CURIOUS REBEL

What swimming taught me about prototyping

I swam competitively for 13 years. I had some talent for the sport and I worked extremely hard but that’s not enough to become an All-American. 

I was fortunate and fast enough to be put on a national-qualifying relay that went on to place top 8. I got a pretty sweet trophy out of it. In part, I owe my achievement to my teammates - without them, I wouldn’t have gotten there. But besides that, it was my passion and obsession with the sport that helped me become better than others who were arguably more talented (and taller/bigger) than me. 

I knew nothing about fluid dynamics or physics of how vessels travel through water. But I knew how to pay attention. In swimming, little changes in your technique have a big impact; A slight change in the angle of the hand or to the path the arm takes through the water could suddenly help you drop a few seconds off your race. So paying really close attention is just as important as working your heart out.

As they say, the devil is in the details and it is certainly true in swimming. If I hadn’t obsessed over tiny details Every. Single. Lap. of the pool, I wouldn’t have been very fast. We did hundreds of laps during our normal two-hour practices and if I made a slight tweak every single lap, that’s hundreds of iterations!

Some product development cycle stretches for several months but mine ends at the end of each practice - and sometimes after each set during a practice. Having the mentality of, “what can I do to make [this specific part of the stroke] better” and paying attention to the variations produced by my small tweaks every single lap of the pool have helped me perfect the product: my races. (But the product is always in beta, of course.)

And if demo days are a tech startup’s chance to hit it big, swim meets are opportunities to showcase how the tweaks have measurably improved my performance. Sure, there are many variables to account for - almost every insanely fast swimmer would tell you that they have had the same routine during meets for a long time - and results may be hard to verify but for sprint races, they are easier to control because there are less room to mess up. Everything had to be perfect since it’s hard to recover from even a tiny mistake during a short race. If you dive into the water a little too deep or if you take a breath in the wrong place, it could cost you the race. 

So, if you want to get better at racing, segmenting the race into components and making countless small changes within each part. Being a sprinter helped me realize that to achieve excellence in anything, you have to pay attention to tiny details and be able to be precise about the changes you make. It’s all about prototyping your race to achieve the results you want.

Aristotle said that excellence is a habit and that maxim is none truer than in the sport of swimming. The constant yearning for perfection at every practice everyday is what helped me achieve my goal of swimming at NCAA twice. The product was my race and the clock served as a measuring stick to see how effective my miniscule tweaks were. How do I know startups are the perfect place for me to work? I’ve been prototyping a product for years.