When the Math Stops Making Sense, SPRINT

The guy next to me at the start line didn't look like he trained much.

"The swim?" he said. "Easy. Mile, mile and a half. Twenty minutes, no big deal."

I was a sophomore in college, bored with fraternity life, so I'd signed up for the Liberty to Liberty triathlon – swim the Hudson, bike across New Jersey, finish at the Liberty Bell. My first triathlon ever. I'd trained hard. I was nervous.

He was not nervous.

I jumped in.

The swim did not take twenty minutes.

Thirty, forty minutes in, I'm grinding alongside the rock wall in Battery Park, working my ass off. I look up and I see my mom on the wall above me. She leans down.

"Something happened with the current. People are dropping like flies. Everyone behind you has been picked up by the safety boat.Y ou need to power through this section right here – then it gets easier."

(I later found out she was on the phone with my dad, saying I think Jon's gonna fucking drown. lol)

So I did. Unsustainably. I dug in and blitzed through.

I finished the swim in an hour and ten minutes. Three times what it was supposed to take. I was the last swimmer out of the water. Of the hundred or two hundred people who started, 35 finished the swim. Everyone behind me got pulled out.

I won my age group simply because I was the last one in.

There are dead zones in business that work exactly like that current.

You hit them and they feel wrong. Progress stalls. The math stops making sense. Every instinct says something is broken.

In property management – I know this from conversations with my heterosexual life partner Peter on my podcast – there's a dead zone somewhere between 150 and several hundred doors. You need middle management. You can't quite afford it yet. The economics are ugly for a stretch.

Most people don't blitz through. They slow down, rationalize, tread water. And they get scooped out of the race by the safety boat.

The ones who make it pick a direction and HAMMER. Growth, org structure, personal development – the pattern holds everywhere. Sprint through the eddy, and you'd be surprised what's on the other side.

What's the dead zone you're stuck in right now?

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

P.S. Sagan putting in the work on the ground in places like Nicaragua! Love to see it.