autumn weather, surrounded by other passionate runners from around the world, and to be alive and physically capable of doing so.
Thing #2: Redefine Success 📝
We have a bad habit of letting other people define success for us, and we tend to let society and social norms define how we think about success. In mainstream, modern American society this tends to mean going to the right school, getting a high-status, high-paying job, marrying a beautiful partner and having lots of beautiful children, all the while posting about the journey on social media and making it all look effortless. In marathoning this typically means running lots of races in exotic destinations at faster and faster speeds, sometimes on an insanely aggressive schedule, all the while wearing expensive, branded gear, posting about the journey on social media and making it all look effortless. In blockchain this typically means being autistic and good at math, raising ungodly sums of money, hiring tons of people who pretend to be busy, creating shitcoins with artificially inflated market caps, making a lot of noise about the process, and never building anything that normal people use or care about—you guessed it, all the while posting about the journey on social media and making it all look effortless.
Escaping from this mindset and figuring out how to define success on my own terms took a long time and it was one of the hardest things I did, but it’s also one of the things that’s made me the happiest over the long term. While I could talk about what this has meant in various aspects of my career and personal life, this issue is about marathoning and about Spacemesh so that’s what I’m going to focus on here.
When I began running years ago I made the intentional decision not to care about pace, speed, or performance in races. I decided that my goal was simply to challenge myself, get healthy, burn extra energy, and most importantly to enjoy myself along the way. Over the years as my running got more intense and more serious I tweaked those goals a bit but I never abandoned that original principle. The one metric I began to pay attention to was distance: for some reason I’ve always been more captivated by the notion of running impossible distances than the idea of running fast. Far has always felt more challenging to me than fast. I’ve not yet attempted an ultramarathon, mainly due to time constraints, but I did reach a point in my training a year or two ago when I was running around 100 miles per week (the equivalent of about four marathons per week), which is pretty insane for someone who isn’t a professional runner.
This year I decided to try some new challenges, just for fun and to see what I’m capable of. I decided to run every single day for an entire year regardless of the weather, logistics (including baby, travel, lack of sleep, etc.), or how I’m feeling (barring serious illness). And I decided to try to run a marathon fast for once. I don’t think I actually expected to achieve these objectives, but I believe in constantly challenging myself and trying new things.
The year isn’t quite over but I’ve more or less succeeded in the first goal. And I totally failed in the second. But I was never playing by anyone else’s rules and I don’t intend to start now. The moment I knew during the marathon last weekend that I wasn’t going to achieve my goal, I had already begun to redefine success in my mind. Success in those difficult moments, over those difficult miles, was literally one foot in front of the other, making it to the next fluid station. Then it was jogging without walking. Then, finally, it was crossing the finish line, then recovering and spending time with family to celebrate. Then it was going for an easy jog the next day, and a longer run the day after that. Recovering from a very difficult marathon and running at my usual pace and distance three days after the race is also success.
I haven’t decided what my next marathon goal will be, but—in spite of what I may have felt in those dark, difficult moments last Sunday—I’m sure there will be another goal and another marathon before too long.
The situation with Spacemesh is a bit more complicated. Building a successful, valuable blockchain ecosystem is more involved than running a marathon (even if it does feel like one). I’ve never cared about vanity metrics like market cap or transaction volume; those in no way, shape, or form translate to the things that really matter, like human joy. From the beginning I decided that one of my goals was simply to help develop the technology, prove that it works, and release it to the world as open source software. I deeply wanted to prove that there are viable alternatives to proof of work and proof of stake. I’m extraordinarily proud of the work we’ve done designing, building, and launching proof of space time and the rest of the Spacemesh protocol over the past few years, and we have indeed proven that it works. The fact that all of our research and engineering is open source and permissively licensed means that it’s a gift to human society, regardless of what happens to Spacemesh. In this respect we’ve already succeeded.
Of course it would be wonderful if we can continue to develop the technology, to make it even easier for people to mine from home, and if the community continues to grow and the coin someday has real value. If we can find a way to do this that’s sustainable and in line with our values then I’m all for it. Right now we’re struggling to raise money because many investors don’t understand our economics (less short-term pumponomics, more long-term, long-tail wealth creation), and because the market is really crowded with projects that are happy to play short-term games (and make a lot of noise about it on social media). I don’t know what the future holds for Spacemesh but one way or another I’m confident that it will work out and that the future is bright.
Being comfortable defining our own success metrics is a big part of that. Spacemesh has made it this far playing by our own rules, and as a result we launched despite having raised one to two orders of magnitude less money than projects of comparable complexity. If we continue on our slow burn trajectory and it takes Spacemesh a while to take off, but the trajectory is as positive as it is right now, I’ll consider that a huge success.
Thing #3: Play an Infinite Game ♾️
On some level nearly everything in life is a game. Making money is a game. Dating is a game. It goes without saying that sports and fitness are games, too. Each game is different but they all have a few things in common. For one thing, games have rules. They have a defined set of players and referees. They have a start point, an end point, and an objective. As I’ve matured and moved through the world I’ve seen the outlines of these various types of games come into focus. If you pay close enough attention you can often figure out the rules of a game, and once you’ve done that you’re already halfway to winning.
Running is a game within a game within a game. The immediate, small game is the race right in front of you. The players, the objective, and the start and end time are immediately evident. The medium sized game is the season. You have a certain number of months to train in good weather before it gets too hot or too cold, you have races scattered throughout the season, and you usually have one big event—in my case, a marathon—at the end of each season. The biggest game of all is your career, which of course consists of many seasons. You may decide to increase or decrease your training in a given season, or to set different objectives. It’s important to understand that these various levels of games are all interconnected: what you do in a season will impact each race that season, and if you make a serious mistake in a race it can even impact your entire career. In other words, it’s actually all one, big game.
This is one way to think about running. It’s a popular way to think about running, about most sports, and about life in general. It provides a comforting degree of structure and quantification. Runners love numbers: we track our distance, our gear, our heart rate, our VO2 max, our stride length, our breath rate, and tons of other statistics.
But it’s not the only way to think about running, and I think it’s not the healthiest way to think about running or about life. To be clear there’s nothing wrong with tracking miles or pace or with training to improve them. But if that’s all you’re focused on while you’re running then you’re missing the point. Because the real point of running, at least for me, isn’t winning. It isn’t miles or speed. It’s being in the moment and enjoying every single run, every single mile, easy or hard, fast or slow, hot or cold. I don’t always succeed in doing this, especially when I’m getting my ass kicked on a hard race, but when I can achieve it, it’s glorious.
There was a moment in the marathon last weekend that I alluded to above: somewhere around miles 5-10, when I fell into stride with the 3:00 marathon pace group. Before this I was running on my own, and then when I first joined the pace group it took a while to get into stride with them. The course was crowded and I was constantly having to dodge around slower runners. And after, I began to really struggle to keep up. But for those glorious few miles I was totally, completely in the zone. It was one of the peak experiences of my life—crossing Brooklyn during the greatest marathon on earth in the greatest city on earth with the very fastest pace group, feeling confident, listening to the crowd screaming at us—that I will never forget as long as I live. If I’m lucky I might get to experience something like that once or twice more in my lifetime.
In the moment I don’t think I fully appreciated how magical the experience was, but when I reflected on the race it immediately hit me. I didn’t realize the magic at the time but I was in the zone and fully present, and that’s what it’s all about, far more than an arbitrary goal time.
This is a good example of the fact that the only way to win a game is to opt out of the game in the first place, and instead to play by your own rules. For me this means running way more miles than I probably should, just for fun and usually without any particular aim, just because I love running so much. I had some minor running-related injuries a few years ago, and my doctor told me I should cut back on the running. Cutting back didn’t help. When I instead leaned into the running and increased the miles a lot, the injuries went away and haven’t come back.
Playing by my own rules means belatedly trying to become fast past age 40 when I’m already way past my prime. It means going on crazy, epic runs around foreign cities while I’m traveling for work, which tend to be more about exploration than about fitness. It means running in all weather: in the rain, on the coldest and hottest days of the year, and even in heavy snow! It means paying peripheral attention to those numbers but recognizing that they’re probably not that accurate in the first place and they’re not why I run. It means being extraordinarily grateful for my 2023 marathon experience in spite of failure.
Back to Spacemesh. I sort of outlined the typical game for blockchains above: raise a ton of money, make a lot of noise, buy a community with tons of marketing, and then maybe think about shipping something. While this game does tend to involve making gobs of money it doesn’t tend to involve doing so in an ethical way or in a way that aligns incentives and creates real value for everyday people. It should be pretty clear that we opted out of this game at Spacemesh a long time ago. That ship has sailed; good riddance.
We’re playing an infinite game at Spacemesh and we’re not playing by anyone else’s rules. I think the most important way we do this is by slowing down and taking our time. While we’d all love to see the community grow, the coin price to increase, etc., it’s important that it happen in an organic, sustainable way (rather than, e.g., due to an airdrop or some stupid, inauthentic marketing campaign), and that we enjoy and appreciate the process of getting there. We believe that we should put our hearts into every line of code we ship and every interaction with our community. We should appreciate the small wins: getting to genesis, reaching one million storage units (64 PiB), reaching 100 days live, etc. And it means always following our north star: ignoring those tempting vanity metrics in favor of working to create joy and economic sovereignty for everyday people everywhere. As long as we remain true to that goal we cannot fail.