Vol. 2, Issue 9: DNF > DNS
A couple of weeks ago, I started a half marathon.
I didn’t finish.
It’s always disappointing when you spend a whole lot of time training or preparing for something, pushing toward a goal and only to see yourself fall short. In this case, I was running, took a bad step, twisted my knee (thankfully nothing more than that) and made the decision to listen to my body and not push any further and hurt myself worse. It could have been worse of course (this could have been my first half marathon or it could have been a tear or break or something), but as I said, it was disappointing.*
*The whole thing sucked. It was my first DNF also. But I think the worst part is that I had an awesome bib number: 20888
And as people do, I posted a photo on Instagram:
The photo engendered a great amount of sympathy from friends, so the moral of this story could be “surround yourself with people who will pander to your sense of self-pity,” but I’m shooting a little higher than that. My friend Neal came through with this in the comments:
“DNF > DNS”*
*Did not finish is greater than did not start, just to be perfectly clear
Man, that blew me away. I don’t make it a habit to start things that I don’t finish*, but sometimes the reality of things is that you can’t finish. Or finishing isn’t worth the pain it’ll cause you or someone you love. Or, and I can’t stress this enough, you don’t want to. That’s got to be OK too.
*Except books and TV shows. Because honestly, who has the time to sit through art that they don’t like in the name of finishing it? I used to force myself to finish books I started by authors I thought I was supposed to read and like (looking at you, William Faulkner), but eventually I realized that it was a terrible form of torture. So aspiring authors, if you care, I give you 100 pages. If you don’t have me by then, you go back up on the shelf.
If you’ve read this newsletter with any regularity*, you know that I spend a lot of time thinking about gratitude and how we can be kind to ourselves while also helping others. Related: I also spend a lot of time thinking about the inconsistencies in time travel movies from the 1980s. Both of those things are valuable. Ping me on either.
*And I don’t know who you are, but if you were to DNF, I get it
There’s a few things that I wanted to pull out of this:
I think we generally struggle with the notion of sunk cost and moving on. We often linger on things that we know are no longer viable, simply because we’ve invested however much time/money/emotion in them. There’s merit to persevering if you believe in the outcome, but there’s also merit to understanding when you cut your losses and pivot.
Progress isn’t linear. It often takes many different cracks at something from many different angles to advance toward your stated goal. I think we all get that conceptually, but practically, my god do I struggle with this. The goal is right there! Why can’t I get to it? I checked all the boxes. This is particularly true in relationship-driven sales, but if I’m channeling my therapist, that’s not how relationships work. You can’t control how the other party responds.
It’s OK to give yourself a break sometimes. We’re all imperfect. We don’t always finish strong. Sometimes, we don’t finish at all.
The other thing that I talk a lot about here is connected TV. We had a pretty big announcement at OpenX this week, about TV+ by OpenX - our new approach to how we curate supply in our exchange. The reception by our clients has been amazing and we’re really excited to lead here.
You can read all about it in AdExchanger here.
And if you’re not tired of me, I add a bit more color here on the OpenX blog.
The press release is here.
And that’s all for this week.
Until next time, friends