A Startup Misogi
Back in 2023, a friend and I were scheduled to do the North Fork Century, a 100-mile bike ride that meanders through the North Fork of Long Island.
Two nights before the race we stared at a weather forecast that called for “2 inches of rain and gusts of wind up to 45mph.” The race, famously, has no refunds and is never cancelled. An email from the organizer told us that it’d be “pissing rain out of a garden hose,” which, while the words made no sense, got the point across.
I was hitting send on the “this is just too much, maybe next year?” text when my friend beat me to it.
“Nice! This is shaping up to be a Misogi.”
A Misogi Challenge
I won’t pretend to have any insight into the actual background of Misogi. Wikipedia and a few articles tell me it’s a Japanese practice of purification - people would (do?) take yearly pilgrimages to waterfalls, lakes, and rivers and dunk themselves in. It’s a reset chock full of rituals and spiritual components. I love the sentiment.
This idea was, apparently, adapted by Jesse Itzler, a guy who I also won’t pretend to know anything about, into the “Misogi Challenge.” The idea is to do one extremely challenging thing each year - something that gives your year a visible dent, like a boulder dropping on the hood of an old Cadillac.
As I rode through torrential wind and rain around mile 80, the power of the Misogi settled in. This ride was so hard, so unique, so out of the ordinary (and had required so much training), that it’d define my year. It’d set the tone and be the headliner. I’d look back in 10 years and say “oh, 2023, that was the year we did the 100 mile bike ride in a tropical storm.”
A Misogi is yearly proof that you can do hard things, maybe the most important thing to remind yourself of. For months after that ride, I had a little extra juice. I’d rode 100 miles in the rain, surely I could cold email my favorite 20 authors to see if they’d chat with me about writing a novel or wake up at 5am for a month to get started on it. And, it had me brainstorming for the next one.
A good Misogi is a singular event that requires planning, training, the support of people around you, and an enormous amount of mental toughness. Physical challenges are the obvious ones - a marathon is five months of life-shaping training leading up to a singular event.
But Misogi’s outside of physical challenges - say, in the startup world - are harder to find but just as useful.
Startup Misogis
A good Misogi is a blend of willpower and the inability for you to back out. I guess I could’ve technically stopped riding on mile 25, but it was unlikely once I started.
So, to find your “Startup Misogi,” you’ve got to work backwards from a thing you can’t get out of once you commit to it. You need to put yourself on the hook.
Maybe you’ll spend an uncomfortable amount of money on a booth at a conference in five months where tons of customers will be, then commit to having something specific at that booth (a certain type of demo, say) that’ll be irresistible to your SOM. If you’re selling to colleges, maybe you go on a 30-day tour of the east coast where you hit 3 colleges a day and try to sell to them (and spend two months before that sorting out logistics and building the assets you need). If you’re making probiotic muffins, maybe you rent a slot at the farmers market for the season.
Startups are a mental slog. There’s a lot of repetitive work that usually leads to results that are 30% positive, 30% negative, 40% unsure, and our brains don’t know what to do with that. And if you just keep that pattern - do stuff, get a mixed result - it’s easy to lose the plot and get discouraged. Your startup will become a living, breathing set of moving goalposts. And, most importantly, your progress will look exactly like everyone else's. A disaster in a world defined by contrast.
A good Misogi will do the opposite. It’ll be a firm thing you’re building towards. It’ll make you nervous and excited. It’ll feel completely different and color your year. It'll separate you from competition. And, it’ll be portable.
When people ask how things are going - the scariest question you can get as an entrepreneur - you’ll have an answer.
“Actually, we’re in sprint mode building towards X.”
When you look back, you’ll say “oh right! 2025 was the year we _____. Can you BELIEVE we did that?!”
That last sentence, “can you believe we did that?”, is what life’s all about. And we can orchestrate it. We don’t need to leave it to luck.
So, what could your Misogi be?
Bonus: I collect Life Misogis - please respond with any you’ve done / want to do.
Here’s an incomplete list:
Nine months of bi-weekly Italian lessons leading into a 3-week immersion in Sicily
Invite friends over to a piano concert where you play 6 new songs
Live abroad with young kids for a year (more of a life Misogi)
Publish a book
Hike a section of the Appalachian Trail
Plan a dinner for friends where you’ll cook something extremely complex
Volunteer abroad for a month
Build a barn in your back yard by hand
Bike a section of the Tour de France