From start to finish (and everything you navigate in between)

Somewhere halfway through an ocean race, usually at night or in the flat grey of early morning, soaked, tired, hungry, you think it plainly. This is it. Never again. I am absolutely done with this. Why on earth would anyone voluntarily do this.

I've thought that exact thought more than once, on more than one crossing.

Building a startup feels exactly the same. At some point you're tired of explaining the same thing for the hundredth time, cash is tighter than you expected, everything takes longer than promised, and you seriously wonder how you ended up here. You swear to yourself that once this is over, you'll go and do something calm and sensible instead.

Then you finish the race. You arrive, you tie up, you sleep in a normal bed and eat normal food. Then you laugh about the worst moments. And slowly, almost without noticing, the story changes. It was tough, yes. Brutal at times. But also beautiful. You learned things about yourself you didn't know before. You handled situations you once thought were impossible. And before you know it, you're looking at the next race.

The same thing happens with a startup. You get through it. You make it work. You see the result of all those hard moments stitched together into something real. And somehow, against your own earlier promises, you find yourself thinking maybe, just maybe, I would do it again.

Not because it was easy. Because finishing something that once felt impossible has a funny way of pulling you back in.

There's an old joke among sailors. There are two great moments in an ocean race, the start and the finish. Everything in between, you'd rather forget. It's funny because it's true, and it's funny because everyone who's actually done it laughs a little too hard, a little too knowingly.

But the joke only works because of what it leaves out. Nobody remembers the middle fondly while they're in it. The middle is where the doubt lives, where you question the whole plan, where the finish feels invented, a rumour from another life. And yet the middle is also the only place where anything actually gets built. The start is a decision. The finish is a result. Everything that matters happens in between, in the stretch nobody wants to be in and nobody, afterwards, would trade away.

I think this rule runs wider than racing or startups. Watch anyone training for something hard, a marathon, a new language, sobriety, a difficult year of parenting. Nobody posts about week seven. Week one gets a photo. Crossing the line gets a photo. The middle gets nothing, because the middle doesn't look like anything, it just feels like everything. It's the part where the outcome is still unknown and the effort is entirely unglamorous, and it's also, without exception, the part that actually decides how the story ends.

Maybe that's the real use of the joke. Not to dismiss the middle, but to admit, honestly, that we'd never sign up for it if we could see it coming in full. We only ever sign up for the start and the finish. The middle, we back into.