The Vaccine of Difficulty

Why Business Owners Need to Seek the Struggle

Seven days ago, my legs felt like they had been replaced by two lead pipes.

That’s the standard post-marathon tax. After 26.2 miles, your body doesn’t just ask “why?”—it demands an itemized receipt for the damage. Every staircase is a mountain; every chair is a trap.

Invariably, someone who hasn’t caught the endurance bug asks the obvious question: “Why do you do this to yourself?”

They see the soreness as a bug. I see it as a feature.

Because a marathon isn’t just a race; it’s a controlled, voluntary drawdown. It’s a way to train the mental reflexes you’ll need when life decides to throw a “hard thing” at you that you didn’t sign up for.

The Reflex Arc: From Mile 22 to March 2020

The same mental muscles you rely on to finish a 20-mile long run in the rain are the exact same ones you need to keep from panic-selling your portfolio when you’re down 30% going into a global pandemic.

When the world looks like it’s ending and the charts are bleeding red, the uninitiated react with their lizard brains. They see the “suck” and they want to escape it immediately. But the person who has spent months training for a race knows that the suck is temporary. Whether it’s a market crash, a 500-page textbook that feels impossible to finish, or a blow-up with a customer on one of my bartenders, the reflex is the same:

Acknowledge the pain.

Breathe through the panic.

Keep moving forward.

In finance, we call this “low time preference.” It’s the ability to withstand a temporary drawdown for a long-term gain. If you haven’t exercised that muscle in your personal life, don’t expect it to show up when your business is on the line.

The Macro Reality: Why Small Businesses Fail

The statistics are cold. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 20% of small businesses fail in their first year. By year five, that number is 50%.

Most assume these businesses fail because of bad math. And while the spreadsheet matters, a lot of those failures are actually endurance problems. Business is hard, and it’s not supposed to be easy. If it were, the “Alpha”—the outsized reward of ownership—wouldn’t exist. You are paid, in part, for the amount of difficulty you can stomach.

If you haven’t built up your “mental antibodies” to hardship, the first time you hit a real pothole, you’re going to fold.

18 Months of Hell

Before we ever poured a pint at Brewery 4 Two 4, we hit every pothole in the book. Funding issues, liquor control delays, construction nightmares—if it could go wrong, it went wrong at the worst possible time.

We had already signed the lease when our funding fell through. For eight straight months, my entire day job paycheck went to paying rent and keeping the lights on in a cold, empty shell of a building where nothing was happening.

When we finally got rolling, the “double life” began. From February to July, my schedule was a relentless grind:

8:00 AM – 4:00 PM: Day Job (Environmental Health Supervisor)

4:00 PM – Midnight: Brewery Build-out

Weekends: 16-hour days of manual labor.

In the middle of this chaos, my wife became pregnant with our son (which wasn’t supposed to be possible). When we finally opened the doors in July, I didn’t get a vacation. I had a newborn on the way in 6 months, a day job I still needed, and a brewery that required me to do all the brewing myself.

That schedule—the 100-hour weeks, the sleep deprivation, the two-job hell + newborn—stayed in place for an entire year after we opened.

Was it harder than a marathon? Absolutely. But the skills I used to survive that year and a half were the exact same “stick-to-it” reflexes I developed during years of training. Giving up Friday night fun for 5:00 AM Saturday long runs wasn’t just about fitness; it was a vaccine for the “startup suck.”

The Modern Grind: School and the Home Front

The struggle doesn’t end once the business is stable; it just changes shape.

This past December, I finally finished my MBA. It was the end of a three-year odyssey where I was juggling course load and case studies while simultaneously acting as the head brewer and managing the brewery’s operations—a workload that is traditionally a two-person job.

In the middle of that professional grind, life requires a high degree of tactical flexibility. My wife’s career in food safety has been incredibly successful, but it requires her to travel extensively. That means when she’s on the road, I am the “boots on the ground” for our eight-year-old.

It’s a different kind of endurance test. It’s the ability to pivot from a grain inventory and orders to school pickups and swim lessons, all while maintaining a steady supply of mac and cheese. It’s not “balanced,” and it’s certainly not easy. But I’ve realized that the mental endurance built in the brewery and on the pavement is what allows me to hold that line at home.

Working hard at things that aren’t your business—like training for a race or grinding through a three-year degree—is the vaccine for the difficulties you’ll run into inside your business. …calm down RFK it’s a metaphor.

Seek the Struggle

If you are an operator or an investor, waiting for things to get “easy,” you are waiting for a market that doesn’t exist.

Difficulty doesn’t just happen to you; difficulty increases your ability. But here is the secret: it doesn’t have to be a marathon. You don’t need to sign up for 26.2 miles to build these mental antibodies.

Maybe it’s getting to the gym to lift weights on the days you’d rather stay on the couch. Maybe it’s forcing yourself to sit down and finish three pages of your book every single morning before the world wakes up. Maybe it’s the quiet, daily discipline of sticking to a healthy diet when everyone around you is taking the easy route.

It doesn’t matter what the “thing” is; it just has to be challenging. It has to require you to tell the lazy part of your brain to shut up and get to work.

The most successful people I know voluntarily seek out the suck in some form. They do this because they want to be stress-inoculated. When the “real” problems show up—the lawsuit, the supply chain break, the economic downturn—they don’t panic. They just look at the situation and think: “I’ve felt worse than this at 5:00 AM on a cold Tuesday. Let’s get to work.”

Micro Brews. Macro Views. (And some Epsom salts).

Dave