6 years ago I was cutting up a soda can in my dorm room…
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6 years ago I was cutting up a soda can in my dorm room trying to build something for my mom. I almost quit more times than I can count. This week I wore the finished version through the hardest race of my life.
When I was 19, my mom had already been living with chronic pain for years. I was a broke college soccer player who used kinesiology tape and muscle stimulators on myself for recovery, and I kept thinking those two things should really be one device. So with zero engineering experience, I decided to try to build that, for her.
The first prototype was a cut-up 7up can and stripped wires on my dorm room desk. It was embarrassing. I lost pitch competitions. Professors dismissed me. People told me to go do something more reasonable.
I didn't listen, and the next 6 years were brutal.
I sent 300 cold LinkedIn messages to find a co-founder I still hadn't met in person. We went through 8 prototypes. I cold emailed 150 investors a day for 8 months. I slept in my car after driving 14 hours to pitch a single investor. I gave up my plan to go to law school. And when we couldn't figure out how to actually build the thing at a real cost, I came the closest I ever came to quitting. My parents sat me down and told me if anyone could solve it, it was me. I locked myself in a room for 84 hours and came out with the answer.
Here is the part I keep coming back to. Nothing about me changed in any way that actually matters. I am the same person who got laughed out of pitch competitions 6 years ago. The only thing that changed is that I did not stop. The unglamorous years everyone told me to walk away from are the exact years that got me here.
This week, I put the finished version on my own body and did all 8 stations of HYROX, the world's hardest fitness race, with zero training. Sled pushes, farmers carries, 100 wall balls, the whole gauntlet. My legs were wrecked. But standing there, wearing the thing that started as a soda can in a dorm room because of my mom, was one of the most surreal moments of the entire journey.
She still asks how it is going every single week. She is my number one fan. Whenever we finally launch, the first one off the line is hers, wrapped, with a card.
I am 26 now and I still do not know how this ends. But I did not quit, and that is the only reason I am standing where I am.
If you are in the dorm room version of your own thing right now, getting ignored and doubting all of it: the discomfort of pushing through is real, but so is the regret of walking away the day before it starts to work. The years nobody claps for are the ones that count.
Keep going.
#inspiration
source
When I was 19, my mom had already been living with chronic pain for years. I was a broke college soccer player who used kinesiology tape and muscle stimulators on myself for recovery, and I kept thinking those two things should really be one device. So with zero engineering experience, I decided to try to build that, for her.
The first prototype was a cut-up 7up can and stripped wires on my dorm room desk. It was embarrassing. I lost pitch competitions. Professors dismissed me. People told me to go do something more reasonable.
I didn't listen, and the next 6 years were brutal.
I sent 300 cold LinkedIn messages to find a co-founder I still hadn't met in person. We went through 8 prototypes. I cold emailed 150 investors a day for 8 months. I slept in my car after driving 14 hours to pitch a single investor. I gave up my plan to go to law school. And when we couldn't figure out how to actually build the thing at a real cost, I came the closest I ever came to quitting. My parents sat me down and told me if anyone could solve it, it was me. I locked myself in a room for 84 hours and came out with the answer.
Here is the part I keep coming back to. Nothing about me changed in any way that actually matters. I am the same person who got laughed out of pitch competitions 6 years ago. The only thing that changed is that I did not stop. The unglamorous years everyone told me to walk away from are the exact years that got me here.
This week, I put the finished version on my own body and did all 8 stations of HYROX, the world's hardest fitness race, with zero training. Sled pushes, farmers carries, 100 wall balls, the whole gauntlet. My legs were wrecked. But standing there, wearing the thing that started as a soda can in a dorm room because of my mom, was one of the most surreal moments of the entire journey.
She still asks how it is going every single week. She is my number one fan. Whenever we finally launch, the first one off the line is hers, wrapped, with a card.
I am 26 now and I still do not know how this ends. But I did not quit, and that is the only reason I am standing where I am.
If you are in the dorm room version of your own thing right now, getting ignored and doubting all of it: the discomfort of pushing through is real, but so is the regret of walking away the day before it starts to work. The years nobody claps for are the ones that count.
Keep going.
#inspiration
source
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