Tag: keep going

My favorite place to watch the New York City Marathon is on 59th Street and 1st Avenue, right at the moment the runners are coming off the bridge from Queens and turning into Manhattan. When runners turn left on 1st Avenue to head north through the Upper East Side, they’re passing mile 16. They’ve already gone through three boroughs — just two remain.

It’s one thing to watch the pro runners, who even at this point in the race seem to be sprinting through the course, and have no doubt that they’ll reach the finish line. But it’s another to see the regular runners — our neighbors here in New York, or runners who’ve traveled from all over to take part in this race — making that turn. I love to see how people react when they reach that point in the race. They’ve already run 16 miles, a distance I don’t think I’ll ever run in a single day. They’ve been up all day, and they’re obviously tired. But when they see the crowds and hear the cheers, they look reenergized.

I know those runners must have moments of doubt along the way. 26.2 miles is forever, and reaching Manhattan still means they’ve only covered three-fifths of the day’s distance. But I also know that thousands of runners complete the marathon ever year, which means that thousands of ordinary people find the strength to keep moving forward. How do they do it? Maybe it’s because the crowd picks you up, or because they’ve spotted a certain landmark that reminds them how close they are to the finish line. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe there’s something inside all of us that gives us the courage to keep going.

Sometimes, when I watch runners make that turn at 59th and 1st, it seems like they’re picking up speed, even after 16 miles. How? I’m not sure. But I know that ever year, I watch runners do what seems impossible: Find a little left in the tank to take that next stride.

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I took that photo today, right at the moment runners are about to turn onto 1st Avenue.

I saw Willie Nelson perform on Sunday, and here’s something I didn’t realize about Willie until he walked out on stage: He’s 88 years old.

88! And still performing live, currently on a 14-stop tour over two months in 10 states!

Now, at that age, nobody’s expecting Willie Nelson to go out and play a marathon set. But I was impressed by the way Willie still found a way to put on a great show:

• He limited the set list to an hour — he’s played about 11 songs per night on the 2021 tour so far, instead of what had been 17 song sets pre-pandemic, per data on Setlist.fm.

• He loaded the lineup with not one but three openers, stretching what would be a normal concert into a six-hour-long festival.

• He toured with his son, J. Micah Nelson, and let him take lead on a few songs. (Willie’s kids can really play, so fans didn’t mind Willie taking a step out of the spotlight for a few minutes.)

• He didn’t waste much time with banter, saying a few words between songs — or just moving right into the next number.

All in all, it meant a set with a lot of hits and very little filler. I’m sure Willie would love to have the energy of a younger artist, able to go out and play for 2+ hours as a headliner. But he’s 88, and he’s got some limitations — and he still found a way to make it work.

As Willie sang that night: He’s still not dead, and still on the road. Impressive stuff.

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That’s a photo I took of Willie and his band on September 12, 2021, in Saratoga Springs, New York.

I just finished “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11,” by Garrett M. Graff. It’s a remarkable book — a book that had me gasping, in tears, and often at a loss for words.

In it are hundreds of stories of the day — stories, of course, told by the survivors of September 11th, 2001. So many of the stories are ones where a single decision may have saved a life: The chef who stopped in to get his glasses adjusted before heading up to his floor; the salesman who was told that his tie didn’t match his shirt, so he headed back to his desk to get a new one; the woman who was fired from her job on the afternoon of September 10th; the dad, who took the ferry to the office, and lived, while his son, who took the train, did not.

Stephen Blihar, an officer with the NYPD, described thinking back upon the day like this: “It was a day of lefts and rights.”

I can’t stop thinking about that phrase: A day of lefts and rights. There are so many choices we make — in a day, in a career, in a lifetime. We agonize over the big choices, when often the small ones — go left, or go right? — are the ones with the most impact. We make the best choices we have, with the best information we have, but who knows what will come of all of it?

Anyway, read the book.  I can’t recommend it enough.

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I took that photo, in October 2018, of the view of New York, looking north from 1 World Trade Center after a thunderstorm.

When I’m working with a team on a project, one of the first questions I’ll ask is: How do we start as quickly as possible?

Let’s say we’re working on a new design for an email. Instead of hiring someone to do coding — on a concept that may or may not work! — I’ll use an email builder that allows us to build an email that’s pretty close to what we want. Will it be exactly what we want? No, probably not. But we’ll get 80% of what we want in 20% of the time.

Once we’ve got that built, we can test it out, see how it goes, and make additional tweaks and changes. Maybe we’ve got a winning concept, and if that’s the case, that’s when we’ll go to the designers to get it to 100%. Maybe we don’t, and we’ve got to keep testing. The good news is, we won’t have wasted valuable resources on a concept that didn’t work.

There are so many tools out there that allow you to test and iterate quickly. Instead of building your own stuff, or wasting time on ideas that might not work, utilize those tools, and see if you can get something live that allows you to collect feedback, learn, and move forward.

First, just see if it works. You can always keep building from there.

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That photo of a construction site comes via Unsplash and Shivendu Shukla.