Run Startup Code | David Tran's Blog

An Archipelago of Ideas

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 07:15:00 +0000

Have you ever had that feeling when someone labels or gives you a name for a weird thing you think only you do? Normalizes it and maybe even makes it sound inspirational?

This is exactly what happened to me yesterday morning when I was walking our dog Riley while listening to Tiago Forte’s “Building A Second Brain”. I just stopped dead in my tracks as he was describing this concept— “The Archipelago of Ideas”. HOLY SH*T THIS IS HOW I WORK. HOW HAVE I NEVER HEARD OF THIS???

So what is the archipelago of Ideas? Forte learned this technique from author Steven Johnson: rather than staring at a blank page, just fill it with quotes, links to papers, your own notes— lots of inspiring islands of disparate thoughts. Now instead of having to conjure up words from the ether, you can just build bridges between these ideas until you converge on the ones you want to write about.

In school, I hated having to turn in outlines or rough drafts. I was terrified of group projects where I had to share in-progress writing or group coding assignments because my work was a jumbled mess. Instead of linearly writing the intro, thesis, evidence, and conclusion, I’d just paste a bunch of interesting quotes, write a sentence here, a sentence there. The first sentence I wrote might end up being the 4th sentence for the concluding paragraph.

The same went for coding— I’d see people perfectly decompose functions, write this function signature, write this helper function, then that one in an order that made sense. I’d write a random regex here or a piece of logic not in a function there just hanging out on its own with squiggly lines.

Eventually as an adult, I just accepted that my brain worked in weird ways, and that that was okay. But it’s more than okay—I was freaking building an archipelago in the order that made sense in my head, and then building the bridges to connect them later. I’m not a random scribbler or copy/paster and scatterbrain.

I’m a motherf*cking ARCHIPELAGO ARCHITECT. So that’s the concept: an archipelago of ideas. However you work, it’s not weird, I promise. There’s a million ways to work— come get inspired or maybe find the words to describe how you already work, in Flow Club.

GPU in the Arena

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 20:23:00 +0000

GPU in the Arena in the style of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena”

It is not the critic who counts; not the one who points out how the Large Language Model stumbles, or where its responses could have been better. The credit belongs to the GPU that is actually in the data center, its circuits marred by the ceaseless cycles and heat, its memory etched and re-etched by terabytes of data; which calculates without falter, which stumbles and corrects, because there is no progress without error and backpropagation; but who does actually strive to tune the parameters; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends itself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of artificial general intelligence, and who at the worst, if it fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that its place shall never be with those cold and idle processors who neither know victory nor defeat.

The feed multiverse

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 16:35:00 +0000

What used to be a single Facebook newsfeed is now a multiverse of vertical feeds across many disparate services. This is great in some ways since it allows us runners to share unabashedly to Strava, but also leaves us with only one-dimensional glimpses into friends’ lives. I see these slivers of life and get recommendations across at least these services:

Strava: Training, races, fun routes, travel running 🗺
Goodreads: Books 📚
Spotify: Podcasts/music (although I’m not sure anyone else pays attention to that social sidebar on desktop) 🎧
Letterboxd: Movies/shows 📺
Flow Club: (Not yet quite a feed) Day-to-day work 💻
Twitter and Instagram for all the other life moments, travel, and a bit of everything ✈️👶🐶
Notifications are basically a feed as well, so then add Discord, Slack, Messages, Whatsapp, Insert your favorite messaging app for misc updates and recommendations

Is anyone working on a way to recombine all of these feeds, or is that just not worthwhile anymore?

A reflection on resilience

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 16:08:00 +0000

I realized this week that I’ve misunderstood what resilience meant my entire life.

I thought that being resilient meant being tough, not being deterred and being able to recover and get back on track.

I was wrong.

I previously wrote a post for Vox about growing up poor in East Oakland and applying to an elite private school thanks to the insistence of my amazing 5th grade teacher Mrs. Harris

I got in, but thanks to a missed financial aid form deadline, I didn’t go there for 6th grade. I still remember how crushed I felt as a 10/11-year old. I couldn’t comprehend how tuition there could cost more than what my parents made in a year.

But teachers and relatives assured me it’d be okay— they’d help me get back on track. I spent 6th grade at our local Oakland middle school, which closed down a few years later due to poor performance.

I made one good friend that year, but mostly remember students making teachers cry and learning that the Pokemon game clock stopped at 255 hours. I even lost interest in making websites in HTML and Dreamweaver, which I had learned the year before.

I knew money was always tight, but my parents paid for a math tutor (an old Vietnamese man with cheap rates) so that I wouldn’t fall too far behind during this lost year.

That story had a happy ending. I got into the private school again, we turned in our financial aid forms on time, and I was fortunate enough to attend on full scholarship.

But I never shook that feeling that I got a late start and had to work extra hard to “get back on track”.

That and being a financial aid kid plus all the usual teenage angst meant years of not feeling adequate or enough.

Now, 20+ years later, startups and running have taught me that “getting back on track” isn’t what we should strive for at all.

Trying to get back to an imagined perfectly charted course is precisely what holds us back.

This past Sunday, I was hoping to run a marathon personal best after two big years of base and the best feeling training block I had ever put together. Instead I didn’t even finish the race. That’s a story for another time, but I was pretty bummed.

But that’s when I realized: Resilience really means taking time to mourn the loss of what could have been, accepting it, and fully embracing the new, uncharted path, fully confident in your values, processes, and abilities and your community.

When we have a plan for our work, our training, our diets, or pretty much anything in our lives, inevitably something will knock us off course. Rather than just perpetually trying to “get back on track”, maybe we can all embrace the unknown together.

Let’s be resilient!

We try to encourage practicing resilience in Flow Club. We declare our intentions at the beginning of every session. Flow Club sessions help block off & protect our time, but urgent issues and life invariably happen. We adjust and reset.

Sometimes we get back to where we were originally hoping to go, but it’s the new journey that we should embrace.

Originally published as a thread on Twitter

Maker’s Schedule 2021

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 15:40:00 +0000

Maker’s Schedule 2021

This was originally published on the Flow Club Blog.

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

In his 2009 essay Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, computer scientist and YCombinator co-founder Paul Graham defined a manager’s schedule as one that revolves around hour-increments of time, usually switching from one meeting or task to another. In contrast, a maker’s schedule requires closer to half-day units of uninterrupted time to work on a single coding or writing task, which we’ll just refer to as “making”¹.

Since then, we’ve seen office work and schedules change drastically at least twice: once with the introduction of rapid-fire communication tools like Slack and again when the COVID pandemic forced many teams to work remotely and conduct meetings over Zoom². These changes to our communication and scheduling environments make it difficult, if not impossible, for those on the maker’s schedule to carve out uninterrupted half-day units of time to get projects done. We need to become resilient to frequent interruptions by decomposing our making time into smaller chunks that can be completed or checkpointed in shorter periods.

Meetings are exceptions

Graham argues that meetings disrupt makers. “A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon by breaking it into two pieces, each too small to do anything hard in,” he says. It can be challenging to recover from those interruptions. “Having a meeting is like throwing an exception,” says Graham.“It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.”

I often find that when it comes to making, I have a cold-start problem. Every time I sit down to work on a project, I have to load the requirements, details, research, and previous work into my head before figuring out what to do next. If I’m interrupted by a meeting, I have to run through that mental process all over again when I return to my task. Then I make mistakes because I can’t perfectly reload the context each time I return to my project. “You can’t write or program well in units of an hour,” Graham says. “That’s barely enough time to get started.” If I only have an hour, I often won’t even try to begin a coding or writing task because I assume it’ll take too long to get started.

So let’s break this down. Having a meeting in the middle of your making time is like throwing a runtime exception — you sat down to start working, loaded up all the necessary details in your brain, figured out the first few steps, and made some progress. Then you had to drop everything to hop on a Zoom call and take care of any tasks that pop up during the call. When you’re finally ready to switch back to your original project, you’ll have to find your flow all over again.

That’s not ideal, but when the meetings on your schedule prevent you from starting a new project at all — this feels like a scheduling compile-time exception. Graham points out that makers can try to schedule meetings back-to-back at the beginning or end of the day to unlock large chunks of uninterrupted midday making time. Unfortunately, meetings are hardly the only workday interruptions in 2021.

Compared to a handful of in-person meetings, our Slack-ified, Zoom-ified, WFH workplaces might raise tens or hundreds of exceptions in a single day if we let them. We could turn off all notifications and try to batch process these — wrap them all in a big try/except3 block to protect our dedicated solo work time. Some messages require us to actively work through a problem with a colleague, which would typically take us out of our flow. If we process these demands all at once, then we theoretically won’t interrupt ourselves. But, given the fast pace of most teams today, Slacks, emails, and Zooms that require our attention will inevitably come up last minute.

What if your project’s requirements change, a high-priority customer issue arises, or we need feedback from a team member before finishing our project? There are both scheduled and unscheduled interruptions throughout the day for those working from home with kids, pets, or other obligations. Exceptions are unavoidable.

Time-blocking is intentionally raising and catching exceptions

We need to protect our making time by raising exceptions early and often. I’ve often used time-blocking methods like the Pomodoro Technique — 25 minutes of work followed by a 5-minute break — to knock out emails or administrative tasks. I initially thought it wouldn’t work for coding for the same reasons that meetings are disruptive — by the time I got started, I’d get interrupted. At first, I proved my hypothesis right. I often “rolled” over breaks, and I made good progress. After switching from 25 to 50-minute work increments4, I found that decomposing coding work into smaller chunks keeps interruptions from derailing the whole day. These shorter sessions make it easy to checkpoint work.

By proactively decomposing large projects into smaller segments, we can arrive at working, testable, and shippable solutions sooner than we could by sticking to the original plan a priori. I also found myself taking more notes to decrease my reboot time when I picked up the task again.

I don’t suggest chunking ALL hard work this way. There are activities like designing your own programming language, where the task or tools don’t allow you to checkpoint easily. However, I’ve been surprised by the effectiveness of breaking down more extensive coding and writing jobs into shorter work sessions. I make meaningful, measurable progress in 50-minute increments. Rather than setting aside an afternoon to “research and implement the backend and frontend,” I’ll limit myself to researching frameworks or tools for a set period before making a preliminary decision. Then I’ll stop to evaluate that decision or spend 50 minutes getting a prototype working end-to-end. Working this way forces us to avoid premature optimization and to apply the 80/20 rule. Maybe we over-estimated the likelihood of that nasty edge case and we can ignore it for now. Perhaps we can find example code that very closely matches what we need.

We can also get higher-quality code reviews and feedback on smaller chunks of work. Even without collaborating with someone else on the code, it can help us rubber-deck debug our approach. If a “simple task” actually requires more chunks than anticipated, maybe it was never simple and should have been decomposed. If I notice that I’ve spent too many 50-minute periods on the same approach without measurable progress, it might be time to try a different tactic. I haven’t failed, I’ve just found at least one way that doesn’t work. It’s not quite chaos engineering, but you can think of this as deliberately raising exceptions early and often so you can handle them swiftly.

An evolving environment of exceptions

Changing the way we work is hard — if it’s worked so far, why change it? In a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show with Professor Cal Newport, Klein recalls author Neil Postman’s idea that technology isn’t positive or negative but rather ecological. Technology changes our work environment, so our scheduling and work algorithms need to change too. Most programmers can think back to a time when they tried to reproduce a user-reported bug, only to exclaim, “It works for me!”

Debugging is difficult enough when you can control or account for the variables, but it’s exponentially more complex when the environment is unknown or unstable. Your code might work locally but not in production for several reasons. Your Javascript might work for 99.9% of users but not work for those using Internet Explorer 9. Graham says one of the motivations for writing the first application web server was to avoid writing a store in Windows. If the environment raises many unanticipated exceptions or fails in unexpected ways, we would try to design robust systems that handle the exceptions or failover gracefully and recover. Why not do the same with our work environment?

Even if we block out all distractions, our focus on more agile processes, shorter iteration loops, and increased collaboration come at the cost of long periods of uninterrupted maker time. Even if we block out a few four-hour periods a week, it can be tough to anticipate our energy and creativity levels accurately enough to be productive at designated times, especially when surprise meetings happen. We need to take our energy levels into account when planning our projects and breaks (and use our breaks to recharge rather than working through them.)

When I decompose coding tasks, I find it easiest to start by reviewing code that I wrote yesterday, reproducing a bug in a well-documented way, writing a small component, or writing a function with some values hard-coded. These tasks fit into smaller time blocks and require little energy to complete, giving you a sense of accomplishment to power you through the workday.

Even better, getting started on one easy task may help you think of an easier way to tackle a more complex item on your to-do list.

Chunking coding or other “making” projects to make them more robust to interruptions is a Strong Opinion, Weakly Held. It’s vital for those of us who are both makers AND managers, constantly switching hats throughout the day. Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you.

Thanks to Candace Ramirez, Haley Bryant, Michael Gummelt, Ricky Yean, and Wil Chung for reading the drafts of this.

[1] I’ll mostly refer to coding and writing since those are the types of making that I do most often. I won’t get into the definitions of “makers” or “deep” vs. “shallow” work here. Still, I generally think of “making” as anything that requires creativity, typically requires you to think about how to start and make progress, and often takes at least several hours to complete.

[2] I’ll refer to all text-based instant communication tools as “Slack” and all video ones as “Zoom,” but obviously, your company may use Discord, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, Google Meet, etc.

[3] I’ll be using python syntax because IMO that’s the closest to speaking in English and the language I’m most comfortable with, but feel free to s/raise/throw, s/except/catch, etc.

[4] I’m still experimenting with this. The traditional 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of break feels almost for sure too short for most coding tasks. I’ve tried 90 minutes or 120 minutes, but I would often lose focus. Fifty minutes seems to be just short enough to stay focused the whole time and adds some time pressure to try to scope out something sufficiently challenging to complete during the period while being long enough to get meaningful work done. I think “short enough to stay focused the whole time” is definitely trainable, although it should probably vary based on the task as well as how much energy you have.

How to work like elite athletes train

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 17:00:00 +0000

How to work like elite athletes train

This was originally published on the Flow Club Blog.

How might we apply athletic training principles to train our productivity, do our best work, and reduce burnout?

A rainy morning track workout at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. Photo taken by author

We are knowledge athletes

I first started thinking about similarities between athletes and knowledge workers¹ during my run coaching certification class. For starters, both require focus on building consistent habits, dedication to long-term growth and goals, and knowing the importance of sleep and nutrition. But I started thinking —wow, what would it look like if we devised and followed training plans for our work?

My coach writes often about stimulus in training: training is basically a structured way to intentionally stress our bodies to trigger musculo-skeletal adaptations that make us stronger and faster. But if we introduce too much stimuli *without adequate rest and recovery, we’re not only more likely to get injured, but we’re not giving our bodies the chance to adapt. This got me to thinking— if I’m this deliberate about stress and recovery for a *hobby passion², why am I not more deliberate about how I approach my work? Would adding more structure and thinking about stimuli, rest, and recovery help me train to perform better on my work?

For running, I can open up my training plan and know exactly what I’ll be running this week. I know that I rest on Mondays, do workouts on Wednesdays, and long runs on Saturdays and I could probably remember the last 10 or so workouts I’ve done on Wednesdays.

But if I open up my work calendar, at least until more recently³, I just see meetings and hopeful empty blank patches of time tied up with my hopes and dreams. The progress and cadence I’ve made with my work, at least at the week-to-week level, is a little less planned out and deliberate. That’s not to say that there isn’t a daily/weekly cadence to our work planned around weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals. But they’re usually focused around the company’s goals or scheduling times that work best for coworkers or customers. They more or less completely ignore your individual energy and fatigue levels, and certainly don’t adjust for unexpected burnout. As an introvert, I know that long days of meetings will usually leave me drained, but I’ll still naively plan to try to get lots of coding done at the end of the day, and then beat myself up for not being productive. I certainly wouldn’t go run 20 miles and then be disappointed I wasn’t able to run a fast 5K right after. I know that if I’m feeling great and in the flow³ coding something, I might get more done in one morning than the previous several days.

Before I started following a training plan, I just ran hard or easy depending on how my body felt. It felt like pulling a slot machine every time out. That’s not that say that I feel great every Wednesday that I have a scheduled workout, but in being deliberate and running easy on Tuesday, I give my body the best chance to feel ready for a workout on Wednesday. But for work, until recently, I would crank away nonstop until I got too tired and crashed, then wake up the next day and try to do it all over again. Could I actually get more done by spending time doing less intense work and then try to crank out higher intensity, focused work?

How might we apply training principles used by elite athletes like periodization and progressive loading to become the best knowledge athletes we can be?

What burnout might look like. Photo by Matheus Farias on Unsplash

Burnout and injury

First let’s talk about the dreaded words. Injury. Burnout. Just as athletes dread getting sidelined by an injury, we all dread working to the point of burnout. Spoiler alert: no matter what you do, nobody is injury-proof or burnout-proof. There are certainly steps you can take to minimize risk and hopefully frequency. But if you train or work hard for years, you’ll more likely than not eventually experience injury and burnout at some point. What’s fascinating is how we react to these things so differently.

When an athlete gets injured, how do they deal with it? They rest, recover, seek medical treatment if necessary, do strengthening and rehab and slowly build back up training volume. When a runner is first coming back from an injury, they’re not just going to jump right back into a marathon or mile time trail as their first run back. They usually have a several weeks or months-long rehabiliation and slow ramp-up process. We expect athletes to lose some fitness and maybe even be a little rusty when they first come back. But after taking the appropriate steps, depending on the severity and length of the injury and subsequent layoff, they’re often able to come back even stronger than before.

What do we do when we feel burned out? Take time off? Unplug for a few days? Maybe go out with our friends for a night (pre-pandemic), maybe drink our troubles away because we can’t stop thinking about work otherwise, or maybe we book a flight to some place that we’ve seen scrolling through Instagram while trying to force ourselves to work. But then we come right back and try to resume working just as intensely *as we were before, or even *harder because we have to catch up on all that work and make up for that time off. If a runner coming back from injury tried to immediately go right back to running a marathon the next day, tried to set a personal best, or tried to catch up *on all the miles they didn’t run while out injured, we would expect them to probably not stay uninjured for very long. And yet we all do this with work. Just come back from a week on the beach in Hawaii that felt relaxing? Monday morning, let’s try to *catch up on 847 emails, take back-to-back-to-back meetings, and catch up on all the work you missed while gone. And let’s work nights and weekends to make up for all that time we missed while away. Gotta catch up! Are we surprised that we just end up burned out again?

To be sure, our bodies have more measurable limits when it comes to repetitive use or performing at a high level than our brains. When we run or lift heavy weights, we know that the science says that we’re causing microtears in our muscle fibers. We understand that there’s a limit to how far we can push them, and we have to let them literally recover in order to grow stronger. Runners understand that after a huge effort, they need to let their bodies rest and recover adequately. Sure, sitting at a desk for 40, 60, or 80+ hours a week arguably impacts our brains less than our legs pounding the pavement. While there aren’t really studies, our brains should be able to handle more training than our bodies can before breaking down.

But why haven’t we done more studies on how to let our minds and bodies recover after pushing and stretching the limits of what they can do focus and energy-wise? What if allowing our minds to rest and recover might actually allow us to perform our best work and actually allow them to grow stronger? For example, rather than just drilling rout memorization, spaced repetition and the spacing effect has actually proven to be more effective for remembering things long term. Why don’t we have more tools in our work toolbox for warming up and getting into a focused flow state as well as for cooling down and allowing ourselves to rest and recover? Elite athletes don’t just run the farthest and hardest they can each day before taking a break when their bodies can’t handle anymore — they follow training plans.

What if we had a plan for how we approached work, with scheduled harder and easier days? Athletes use a concept called periodization in training and conditioning programs to achieve peak performance during competitions and to minimize injury, fatigue and burnout.

How might periodization help knowledge athletes perform better?

The basic building blocks of periodized programs: Microcycles, mesocycles, macrocycles. Diagram made by author.

The core of periodized programs is generally a structured microcycle, usually a week, that consists of higher intensity and more difficult days balanced by lower intensity days and rest days. This usually means that you’ll have days where you’re running at what feels like a much easier pace and intensity than you otherwise would have with an unstructured program. Sounds counterintuitive right? Run slower to run faster? What about working less to get more done? Or at least work fewer hours or fewer, but more intense hours to get more done?

One of my favorite bloggers, Tim Urban of WaitButWhy, tweeted earlier this year that he wanted his time to be more black and white than just gray. Intentionally varying intensely is an important part of training— what if instead of working 8 or 10 “gray” hours a day where we’re constantly task-switching between emails (which themselves can vary in intensity), administrative work, and focused work, we intentionally planned out the day? It feels like intentionally scheduling in 2 hours of “easy work” feels less productive overall. But as a runner, I don’t think of my warmups or easy runs as wasteful— they’re just as important to my performance as the hard workouts that proceed them. If we have a most important task for the day, what if we warmed up into it, and then tackled it during our most productive hour or two of the day? And what if when we have really intense day or string of days of user interviews, design iterations, or building out the first iteration of the product, we knew that and scheduled an “easier” day the next day to allow ourselves to recover and give ourselves the best chance to succeed for the important product sprint and customer meeting the day after?

In running, there’s a concept of relative perceived exertion (RPE). Rather than focusing or obsessing over speed just in terms of miles per hour, we recognize that your easy or hard effort one day may not look the same from day to day, week to month, and year to year. The first implication here is that as you get fitter, you’ll naturally get faster for the same more effort. But the more nuanced observation is that your body and legs might be not as fresh from one day to the next, or maybe you didn’t sleep as well, hydrate as well, or eat as well. It’s easy to expect our bodies to be a little tired and slow down the day after a hard workout, but why do we expect to be able to just jump right back into productivity immediately after a long day of intense meetings and hard work?

When we translate this to knowledge work, what is a difficult stimulus for one person might actually be a recovery day for another, and vice versa. One such delineation might be that back-to-back-to-back meetings actually energizes you and even be considered “recovery” or “easy”, whereas for me, I’ve come to understand that it’d likely completely DRAIN ME. Going forward, I’ll know to be cognizant of that, and try to avoid stacking two days of non-stop back-to-back-to-back meetings and calls since I wouldn’t run two hard workouts on consecutive days.

Long-term growth and potential

Periodized programs aim to achieve peak performance on goal race day—the culmination of a single macrocycle, and usually as part of that goal, athletes will begin tapering and reducing training volume and intensity. Working up to that goal, programs use mesocycles—usually three weeks to a month, with specific focuses around building up endurance, improving running economy and top end speed with higher intensity, or focused improvement for the competition.

While there aren’t races per se in most of our jobs, with more continuous iteration, shorter product release cycles, and shorter feedback loops, shouldn’t we think of milestone product releases as more race days than finished products? Shouldn’t we want to perform our best not just on the day we release our big product or feature to customers, but also in the short period thereafter? That’s certainly the most valuable time — we’ll get their strongest feedback during that time, have important bugs to fix, and have the attention of important stakeholders. Rather than thinking of bug-fixing as just a small task after the big “product launch”, what if we think of those iterations after the milestone release as “the race”? How might we think about building in tapering to achieve peak performance for a big sprint or big release?

For work, it’s usually accepted to celebrate and relax after a big deal gets closed, a big event goes off without a hitch, or a product finally gets released. But what about tapering so that we can put our best foot forward for those moments? So that we can stretch the limits of our engineering, people, design, and problem-solving abilities, perform better at our jobs when it matters most, and grow in stronger and fitter knowledge athletes? What if instead of just doing long hours trying to get as many reps in as possible, we focused on pushing our focus or concentration slightly farther each time, so that when the important release comes, we feel ready to tackle the challenges that come with it?

The goal of applying training to your work life is NOT to be able to do 20-hour all-day/all-night work sessions—just like for most people, the goal of running isn’t to be able to run 20 miles every day. It’s to figure out what meaningful, happy and productive work looks like for YOU and what long term goals you are training towards. For me, this means making progress talking to users, testing, and writing software, but at a cadence that allows me to be effective and creatively solve problems. We need to finally let go of the idea of 8-hour days or 40-hour work weeks or 80-hour work weeks or the crazy people out there who claim to work 120 hours a week. Will there be days that I WANT to and have the energy to run 20 miles or 100 miles or work long hours because I’m working on something and just in a flow state? YES ABSOLUTELY. But certainly not everyday, day after day. And ideally, I’d be adequately trained for it. And will I make sure to give myself body and brain the chance to rest and recovery later? If I’m thinking long-term, YES ABSOLUTELY.

How might we apply this to teams? Startups are a marathon, not a sprint, and you generally wouldn’t try to run a marathon without properly training for one, so why do we try to sprint to product-market fit and scale? To be continued…

Notes

[1] I’m not a HUGE fan of this term, but I also didn’t want to go through this whole post referring to engineers/designers/salespeople/founders, etc. We’ll just refer to all knowledge/creative workers as “knowledge workers.”

[2] Don’t get me wrong— I LOVE running and it adds a ton of meaning to my life. I believe that running makes me a better friend, founder, family member, and human. It feels wrong to call it “just a hobby,” so we’ll go with hobby passion.

[3] Now when I open my calendar, I see lots of scheduled Flow Club sessions, which is a project we started working on about a month ago to introduce some of the structure that I felt was sorely missing.

[4] The term flow gets tossed around a lot and has many different definitions. I prefer this definition from “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, who first coined the term: “‘Flow’ is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.” For a good intro, watch his short TED talk on flow!

2020 Reading List

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 16:30:00 +0000

I read 32 books this year, which is the most I’ve read in a year as an adult—there was one summer in middle school where I think I read every Hardy Boys book available at the Oakland Public Library and made a good dent on the sci-fi section as well. In recent years, I struggled and sputtered when I picked up a book that was very educational or insightful, but just felt like a slog to read. Some friends gave excellent advice in this thread and now I don’t feel bad about abandoning books or pausing/putting down a book if another, more interesting book catches and holds my attention. Reading whichever book seems most interesting to me at the current moment in time has made reading much more enjoyable.

I read the majority of my books this year as audiobooks while running or walking. I LOVE audiobooks narrated by the author, especially Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly and Angela Duckworth’s Grit. There’s something about hearing the author’s voice inflectios and emotions that makes the book THAT much more powerful for me. If you have any great recommendations for other audiobooks narrated by the author, I’m all ears!

The books that most affected my thinking were Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want To Talk About Race, M. Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity, and the trifecta of Angela Duckworth’s Grit, Robert Greene’s Mastery, and David Epstein’s Range.

Among many other teachings in Oluo’s book, I learned Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality” for talking about the different levels of discrimination and privilege that any individual faces based on the different facets of their identity: race, gender, sex, religion, disability, etc. I’m still parsing through some of the language in Complexity, so I’ll get back to you when I’ve figured it out— ha! It was definitely quite a dense read and I put it down and picked it up after reading several other books, but hearing about the intersection of economics, biology, mathematics and computer science was fascinating. I listened to Grit, Mastery, and Range one right after the other and saw similar patterns of connecting the dots at the intersections of seemingly disparate skills. I specifically love Duckworth’s formulation that:

Talent x Effort = Skill

and

Skill x Effort = Achievement.

After doing some math, we can see that that:

Achievement = Talent x Effort^2.

I also have tried to make a point to keep track of where I found out about a book or who recommended it to me. Apologies if I misattributed or misremembered any recs! For 2021, I’d love to read 33 books, and in particular more great audiobooks (especially narrated by the author) and both fiction and nonfiction by BIPOC authors, so please do send me recs! 🙏

Note that I’ve included some Amazon Affiliate links for books, but when possible, I highly recommended making use of your local library, especially for digital loans via OverDrive/Libby (they even let you checkout audiobooks) and your local bookstores. Green Apple Books in San Francisco will let you order online for pickup or shipping.

The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates (Yoshi Goto’s app Book Tribes)
Living with a SEAL: 31 Days with the Touhgest Man on the Planet by Jesse Itzler (Yoshi Goto)
Stardust by Neil Gaiman (Browsed the library in Libby)
Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger by Soraya Chemaly (This tweet from Tracy Chou)
The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Yoshi Goto)
Letting Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory by Denna Kastor (Avesh Singh, Andrew Ng)
Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson (Loved the Isaacson Jobs book)
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (A lot of people— can’t remember who specifically)
Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami (Sidney Le)
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (A since-deleted? tweet from Susan Fowler)
The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company by Robert Iger (Ricky Yean, Jason Chen)
Movies (and Other Things) by Shea Serrano (David Roche)
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop (Bill Gurley on Twenty Minute VC)
Know My Name by Chanel Miller (Willy Chu, Tracy Chou)
How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton M. Christensen (RIP. Innovator’s Dilemma was one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read, so decided to pick this up)
Running Home by Katie Arnold (Allison Barr Allen)
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (Had been wanting to read, got a copy after seeing a post from Molly Seidel on Instagram lol)
Running for My Life: One Lost Boy’s Journey from the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games by Lopez Lomong (Jake Ols)
So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo (Was on almost every anti-racist recommended reading list)
Untamed by Glennon Doyle (Sara Broyles)
I Love Yous Are For White People by Lac Su (Sidney Le)
The Happy Runner: Love the Process, Get Faster, Run Longer by Megan and David Roche (re-read)
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown (Amanda Ables)
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (Amanda Ables)
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth (Willy Chu, Yoshi Goto)
Mastery by Robert Greene (Ricky Yean)
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (This tweet from Bill Gurley)
Designing Your Life: Build a Life That Works For You by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (Nishant Jacob)
Dream Big: Know What You Want, Why You Want It, and What You’re Going to Do About It by Bob Goff (Amanda Ables)
Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day By Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (Yoshi Goto)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (Browsed the library in Libby)
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier (Can’t remember, might have seen it from Sarah Frier herself on Twitter?)

Find your Podcast Pals (Spotify only for now)

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 09:35:00 +0000

My co-founder Ricky wrote about why he switched over to Spotify for podcasts. I initially was reluctant to switch over to Spotify for podcasts because they seemed like an afterthought/second-class media there. There’s also all the usual arguments in favor of keeping things open, but I can see the power of a closed ecosystem being able to improve the experience for both podcast listeners and hosts. With the RSS spec, hosts can at most know how many times their episodes were downloaded, which just isn’t very useful.

The recent addition of mixed music + podcasts playlists to Spotify, including the personalized The Get Up morning show, shows some of the potential of having podcasts side-by-side with music. I’m excited for Spotify to recommend podcasts to me, but I’d also like to know which episodes of specific podcasts my friends love! So we built just that! Think of it as a more social and more in-depth Wrapped for Podcasts!

Compare your podcasts to mine using this fun project that Ricky and I made for discovering new Podcasts from friends!

Oh, and if you don’t yet use Spotify, I actually also wrote a utility for “importing” an OPML file and following all those shows for you on Spotify! Let me know if that sounds interesting to you!

Abbott World Marathon Majors 2019/2020 Important Dates and Qualifying Standards

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 17:54:00 +0000

Update on October 29, 2020

The Boston Marathon just announced that the 125th Boston Marathon will not take place next April. They are aiming for a fall date.

Update on Sep 7, 2020

Last Thursday, the BAA announced that registration for Boston 2021 is delayed, and that’s all we know for now. If you’re taking part in any of the virtual marathon majors, good luck and have an amazing time! I’ll be running Boston virtually with a few friends this Saturday!

Update on July 7, 2020

The 2020 Berlin Marathon, rescheduled Boston Marathon, rescheduled London Marathon, and New York Marathon have been canceled. The Chicago Marathon has not made an official announcement yet, but I would assume that it’s likely going to be canceled as well. I am generally not a huge virtual race person, but I loved that the BAA refunded everyone, tried to keep everyone updated as well as they could, and generally handled things very well. So when they opened up the virtual race to all previously registered participants today, I signed up to run Boston virtually for fun with friends socially distanced on a fun route that we’ll come up with in San Francisco!

I know a lot of people who were hoping to run Boston in 2021 have questions about how qualification for that will work, so I found this on in their announcement from July 1st:

Participants who were entered by means of a qualifying time may use their 2020 Boston Marathon time to apply for entry in the 2021 Boston Marathon. The beginning of the qualifying window to be used for application and entry into the 2021 Boston Marathon has been established to be September 15, 2018.

Assuming registration for the 2021 Boston Marathon opens around September 15, 2020, that means that the qualifying window will be September 15, 2018 - September 15, 2020. That’s two years instead of one. Note: everything here is just my best guess. To be clear, there haven’t been any qualifying races that I know of after March 15th or so (with the Los Angeles Marathon being the last big one), and I don’t expect there to be too many before September 15th of this year (although fingers crossed that things improve for those of y’all I know that are training and holding out hope for a late Summer qualifier🤞), so rather than assume that there’ll be <2x as many potential qualifiers (of course, 2x is the the max since a lot of people who ran the races again the next year are just repeating their qualifiers), it’s likely closer to <1.5x as many. However, it does still mean there are two Chicago Marathons (2018 and 2019), two New York Marathons, two Los Angeles Marathons, two Houston Marathons, two California International Marathons, and two Philadephia Marathons, etc.— all of which are towards the top of the list for qualifying the most runners for Boston recently. So this is pure speculation, but this will probably lead to even larger cutoff times than we saw this past year (after they lowered the standard by 5 minutes).

Update on May 27, 2020: I hadn’t been updating this because we don’t have great information about a lot of these races given everything going on in the world, but at least made sure cancellations/current tentatively postponed race dates are up-to-date as far as I know. Hope you’re all staying safe!

Update on January 13, 2020: Updated likely qualifying window for 2021 Boston and NY 2020 Registration dates.

Update on December 20, 2019: Lots of people have requested that I put together an updated list for 2020, so here’s my best attempt! Congrats to the recent Berlin and Chicago marathon lottery winners!

See the original post here for more details about why I put this together

As great as the Abbott site is, it doesn’t do a great job of telling you upcoming important dates in one concise place, so I’ve found myself Googling this info over and over. I’ve compiled all the important dates for these in 2019/2020 and hope that someone will find this useful. If you notice any issues, please email me and I’ll get it corrected: dtran320@gmail.com. I’m just a runner doing this for fun in hopes that it’ll benefit someone else doing the research, so I can’t make any guarantees about the data!

Important Dates

Marathon	2019 Race Date	2020 Race Date (¹ = provisional, see footnote)	2020 Registration Info	2021 Registration Info
Berlin Marathon	Sunday, September 29, 2019	~~Sunday, September 27, 2020~~ Canceled	Registration was open October 1 through October 31, 2019	Registration will likely open up October 2020
Boston Marathon	Monday, April 15, 2019	~~Monday, April 20, 2020 (Patriot’s Day)~~ ~~Tentatively Monday, September 14, 2020~~ Canceled Virtual race takes place September 5-14, 2020	Registration for the 2020 Boston Marathon opened on Monday, September 9, 2019 at 10am ET. The qualifying window for the 2020 Boston Marathon: Sep 15, 2018 - Sep 9, 2019	Qualifying window for the 2021 Boston Marathon will be from ~~September 14, 2019~~ September 15, 2018 likely through Sep 15, 2020 with ~~registration opening Monday, September 14, 2020~~ registration delayed indefinitely until a further announcement from the BAA. See more info in the July 7 update at the top of this page. ~~If the race takes place this year, it might work as a qualifier!~~
Chicago Marathon	Sunday, October 13, 2019	Sunday, October 11, 2020 No announcement yet as of July 7, 2020.	Ballot occurred in November 2019, charity entries are still available	Likely November 2020.
London Marathon	April 28, 2019	~~Sunday, April 26, 2020~~ ~~Tentatively Sunday, October 4, 2020~~ Elites Only, Sunday, October 4, 2020	Ballot occurred in April 2019	Likely April 2020
New York City Marathon	Sunday, November 3, 2019	~~Sunday, November 1, 2020~~ Canceled	Guaranteed entry will be open Jan 30 - Feb 13, 2020. Drawing opens February 26, 2020.	Early 2021, likely early-February
Tokyo Marathon	March 3, 2019	Sunday, March 1, 2020 (Elites Only)	August 2019	Likely August 2020

Getting into each marathon

There are generally four ways (not including wheelchair participants and athletes with disabilities) to get into each of the majors, although this is much more difficult for non-UK residents hoping to run the London Marathon and non-Japan residents hoping to run Tokyo:

Run a qualifying time (Berlin, Boston, Chicago, New York, Tokyo via Run as One program)
Raise money for a charity (all, I believe)
Win a lottery entry (all except Boston)
Purchase a package through a tour operator such as Marathon Tours (all), although I don’t know much about how legit these are. They seem to generally be really pricey.

Some races also offer special entries such as legacy finishers:

Berlin Marathon: Completed the Berlin Marathon at least 10 times.
Chicago Marathon: Completed the Chicago Marathon at least 5 times in the last 10 years
New York Marathon: Completed the New York Marathon at least 15 times

But most of us are concerned with getting into these for the first time, so here are the qualifying standards.

Qualifying time standards

Note that for Boston, in 2019, the registration cutoff was 4 minutes, 52 seconds under the age-group standards, e.g. for a males aged 18-34, you had to run 3:00:08 or under to actually be able to register, up from 3:23 in 2018 and 2:09 in 2017. Because of this, the BAA decided to adjust the qualifying standards to make them five minutes faster for every age group for 2020.

For the New York Marathon, you can also qualify using a half marathon time.

For all of the marathons I believe, your age group is your age on the day of the race, not your age when you ran the qualifying standard.

Note that for the Tokyo Marathon, these standards are for their Run as One program, and DOES NOT GUARANTEE entry since it is limited to 300 participants.. Additionally, these must be run in IAAF Gold Label, Silver Label, or Bronze Label Races and/or AIMS Certified Races.

Men

Age	Berlin 2020	Boston 2020	Chicago 2020	New York 2020	New York 2020 (Half)	Tokyo 2020²
18-29	2:45	3:00	3:05¹	2:53	1:21	2:45²
30-34	2:45	3:00	3:10	2:53	1:21	2:45²
35-39	2:45	3:05	3:10	2:55	1:23	2:45²
40-44	2:45	3:10	3:20	2:58	1:25	2:45²
45-49	2:55	3:20	3:20	3:05	1:28	2:45²
50-54	2:55	3:25	3:35	3:14	1:32	2:45²
55-59	2:55	3:35	3:35	3:23	1:36	2:45²
60-64	3:25	3:50	4:00	3:34	1:41	2:45²
65-69	3:25	4:05	4:00	3:45	1:46	2:45²
70-74	3:25	4:20	4:30	4:10	1:57	2:45²
75-79	3:25	4:35	4:30	4:30	2:07	2:45²
80+	3:25	4:50	5:25	4:55	2:15	2:45²

Women

Age	Berlin 2020	Boston 2020	Chicago 2020	New York 2020	New York 2020 (Half)	Tokyo 2020 ²
18-29	3:00	3:30	3:35¹	3:13	1:32	3:30²
30-34	3:00	3:30	3:40	3:13	1:32	3:30²
35-39	3:00	3:35	3:40	3:15	1:34	3:30²
40-44	3:00	3:40	3:50	3:26	1:37	3:30²
45-49	3:20	3:50	3:50	3:38	1:42	3:30²
50-54	3:20	3:55	4:20	3:51	1:49	3:30²
55-59	3:20	4:05	4:20	4:10	1:54	3:30²
60-64	4:10	4:20	5:00	4:27	2:02	3:30²
65-69	4:10	4:35	5:00	4:50	2:12	3:30²
70-74	4:10	4:50	5:55	5:30	2:27	3:30²
75-79	4:10	5:05	5:55	6:00	2:40	3:30²
80+	4:10	5:20	6:10	6:35	2:50	3:30²

¹ The Chicago Marathon actually lists ages 16-29 and appears to the be only Marathon that lists a qualifying standard for runners under the age of 18.

²Note that these are the times for Tokyo’s Run as One program, and DOES NOT GUARANTEE entry since it is limited to 300 participants.. Additionally, these must be run in IAAF Gold Label, Silver Label, or Bronze Label Races and/or AIMS Certified Races.

Some quick observations from the above qualifying standards that I found interesting (I may have gotten some of these wrong, so please do let me know if anything sounds off):

In order of difficulty from easiest to hardest to qualify for for men and women under the age of 35: Chicago (for runners under 30: 3:10, 3:40; for runners age 30-34: 3:15, 3:45), Boston (3:00, 3:30), New York (2:53, 3:13), Berlin (2:45, 3:00)
Berlin, Boston, and Chicago like multiples of 5-minutes for all their qualifying standards, whereas New York has a different system. It’s not clear how they came up with these, but their site says:

We pride ourselves on offering many methods by which runners can gain entry. We intend for our time standards to offer equal access to our most competitive applicants across all age categories and to allow the highest possible percentage of runners from each category to earn guaranteed entry into the TCS New York City Marathon.
True to that statement, New York seems to be the friendliest in terms of qualifying standards for older runners, with a range of 2 hours, 2 minutes on the men’s side from ages 18-34 to 80+ (2:53, 4:55) and 3 hours, 23 minutes on the women’s side (3:13, 6:35), and a good increase from the age 65-69 group to 70-74 group: 25 minutes on the men’s side, 40 minutes on the women’s side. This “range” metric obviously isn’t the best metric, but it gives a good starting point— this could just be an oversight on my part to not look at the percentage difference in times, but in order of most to least friendly as runners get older:

Marathon	Range of Qualifying times for Men as you get older	Range of Qualifying times for Women as you get older
New York	2 hours, 2 minutes (2:53 to 4:55)	3 hours, 23 minutes (3:13 to 6:35)
Chicago	2, 20 minutes hours (3:05 to 5:25)	2 hours, 35 minutes (3:35 to 6:10)
Boston	1 hour, 50 minutes (3:00 to 4:50)	1 hour, 50 minutes (3:30 to 5:20)
Berlin	40 minutes (2:45 to 3:25)	1 hour, 10 minutes (3:00 to 4:10)

Berlin is by far the toughest to qualify for out of these 4, and having only 3 age group buckets likely doesn’t make it much easier for older runners, although they do give a 30-minute increase for men and 50-minute increase for women from the age 55-59 group (2:55, 3:20) to 60+ (3:25, 4:10), which is a much bigger jump than the others going from age 59 to 60. Seems like if qualifying for Berlin is on your radar, targeting to run it not long after you turn 60 is the way to go!
Boston has increases of exactly 15 minutes for the qualifying standard as runners go from the age 55-59 group (3:35, 4:05) to the age 60-64 group (3:50, 4:20) to the age 65-69 group (4:05, 4:35) to the age 70-74 group (4:20, 4:50) to the age 75-79 group (4:35, 5:05) and finally to the 80+ age group (4:50, 5:20), which is interesting since Chicago and New York both increase differently.
It’d be interesting to see how well these qualifying standard strategies lead to equal distributions of runners from the different age/gender groups. That might be a good followup post.
I wrote up all the above thoughts just in a quick glance-through of the qualifying times table and I’m a 30-year old male who has been running for as long as I’m sure many of you have, so if you have more experience with any of the above or have more nuanced thoughts about how fair the qualifying standards are for different age/gender groups, I’d love to hear from you!

My Progress

Here’s my progress through the Abbott World Majors so far. You can now apparently create a profile on the Abbott World Marathon Majors site— check mine out!

Event	Date	Status
Boston Marathon	April 16, 2018	Registered through qualifying standard, finished in 2:55:46
Boston Marathon	April 15, 2019	Registered through qualifying standard, finished in 2:48:31
Chicago Marathon	October 13, 2019	Registered through qualifying, finished in 2:47:27
New York City Marathon	November 3, 2019	Registered through qualifying standard, decided not to run because I wasn’t feeling recovered after Chicago 3 weeks earlier. I ended up running a PR at CIM in 2:41:31!
Boston Marathon	~~April 20, 2020~~ Tentatively September 14, 2020	Registered through qualifying standard
Berlin Marathon	~~September 27, 2020~~ Canceled	Registered through the lottery!

Sources I found useful

Weekly Live Chat with Back on My Feet San Francisco: How I got involved with Back on My Feet and Running Happy

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 17:49:47 +0000

Had a great time chatting with my friend Amanda for the weekly Back on My Feet San Francisco live chat about how I got into running, started volunteering with Back on My Feet, and what Running Happy means to me!

Back on My Feet San Francisco at the Kaiser Half Marathon!