Everything counts

On the last weekend of October I hope to be standing in Machico, on the east coast of Madeira, at the start of Ultra X: 110 kilometres over two stages, with more than 7,000 metres of climbing between them. I was in Madeira last year and saw the terrain for myself, which is why I entered. It is a real challenge, chosen deliberately, and a race that scares me a little gets me out of the door on the mornings when nothing gentler would.

The training is mapped through to race weekend, and it has not gone to plan. I am playing catch-up against the deadline. I am using Claude to manage the training: it has access to my health data, including Strava, so it knows my training history, and it has the race details, so it knows the goal I am working towards. There is an overall plan to race day, each week my training and health metrics get reviewed against it, and the plan for the week ahead gets updated. The deadline keeps everything focused. It sits on the calendar, close enough to be frightening, and the fear is useful.

One of the thoughts I had on a recent morning run came from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits: “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” Nothing is neutral. Every missed training session has an impact, and every session completed gets you closer to the goal. Every vote gets counted, so make sure yours are moving you towards the person you want to become, or in my case, the person I need to be on the start line to complete the race.

On a similar theme, an audiobook that has kept me going on the long runs is Jim Rohn’s The Art of Exceptional Living. Rohn extends the counting to what surrounds you, with the line most people know him by: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” You can widen it to the books you read, the podcasts you run to, the rooms you choose to sit in. Your environment is training you all the time, in one direction or the other, and the only real choice you get is the direction.

Founder-led businesses run on the same arithmetic, with the stakes doubled, because a founder’s votes are counted twice. A choice that trains you also trains the business watching you: the team calibrates to what you do rather than what you say. Hiring is the clearest case. You are choosing the five people your company spends its time with, so the useful interview question is whether this person moves the business closer to the one you set out to build. The same test applies to the opportunities you say yes to, and to whether this quarter’s actions still line up with the mission you wrote down when it was all theoretical.

Accountability is the part that usually goes missing. A set of KPIs, reviewed regularly, is a training plan for a company: an honest record of what happened, set against where you said you were going, with the next month adapted to suit. The review exists to catch drift so that you can adapt accordingly, and it works for the same reason the race on the calendar works: it keeps the goal close enough to change what you do.

I wrote in the spring about why I am building Phoenix Advisory, and that piece ended where this one does: the process, the standard you hold yourself to, and who you become along the way. October will go however it goes, hopefully well. For any founder, it is worth doing the same: set a goal scary enough to change your behaviour, review it regularly, and judge it by the person and the company it is building. Hit or missed, they both remain.