We hadn't even started yet. She was already asking how to scale it.

Last Saturday started with an alarm I almost turned off.

Long week. Both of us. The kind where Friday night lands on you like a weight you didn't realize you'd been carrying.

My phone went off, and my first thought was: I could just sleep.

But we'd made a commitment. So we drove, further than made sense for a beginner class on a Saturday morning, and pulled into the parking lot of a rowing center on a morning that had no business being as beautiful as it was. Sunny. Crisp. The kind of Midwest spring morning that feels like an apology for winter.

We hadn't even gotten out of the car.

And that's when she turned to me and said:

We hadn't touched the water. We hadn't held an oar. We didn't even know if we'd like it.

And we were already designing the recurring calendar invite.

I laughed because I recognized it immediately, in her and in myself.

This is what high-achievers do. We are congenitally incapable of just showing up. Before the experience has even begun, we're already building the system around it. Solving for repeatability. Optimizing the logistics.

We're writing the training plan before we've decided if we like the sport.

I looked at her and said:

Inside, there were sixteen of us, strangers, split across two boats in an indoor rowing tank. Beginners, all of us. Nobody knew what they were doing.

And then something happened that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

We started moving.

Not perfectly. Not in sync at first. But gradually, following the person in front of us, matching their catch, their drive, their recovery, sixteen people who'd never met found a rhythm together. The same flow. The same breath.

And when we got it right, when all the oars entered the water at the same moment, you didn't just hear it.

You felt it.

We were out on the water after that. Actual water, morning sun, the kind of stillness you don't find in a city. Birds. Trees edging the banks. Flora and fauna are completely indifferent to our deadlines and our five-year plans.

Sixteen humans in two boats, weightless in a way that had nothing to do with the water beneath us.

Two women who spend most of their professional lives being the ones in front, setting direction, making calls, carrying the weight of other people's decisions, were just following.

One stroke. Match the timing. Do it again.

That's it. That was the whole job.

I fell in love with rowing long before last Saturday.

Years ago, Satya Nadella, then the new CEO of Microsoft, recommended a book to his leadership team: The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown. Nine working-class young men from the University of Washington, who never expected to compete with the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, ended up winning gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

What Nadella took from it was about teamwork.

What I took from it was something else: the image of eight bodies becoming one movement. The boat that wins isn't the one with the strongest rowers. It's the one where everyone surrenders to the same rhythm.

I'd been admiring rowing from a distance ever since. San Diego Harbor. Sarasota Bay. Always watching. Never getting in.

Last Saturday, I finally got in.

📖 Read The Boys in the Boat

Here's what I want to leave you with.

The parking lot question, how do we make this sustainable, wasn't wrong. It was just early. Asked before the experience had a chance to teach us anything. Asked because we are so conditioned to optimize that we skip the part where we find out if something is even worth optimizing for.

You do this too. I know you do.

You're not stuck because you lack a plan. You're stuck because you're writing the plan before you've let yourself have the experience that would make the plan obvious.

The only next step last Saturday was to get out of the car.

What's the thing you've been watching from the parking lot?

Not researching.
Not scaling.
Not solving for sustainability.

Just: what would it mean to get through today?

Here's what I've learned after years of coaching leaders through this: the voice that starts optimizing before you've even begun isn't logic. It's a Saboteur. And it has a name.

Reply SAB to this email to discover which Saboteur is driving your need to optimize before you begin.

With clarity,