Train Like a Startup Athlete
Or why your startup deserves the highest-performance version of you
The Next Founder helps founders build great startups. We offer advice on managing your mental health and productivity, hiring and managing great people, building a strong culture, and keeping people aligned and working on the right things. See the series overview at Welcome to The Next Founder and find out more about me at My Story.
In “Train Like a Startup Athlete,” we’ll discuss what startup founders need to do to perform at their best and stay motivated over the long time period it takes to build a startup.
“Forty-hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess.”1
— Naval Ravikant
“Many people chase achievement, assuming it will lead to well-being. They should reverse that order of operations.”2
— Arthur C. Brooks
"Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
— Gustave Flaubert
Limping along
Your alarm clock blares at 6 a.m. Monday morning. You smack the off button with one hand and grab your laptop with the other, which is easy since it’s still warming your chest from when you passed out working last night. You add the finishing touches to a pivotal customer presentation at 8 a.m.
You mentally rehearse while taking a perfunctory shower and then jump into the meeting. It’s not the trainwreck from last night’s stress dream, but it’s firmly in the “meh” bucket. You stumble through a few sections since you are so tired, and you don’t handle some objections very well since you’re distracted by your long to-do list looming for the rest of the day.
You should have finished the presentation last week, but you couldn’t muster the energy to get it over the line. You didn’t get it done even after canceling all of your Friday meetings and canceling a Saturday morning hike with friends, which would have been your own exercise or social interaction of the week.
You sleepwalk through the day, then go home and dive into the mountain of unread emails that piled up last week. You suddenly sit bolt upright at 8 p.m. and realize you passed out while scanning your inbox. You had hoped to get to the gym for the first time in a week, but that plan is out the window. You were also going to grab a drink with a promising Bumble connection, but you cancel on her for the second time, accepting that you’ve now snapped the elastic on whatever tenuous connection you had built up over a few texts.
You pound some leftover Thai takeout, trying to ignore that your jeans have shrunk a few sizes since you founded your company last year. You reflect that it’s been a week since you’ve exercised, seen your friends, or eaten anything that wasn’t delivered by a guy on an e-bike. You usually rationalize that sacrificing your personal life is worth it for the sake of your startup, but after your mediocre presentation, you wonder if it’s helping your startup, either.
If you slept 8 hours a night, worked out regularly, and kept up with your friends, would your cringey customer meeting have gone worse? No, it probably would have gone better if you had learned to Train Like a Startup Athlete.
The Startup Athlete
Let’s switch the topic to sports; yes, a sports analogy is coming your way.
If you follow the training regimens of top athletes like LeBron James or Lionel Messi, they describe hours of intense drills and workouts, as you’d expect, but they also report sleeping 8-10 hours per night, regular sessions with coaches, nutritionists, and masseuses, monitoring their diet, and deploying meditation and other mindfulness practices to stay focused and balanced.
No one would call LeBron or Lionel “lazy.” We admire their discipline and dedication to their craft. Their fans want to see them do something amazing, and they train so they can deliver. And, not incidentally, tens of millions of dollars are at stake.
While you might not be going toe-to-toe against the best athletes in the world, the same principles apply to a startup founder pursuing a high level of performance over a long time period. And, not incidentally, tens of millions of dollars are also at stake.
If you want to perform, you have to invest in yourself. You have to train.
You probably know this intuitively. If a friend told you they were exhausted, depressed, and distracted since they worked nonstop, ate a crap diet, never exercised, and barely spoke to their spouse, you know what you’d say to them. You’d encourage them to exercise, eat well, invest in their relationships, and prioritize sleep. They’d not only be happier and a better friend and partner, but they’d also produce better work. Win-win!
Then you’d probably return to sitting on the couch, eating tortilla chips, and scrolling TikTok until midnight. Most of us are terrible at following the same advice we happily give to others.
The performance stack
You might be with me so far, but if you are like most founders, you probably aren’t investing in yourself as much as you’d like, and it probably got worse when you started your startup, right when your need to perform hit an all-time high.
A shift in behavior requires a shift in your beliefs, which might require a shift in your identity. If you think of yourself as a hapless startup founder just trying to make it through the day without blowing up, you’ll constantly be in reactive mode. But what if you envisioned yourself as the startup world’s version of an aspiring Messi? What if you saw yourself as a Startup Athlete?3
Your performance as a founder exists at several levels, where each level builds on the level below:
Physical
We don’t want to launch a religious or metaphysical debate about souls and spirits, but we can probably agree on one thing: your brain is part of your body. Your brain is capable of transcendent feats of creativity, but it’s also a blood- and hormone-filled piece of meat. If you doubt this, try building an investor pitch after a redeye and three G&Ts (based on a true story).
When healthy and rested, your brain is a font of creativity and energy that produces excellent work and inspires others. When you are exhausted or stressed, that same brain makes you sluggish and indecisive and avoids the hard decisions and discussions that lie between you and success.
Emotional
Your emotional health is right downstream from your physical health. I’ve heard therapists say half of their business would disappear if their clients ate, exercised, and slept well.
If you aren’t caring for your physical body, your emotional health will go downhill quickly. You’ll be stressed, distracted, anxious, and possibly depressed, which is no way to create great work. You’ll avoid hard decisions, won’t be able to focus, and will find it difficult to connect with your team. You’ll be more likely to quit or shut down your startup prematurely.
Mental
When you picture what startup founders do from day to day, you probably see their mental contributions. On a given day, a founder might build a patentable technical solution, turn a customer insight into a brilliant product design, or salvage a tough customer meeting by flipping a hard question into an opportunity to highlight a product differentiator.
You can’t be sharp mentally if you aren’t in good physical condition and if you aren’t in an emotional state that allows you to attack your work with focus and optimism.
A word about work/life balance
You might suspect we are discussing work/life balance, but we aren’t, not exactly.
As a mental model, “work/life balance” creates a conflict that can never be fully resolved. It implies that an item added to one side of the work/life balance scale has to be offset by one on the other side. “Balance” implies that an hour of exercising is good for you but bad for your company. “Balance” implies that seeing your friends might distract you from work, but the need to make entries on both sides of the ledger demands such compromises.
“Startup Athlete” promotes alignment, not conflict. It promotes performance, not compromise. A good night’s sleep is not a luxury to indulge in on the rare slow day you get through your to-do list. It’s how you get through your to-do list. Time with your partner or friends isn’t what you do when you find yourself with some spare time. It’s how you maintain energy and perspective over a long time period.4
Instead of a balance of opposing forces, training like a startup athlete kicks off a virtuous cycle:
I learned this the year I both became a father and co-founded my third company, Vontu. I maniacally focused on never wasting a moment. I started running and biking to work since I didn’t have time for workouts. I focused on the most critical items at work, even if they were difficult. My company took off, I had my best year of triathlon competition of my life, and my kids are wonderful and don’t have stories about a successful but absent father.
You can also find stories from founders who report their startup years were some of the most miserable of their lives. They report episodes of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, losing touch with friends and family, and even divorce and estrangement. Some quit or were ousted from their companies. Most will tell you that many of these sacrifices didn’t help their companies anyway.
So, how can you turn yourself into a Startup Athlete?
Be honest with yourself
Most of us find excuses for not investing in ourselves. We skipped a workout because we had meetings all day. We ate junk food because we had a stressful day. We drank a third beer because we lost the big deal. We drank a third beer because we won the big deal.
You can always find an excuse, and startup founders have the mother of all excuses: their startup. A founder is always overscheduled and overstressed, so a stressful day can’t be an excuse not to train. Waiting for a quiet day to train will leave you waiting for months, so you may as well train on the bad days, too. It’s how you make the next day a good day.
The startup founders I know who worked at high intensity over a long time period all consistently invested in their physical, mental, and emotional health. They were startup athletes. Most of the ones who failed didn’t, and ironically, even after their startups failed and gave them their free time back, they still didn’t take care of themselves. Hmm…I guess the startup wasn’t the excuse after all.
Prioritize it
The best way to know if you are training like a startup athlete is to look at your calendar.
Do you only work out on a slow day when you have free blocks of time available? Or do you schedule your workout first and then schedule work around it? Do you cancel date night when you get busy, or do you close your laptop, show up, and focus on your partner?
Your training isn’t a luxury. It isn’t what you do on a slow day once all of your work is done and you have some time to kill. Your training is more like brushing your teeth: you don’t only do it on the days you aren’t very busy (or at least I hope that’s the case!)
Yes, there will be some exceptions. When your biggest prospect tells you at 4 p.m. that you need to show up at 8 a.m. tomorrow for a final pitch, you should cancel your workout and your date night and rehearse on the presentation until midnight, but be honest with yourself about how often this really happens. Don’t just cancel date night because you had a bad day. Rally, show up, and turn it into a good day.
Reduce friction
Even if you are supremely disciplined, you have no hope of consistently training like a startup athlete unless you make it easy. Always reduce the friction that stands between you and your training.
For example, working out at a gym is very high friction. You have to join the gym, pay for it, travel there, park your car, change your clothes, work out, change back, and travel home. Gyms know this, which is why they earn the majority of their profits from people who join but never show up.
But what would happen if you lived close enough to your office that you could bike or walk to work every day? To get in a workout, you wouldn’t need to carve out time or tap into your shallow pool of discipline. You simply wake up, lace on your shoes, put your laptop in your backpack, and hit the road for your commute. I’ve done this for 25 years, booking over 20,000 miles and saving thousands of dollars of gas and parking.
You can also design your environment to be conducive to good habits. Don’t stock junk food in your office, even if your team says they want it (they really don’t). Get a set of dumbbells for your home office and do micro-workouts between meetings. Put your office in a neighborhood where it’s easy to go for walks with co-workers for your one-on-ones instead of sitting in a conference room.
Stop beating yourself up over your lack of discipline. Organize your life so that you don’t need much discipline.
Develop routines
Another way to make your training happen is to make it automatic. Create routines that make your training a built-in part of your everyday life.5
Sign up for an exercise class or a group workout at the same time and place every week, probably first thing in the morning. Park in a lot a mile from your office and walk to work, or take the bus halfway and walk the other half. Start the day with a brief stretching and bodyweight workout that you can do in your home office with no equipment. Get a cheap standing desk and join some meetings standing up.6
Many startup founders I know, myself included, schedule a date night with their partner on the same night every week. Some order the same healthy salad for lunch every day. Some do 25 push-ups at the end of every meeting. Some volunteer at a non-profit every Saturday morning. I join a group bike ride with other founders every Friday morning and a group open water swim and happy hour after work.
Don’t expect to get this right immediately. Experiment until you find something that works for you. Once you do, stick with it. You don’t just owe it to yourself, you own it to your startup.
And you will need every bit of energy you can muster to have any hope of doing what we’ll talk about next: Unmask Imposter Syndrome.
Naval Ravikant has a great thread on personal performance, like he does on so many other topics.
Arthur Brooks's great Atlantic Monthly column How to Build a Life is ostensibly about happiness, but if you read it you’ll soon learn that it’s not just about a happy life. It’s about a life full of contribution.
Although you can find similar concepts represented elsewhere, my first exposure was “The Making of a Corporate Athlete” in by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.
Executive Coach Ed Batista’s piece “Investments, Not Indulgences” does a great job driving home this concept.
James Clear’s Atomic Habits is a modern classic for a reason. It has excellent advice on building good habits by making them more automatic.
You don’t need to spend four figures and remodel your house to install a standing desk. You can find small portable ones like this Tripod Stand for under $100.