Building for the long term

Back in 2020 we had a global pandemic, violent protests and a divisive presidential election. The COVID lockdowns prevented the spread of a virus, but they also divided us.

Without opportunities to come together (at unifying events like races), we forgot how to cooperate.

I felt like I needed to do something. So I went to my roof and shouted “Hi everyone, be nice to each other. Don’t steal things. We should all work together!”

If you know me, you know that I am not very good at yelling. So it should come as no surprise that my shouts did little to bring people together.

So I thought to myself, “how could I make a bigger impact?”

After thinking, I decided that organizing events that bring people together regardless of race, religion or politics would make a bigger impact. This way, people would have an opportunity to see one another as humans while focusing on our similarities, not our differences.

So I rented a gym and invited others to play basketball. And that was fun. It brought people together. It felt impactful.

But I was only 1 person. And we only played basketball once per week.

So I thought to myself again, “how could I make a bigger impact?”

After thinking, I decided that the right technology could make it easier to organize events. With better technology, there would be more unifying events and I could make a bigger impact.

Of course, I couldn’t do this alone. So I called Suny and explained how we could build technology that brought people together. If we did a good job, maybe the future would be a bit better. He agreed that it was worth trying.

So we built a basic app and asked people to share their feedback. While this seems simple, people live busy lives so getting their feedback became quite a challenge. I asked my friends and family, but I am not very popular, so I ran out of them pretty quickly.

Unsure of what to do, I took inspiration from Forest Gump and started running. I ran with many different communities. During one of these runs, I met Tim from Run The Day.

As I learned about Run The Day, it became clear that the company had been making it easier for communities to organize races since it had started in 2003. It was supporting events that brought people together, so that everyone could focus on what binds us together - not what drives us apart.

The technology it had built looked old, but it was still providing a great service. Plus, Tim had hard-earned expertise from his 20+ years working with races. This was rare.

So I asked myself a slightly different question, “how could we all work together to make a bigger impact?”

After thinking, I decided that building a company for the long term could make it so easy to organize a race that there would be more of them in the future. More races would bring more people together, so that we would be better at cooperating with one another.

As you know, we eventually partnered and crystalized Run The Day’s mission as uniting athletes and strengthening communities (if you can move you’re an athlete.)

While we no longer have the violent protests that we experienced in 2020, the gap in our values (politically, culturally and economically) continues to grow. If we don’t bridge this gap, we are likely to experience more disruption, tense conflicts and eventually decline.

These are serious problems. Run The Day certainly won’t solve all of them. But by building for the long term, we can hopefully make it easier to host events, so that more people can come together around a common goal. This would help us to better cooperate.

If our work can improve our future cooperation even just a tiny bit, it would be worthwhile.

-Ian

Raising money for mental health

goruntheday

1,172 followers

View more on Instagram