The Language of Winning

In one of the startups I had worked with, the product was taking much longer than it should have. When I finally got involved in pushing the product, I was told by the founder “It’s a marathon. Not a sprint”. I resigned the next day.

What people think - the startup was in for a prolonged mission which would need a whole lot of patience.

What I inferred - the startup was looking at incessant delays, a whole lot of uncertainty and most importantly, a lack of focus.

Sorry to burst the bubble - but a marathon is a sprint! Let’s see the data:

The average pace for a male marathon runner is 6.43 min/ km for 42 kilometres! In other words, that’s approximately 9 km/h for over 4 hours - CONSISTENTLY! But, this would just make you average - so let’s see what the world record is:

#1: Eliud Kipchoge - 2:01:09

#2: Kenenisa Bekele - 2:01:41

$3: Kelvin Kiptum - 2:01:53

In fact, the 10th fastest has a time of 2 hours, 3 minutes & 4 seconds!

See my point? A marathon is a series of sprints.

So, if you want to have just experienced being a founder in a startup, that’s great. But I have built 2 startups on my own, so I’ve already checked that box. I’m now interested to run .. to arrive.

Another similar line “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Absolutely. It was built every single day. For approximately 800 years!

Don’t get me wrong - you need patience. When I recorded my first episode of “BrainBox”, it was just a 3-minute episode on September 09, 2021. I heard it yesterday & the underlying theme is the same even today.

I worked strategically towards it - got amazing guests, put in a whole tonne of time researching them & one of the most common compliments I get is - “Kaushik, I absolutely love the questions.” Each episode takes about 6 hours of effort.

Fast forward building every day for 18 months, I have had an amazing 55 episodes (18 hours a month), got 23,000+ downloads & we have been voted 9th pan-India by Spotify.

In fact, I had a batchmate of mine tell me just days before I won the award, “Kaushik, Frankly I don’t know what you’re doing with BrainBox. In fact, most of our batchmates don’t understand it either.”

I replied: “I know what I’m doing. That’s all that matters.”

Everything around my podcasts is still free. I get people regularly asking me how to monetise it. Yes, you need patience. But. it’s got to be strategic. And remember, you don’t have an infinite amount of time. If you want to win, you’ve got to be sprinting.

Attaining your dream is about managing results. Not the clock.