We were running along the beach in California and I felt like I could go forever. The altitude in Utah will humble you fast, so sea level always feels like a superpower. The morning was perfect. The run felt effortless.
Then we turned around to head back.
The wind hit us immediately. Strong, steady, right in our faces. Abby and I both slowed and looked at each other. Where did this come from? Then it hit me: it didn’t come from anywhere. It had been there the whole time. We just hadn’t felt it because it was pushing us.
We think we’re fast
When the wind is at your back, you feel strong. You feel capable. You feel like everything is clicking and you’re just built different. You don’t think about the wind. You think about yourself.
That’s the trap. The conditions doing work on your behalf become invisible. The tailwind feels like talent.
Friction makes it obvious
The second we turned around, the wind was undeniable. Obstacle, resistance, grind, it’s all very loud. You can’t miss it. You talk about it, complain about it, strategize around it. It becomes the whole story.
The help is quiet. The hard stretch is not.
But here’s the thing about that hard stretch: it’s actually doing something for you. Friction makes you more creative. It makes you work harder than you would otherwise. The resistance is exactly what makes you stronger.
There’s a story about a group that was trying to build a biosphere, completely enclosed, meant to simulate the conditions needed to sustain life in space. Their trees grew well at first. Right soil, right nutrients, right light. But at a certain height, the trees would always fall over and die. It took them a while to figure out why. The answer was wind. The biosphere had perfect conditions by every measure. What it couldn’t replicate was wind. Not because they forgot — there’s just no wind in an enclosed system. And without that resistance, the roots never had a reason to grow deep. The trees had everything they needed except the one thing that would have made them strong enough to survive.
Too much funding is a biosphere
I think about this a lot when I see startups raise enormous rounds before they’ve proven anything real. The money removes the friction. You can hire your way around hard problems. You can spend your way past the questions you should be forced to answer. But those questions don’t disappear. They just get deferred.
If a startup is never forced to look itself fully in the mirror and ask whether it’s creating real value for real customers, it ends up a lot like those trees. Plenty of nutrients. Room to grow. And roots that were never made strong enough to hold the weight.
The friction is the work. Not the obstacle to it. The companies that get forged in hard constraints, limited runway, customers who won’t buy unless the product actually solves something, those are the ones that build something that can stand on its own. The same is true for people. Character doesn’t develop in easy conditions. It develops when you’re forced to solve deep, hard problems and you can’t spend or hire or wait your way out of them.
The honest question
I think about this with Halda. There have been stretches where things just moved. Deals closed, momentum built, the right people showed up at the right time. It’s easy to look back at those stretches and think we figured something out. But I’m not sure we always know how much of it was us and how much of it was just the wind.
And the stretches that felt hard? Those are probably the ones that grew the roots.
I don’t think the answer is to stop feeling good when things go well. But I do think it’s worth asking, when things feel easy, what you’re actually benefiting from that you didn’t earn. Because if you don’t know what’s helping you, you definitely won’t see it coming when it stops.
We finished the run. It was hard on the way back. But at least we knew why.