My friend ran the Brooklyn Half this weekend. I spent the weekend fused to a heating pad with a pulled back muscle. We were living very different lives!

But when we chatted about the race she told me she beat her previous time by ten minutes. And she said “I could've gone faster. I just couldn't get out of the pack”.

She had the capacity to go faster but the environment limited the outcome. The distinction between your capacity and the conditions is something I think about a lot as a founder.

I’ve learned that opportunities/openings often don't announce themselves. They appear inside of the chaos. Or on a slow Tuesday. Or in a conversation that wasn't supposed to be anything. And then they close fast.

The times I’ve missed them wasn’t because I wasn’t “in the room” it was the times when I skipped the invisible prep work.

The story I sometimes tell about applying to business school is usually that I applied at the last minute and to only one school and got in. What I’ve left out is the part before it. I was living abroad. Studying for the GMAT on nights and weekends, alone. Cold-emailing alumni. Getting on calls with professors. Meeting up with alumni asking questions I’m embarrassed by now. By the time I hit send on the application, it felt like a formality. I knew I was getting in, it felt inevitable. I was just waiting for the paperwork to confirm it.

Running in the pack is real. There are external forces - market conditions, your network, your runway - that will limit your pace regardless of how hard you push. I'm not saying that preparation erases all of that.

But what I am saying is that sometimes the pack... is you. Matching the pace of people operating at a lower level. Taking advice calibrated for a different founder. Avoiding the debrief because your afraid of the critique.

The invisible training is the honest accounting of what was in your control and what wasn't. For me, it looks like running a transcription tool on every sales, partnership, and investor call, then reviewing them alone, individually and in batches. It’s tedious AF but it has made me significantly sharper in those calls.

Maybe the opportunity has already been here and you watched it go by. Maybe it's the next conversation, the next pitch, the next slow Tuesday. You can't control when it shows up but you can control whether you're ready when it does. Which was the long way of reminder you to stay ready so you don’t have to get ready. 😉

Talk soon!
Kelly

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