A Running Shoes System
I love systems and hate willpower.
I especially love the simplest systems: pick a goal, understand your existing inertia, work with that inertia to re-route it to somewhere you’d like. Willpower “relies on the weather,” as my old boss used to say, so we need to pretend it doesn’t and will never exist. If it shows up, great, but we don’t need it. Systems will do.
I’ve used this example before but it’s a great one — in 2018, I decided I wanted to run a marathon even though I’d never run more than 6 miles before. The big change I made was to put my running shoes on every morning for seven months.
If I didn’t run, at some point during the morning I had to tuck my tail between my legs and change out of my shoes. This made me feel like an idiot.
On the days I didn’t feel like running I’d say, “I’ll do a mile then shower and change,” but, once I was out there, I ended up doing 3 or 5 or 10.
As a result of putting running shoes on every morning (a tactic lots of people before me have used), seven months later a marathon happened. It was a side-effect.
About six weeks in the running part was automatic, so I started looking into running programs and diet and other ways to be a better runner. But, those things only happened after that early momentum.
The problem I’ve found helping our founders build systems is that they want to jump straight to that second part. They ask questions things like whether their system should be in Notion or Airtable, which is maybe relevant long-term, but not the place to start. Your first system should be as simple as humanly possible — the “put on your running shorts” of systems.
So, today, on this sunny and beautiful (at least in Connecticut) Sunday, I challenge you to make a ”Running Shoes System” for next week. A way to build inertia in a dead simple way towards something you want.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you want to run more customer interviews — or, better, become the type of person that’s always talking with customers.
Here’s the approach:
Goal: Speak with customers every day.
Running Shoes: A Word doc each morning that you spend 30 minutes on that has ideas and tactics for speaking with customers. Five minutes at the end to be spent on a “journal entry” — what you did and what you might try next time.
Visual Reminder (shame if it doesn’t happen): Five post-its on your monitor, with the days of the week on them, that you have to leave up if you don’t spend your 30 minutes in the Word doc.
The beauty of this approach is how little the “technique” matters. Who cares what your first day of 30 minutes looks like? Maybe it’s completely unoptimized and you spend 15 minutes researching questions or watching Tacklebox content. Fine. The next day you’ll be closer. And if you do it every day your subconscious will start working for you — it’ll want to fill that Word doc so that your mornings are easier.
This doesn’t have to be startup related, too. Try it for eating healthy or speaking with friends or whatever else you’d like — the goal is to start to get a feel for systems so that we can extend them across other parts of your life.
We’ll get more complicated with them, but step one is having them exist in the easiest possible form.