Midline Monday: why not you?
Running 250 miles, having the courage to try and minimizing regret.
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Weekly Reflections
Last week, Rachel Entrekin won the Cocodona 250; a 250-mile ultramarathon across the Arizona desert. She finished in roughly 56 hours. She slept for just 19 minutes, beat everyone in the field - men included - and shattered the course record by over two hours.
During the race, she maintained a simple mantra: why not you?
She reflected afterwards: “maybe especially women, we tend to talk ourselves out of even trying to do things, because we think that we’re not qualified, or we don’t have the experience… But why not? Why not try?”
She wasn’t talking about running 250 miles. She was talking about the habit of self-disqualification. The habit of ruling yourself out before the game even starts.
Theodore Roosevelt gave his famous Man in the Arena speech in 1910. The credit, he said, belongs not to the critic but to the man in the arena. The one whose face is “marred by dust and sweat and blood.” The man who strives, errs, falls short, and keeps going. Who at worst fails while daring greatly.
The man in the arena is not guaranteed to win, but has the courage to try.
Author Dan Pink spent years studying the science of regret. His conclusion: we mostly regret the things we don’t do.
Regret from action fades. But regret from inaction festers and calcifies. The business you didn’t start, the conversation you avoided, the race you never entered. Those regrets tend to linger
Pink identifies boldness regrets as among the most common and most painful: I wish I’d taken that chance. I wish I’d bet on myself.
Bezos didn’t make the decision to start Amazon based on a spreadsheet, he used something he calls the Regret Minimization Framework.
He asked himself: when I’m 80 years old and looking back, will I regret not having tried this? The answer was yes. So he went for it.
He didn’t know if it would work but knew he’d regret not finding out.
That’s a useful question to carry around. Not will this succeed? That’s unknowable.
But will I regret not trying? That’s a question you can usually answer honestly.
When I audit the things I’m genuinely proud of in my life, there’s almost always a moment of uncertainty followed by a decision to go anyway.
And I wouldn’t trade any of them.
I wonder sometimes about the moments where I didn’t rise to the occasion. Perhaps there’s a version of events I’ll never get to see because I stood at the edge and stepped back.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: failure doesn’t happen when you go for it and miss.
Failure is doing nothing.
Rachel Entrekin ran through the Arizona desert for two and a half days on nineteen minutes of sleep, asking herself why not me?
It’s a great question.
Why not you?
That’s the work.
Onward 🖤