Why I think physical exercise is the greatest drug known to man and everyone should get high off of it: (in this abstract - im going to talk about running) the other day, two engineers on our team asked me, “why do you run?” I initially gave them a pretty surface-level answer: “physical exercise is necessary for every human blah blah” one of them asked me again, “no, not that. what’s your WHY for running?” took me a lot longer to answer than I anticipated because suddenly I had a million different reasons running through my head. now that I’ve had some time to compartmentalize those thoughts, I think I finally know how to explain it. The beautiful thing about running and what I’ve enjoyed most since starting this journey ~3 years ago, is that I think running is one of the closest simulations we have for life itself. It teaches you: -discernment -pain and pleasure -stoicism -evolution -growth -presence and most importantly…. how to build. (see thread below)

10) Building this might be the biggest one for me. running is the epitome of building. nobody wakes up and runs a great marathon. you build the ability to do it one completely unremarkable day at a time. one run becomes a week of running. weeks become months. 3 miles becomes 5. 5 becomes 10. your lungs adapt. your legs adapt. your mind adapts. eventually you look back and realize you’ve built something that at one point you weren’t capable of doing. i think almost everything meaningful in life is built the exact same way. your career, your body, your relationships, your spirituality, your confidence, your company, your mind. you don’t build any of these things once. you build them every fucking day. when we first started @sideshift_app we had 0 clue what we were doing. we didn’t know how to properly run a marketplace. we didn’t know how to increase network effects. we didn’t have some grand master plan that showed us exactly how to get from 0 to where we wanted to go. sh*t, on paper we were just five degenerate college kids. but we knew we could show up every single day, outgrind the person next to us and keep throwing sh*t at the wall until something worked. we all possessed enough intrinsic motivation, confidence, delusion and swagger to genuinely believe that if we kept doing those things for long enough eventually we’d figure it out. that’s building. and that’s exactly what running teaches you. you don’t need to know exactly what you’re going to look like 1,000 miles from now. you just need to run today. then wake up and do it again. and again. and again. some days you get faster. some days you feel worse. some days it feels like absolutely nothing is changing. but you’re laying another brick. progress often becomes visible long after the work responsible for it has already been done. the person you eventually become is being built during all of the boring days when it feels like nothing is happening. and building isn’t exclusive to companies or careers. you’re always building something. you’re building your mental. you’re building your body. you’re building your spirituality. you’re building your relationships. you’re building your reputation. you’re building your capacity for stress. you’re building your confidence in yourself. a quote from @nicholasnlawton that has always stuck with me is “businesses & dreams die by suicide rather than homicide.” at the end of the day nothing can stop you besides you. god creates. humans stop. so keep moving and keep building.