Leo Bottary describes how four people met at an event, then spontaneously ran 14 kilometres together without knowing the distance beforehand. He uses the run to show how peer support and acting without overthinking can push you past what you thought you could do alone.
then you can learn and grow and do some extraordinary things. So, and the fact is that you all can help one another though in ways that you will not find anywhere else, and that's precisely what we're going to talk about today, is how we go about doing that, how we take what you have here in an event and be able to capture it in a way and extend it throughout your life, both in terms of business and personal. Before I do that though, I want to share a story and This story happened yesterday. So you'll probably recognize some of the people in this photo. There's Rafael, of course, just got off the stage. There's Miguel, Ryan, and myself on the right-hand side. We went on a run yesterday at Miguel's invitation. And Miguel said to us before we left for this trip, "Hey, you guys want to go for a run Wednesday morning? Might be kind of a nice way to do, you know, just get out there and—" bond and all. So we said, "Sure, let's go out and do a run." So we bring our running gear and we get here and we enthusiastically show up on Wednesday morning and we get out there. And it made me think about your theme: play, think, start, scale, enjoy. And it made me think about the one thing that we forgot to do was think. Because what was the one question that we didn't ask Miguel before we started this run? How far are we going? Right? Seriously. I mean, you know, so you've got these people here, right? Never met. We don't know what everyone's respective fitness level is. We just show up ready to go. We're going to go for a run today. And so sure enough, Miguel gets us going and I'll bet if I asked Ryan or Rafael and said, hey, how far did you think we were going to go? 5K? 8K at the most? Oh no, 14K. He takes us out on a run. Killed us. So of course, Miguel could have done this run on his own. For us, however, there's no way. First of all, if he ever told us it was going to be 14K, we would have said, that's great. We're staying in bed. We are not going to do that. Because quite frankly, we probably all had some self-limiting beliefs about that. Quite frankly, the 3 of us have never run anywhere near that distance in years. So the idea that we would go on that run that day happened, and we completed that run. Now, in fairness, this is not the finish of that run. This is about halfway. Stopped, Ryan took a quick selfie, and we were ready to go, right? We looked much worse, actually, after the completed run. But I'll tell you this, there was something about the, just first of all, not knowing what we were getting ourselves into, just blindly going forward. You think about that as an entrepreneur oftentimes. You want to always overthink all the challenges you're going to have in front of you, and yet at the same time, how cool is it when you just get out there and you're just going to do it? You're going to somehow, through some force of nature, make that happen. Again, I think Miguel could have certainly done this run on his own. For us, however, we lifted one another up. You know, we smiled at one another, we looked at each other, we were all in the same boat, we were misery loves company, we were all of those metaphors when it comes to doing this run. But it was really remarkable because at the end of it, we accomplished something, as small as that may seem, to just do, you know, a run that day that we never could have done without one another's support and help.
