Today’s Walk is For Tomorrow
Some days are not for progress. They are for giving tomorrow a chance.
Hello everybody!
Today’s newsletter is not a reflection, per se. It’s a collaboration... that is also a reflection, but not entirely mine.
For a while now, I’ve been using a tool called Boardy AI — this is not sponsored, just context — whose main trick is connecting you with other people in its network through warm intros. If you haven’t heard of it before, you should check it out, because it’s life-changing, and I mean it.
Free weekly reflections for sustainable discipline.
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That information is relevant because the guest I’m featuring today and I met through Boardy. After chatting and learning more about what we were both doing, we realized it would be a good opportunity to collaborate. This article is that first collaboration.
Abbey Jackson is the founder of Up Coast and the creator of the From Passion to Product framework, a program that helps both technical and non-technical entrepreneurs turn app ideas into real products.
She came to tech the hard way: starting from disability income in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, she took out a high-interest loan for a coding bootcamp and went on to become a staff engineer, earn a patent in vehicle-mobile app architecture, and hold senior roles at Intel, MasterCard, and Rivian.
Abbey was very generous in sharing her personal experience with me, along with a lot of good advice that can help me — and ideally help you too, once I put some of it into practice — expand on my ideas in a better way. As I heard her story, I realized it could be helpful for the community, and I didn’t hesitate to invite her to share it with all of you.
It has been a journey for her, and because of that, I think there is a lot to take from her experience. But I’ll let her tell you that herself.
Let’s dive in.
👉 Want to actually train this, not just read it?
Each week, alongside this reflection, I publish a short practice guide — something you can work through in 10 minutes on a slow day, so the idea sticks when a hard day hits.
It’s called the Paid Companion. $9.99/month.
You do not have to feel good to do good things for yourself.
I want to say that again because it took me a long time to actually believe it. Not just know it intellectually, but actually believe it on the days when my body was telling me to stay still and my mind had already given up on the idea of moving: You do not have to feel good to do good things for yourself. The walk does not require you to want to go. It just requires you to go.
I came to this understanding the hard way. A few years ago I was burned out. Really, genuinely burned out, not the kind people describe after a hard week. I had a partially dislocated shoulder that went undiagnosed and untreated for a year and a half, and the nerve pain from it was so severe that there were full days where I spent every waking hour on the verge of throwing up. Not from nausea. From pain. I also had migraines triggered by the nerve damage, many times a month, sometimes lasting several days, sometimes multiple times in a week. At my worst, I estimate that about 50% of my working days I was trying to function through a migraine. I was showing up, or trying to, but I was not really there.
Sleep became something I dreaded. I would stay in the bathtub after my partner went to bed, sometimes until midnight, just to delay the moment I had to go lay down in that bed. After about three hours my body would be in so much pain that I had no choice but to get up. I would do 45 minutes to an hour of stretching and weight bearing exercises in the middle of the night around 2:30 or 3am, and then sleep sitting up on the couch for an hour or two because lying down hurt too much. And then I would go back to bed in the early morning hours around 5am so that I at least woke up next to my partner.
On top of all of this, I had been in undiagnosed ultra-early perimenopause for years. I did not know at the time that is what was causing my intellectual difficulties. What I knew was that my thinking had changed in a way that terrified me. I could not learn. I could not retain information. I would read a line of code, then a second line, and by the third line I had forgotten the first. I genuinely thought I had early onset Alzheimer’s. I did not tell anyone because I did not want to find out that it was true. I decided that if it was, I would rather not know and just let myself get worse. It took years to get a diagnosis, and then more years and a lot of fighting to get hormones, and when I finally did, a doctor apologized to me. She said they should have given them to me much sooner.
During the worst of the burnout, I was fawning constantly at work, pretending to be okay when I was not, because when you are not okay every single day, people’s patience runs out. The grace that gets extended to someone who is struggling gets quietly withdrawn when the struggling does not stop. So I tried to hide it. And hiding it made everything worse.
During all of this, I took a role as an engineer while I had COVID that turned into long COVID, and I could not perform. I could not learn and I was let go, justifiably so. I took a product management role after that but the back to back meetings, the expectation of availability at specific times, the pace, made everything worse. That job was killing me.
After the third time of ending up on medical leave in a span of only 6 years, I had no choice but to realize my life needed to change significantly.
In the midst of trying to survive my last job, I moved to a small town in the mountains. I now live about 200 feet from the forest and I spend hours every day there with my dog. During the worst of everything, I started to notice a pattern. On the days I went into the woods, I felt better. Not always immediately. Not always dramatically. But there was a correlation I could not ignore. I started to understand that whether or not it helped today, not going made tomorrow harder.
That is when the first mantra I have ever had in my life showed up: “Today’s walk is for tomorrow”. A lot of the time it helps me today. But even when it does not, it is not wasted. It makes tomorrow more possible. And if I do not go today, the chances of feeling worse tomorrow go up.
Going anyway does not look graceful. On my worst days it looks like a panic sequence. My breathing gets shallow. My body goes tight. My stomach hurts. I stop being able to think clearly and sometimes I dissociate, just staring at a wall or a screen for an hour, completely checked out. And then at some point I reason with myself. Not motivate, not push, not force. Reason. I remind myself that this is a choice I am making for tomorrow. That if I do not go, I am removing a chance at feeling better tomorrow. I cannot guarantee the walk will help. But I know that going is one of the easiest ways I can set myself up for success in the following days.
Plus, I almost always feel better after anyway.
This is not a story about overcoming adversity. I have not overcome it. I am still in pain. I still cook every single meal from scratch because I am allergic to enough things that there is no other option. I still spend hours every day on activity, walks, weight bearing exercises, hiking, mountain biking, not for pleasure right now but because if I do not, the pain takes over and I cannot work at all. I have to prioritize my health. If I plan to work first I end up being too tired, or in too much pain to be physically active later and so I often do not start working until noon or 1pm. My dog asks to go out at 3:30. My partner gets home at 5. I make dinner around 6:30. All of these interruptions mean I work until 9 or even 10 most nights just to get six hours of work done. Right now I do not have much of an identity outside of taking care of myself and building this business.
I built my business around my health not because it was an inspiring choice but because it was the only viable one. I cannot work in a traditional tech job. I cannot show up at specific times for back to back meetings. I cannot learn at the pace that industry demands. I cannot stand for more than even a few minutes some days. I cannot do the things that most jobs require. I have no mental resistance to working retail or at McDonald’s, I would do it without hesitation if I physically could. But I cannot. So I have to build something that works around what I actually am, not what I wish I could be.
The async model that I have designed for my business is not a lifestyle brand for me. It is a survival decision. Health first is not a value statement. It is the only way I stay functional enough to work at all. Exercise before work, even if that means starting at 1pm, is not a flex. It is the thing that makes the rest of the day possible. The truth is I miss starting work at 7:30am and not coming up for air until the afternoon. But that version of me does not and cannot exist anymore.
And here is what I have learned from living this way: the discipline required to take care of yourself when your body is working against you is not the same as the discipline people talk about in productivity content. It is not about waking up early or optimizing your morning routine. It is about making the same unglamorous choice, over and over, on the days when everything in you wants to stop. Going for the walk when your body hurts and your breathing is shallow and you have been staring at the wall for an hour. Cooking the meal from scratch when you are exhausted. And then doing it again for the other meals too. Starting work at 1pm without shame because you spent the morning keeping yourself functional.
Today’s walk is for tomorrow. That is it. That is the whole philosophy.
You do not have to feel good. You do not have to be motivated. You do not have to be the kind of person who does this easily or naturally or with any grace at all. You just have to make the decision, on the hard days especially, to give tomorrow the best chance you can.
Thanks so much, Abbey, for sharing your story with us.
I think, at some point, we all share a bit of that story, in different degrees, of course. Life hits us, and those hits stack and compound.
I’m personally also still in the midst of my own story. I haven’t defeated adversity yet, and I can attest that the idea of discipline many of us carry usually ends up with us waiting for the right moment to do what we need to do, even when all the signs around us tell us we should be doing it, and still, we don’t.
Sometimes that “right” moment never comes, and sometimes it comes like a hammer.
Like what happened to Abbey.
But what if we decided to make choices with tomorrow in mind?
What if we walked today in service of our tomorrow?
This won’t always be perfect or glamorous, as Abbey said so well. Our walks won’t be perfect, and there will be days when there is no walk at all. But if we remember the reason why we are walking today, then the chances of returning to it become higher.
Let me invite you into a small practice. Pick an activity you know you should be doing, and have trouble starting or maintaining. Write down why you need to do it, and keep that note somewhere visible, accessible, unavoidable.
Be visceral. Remind yourself of the stakes of not doing it.
Now the key: focus on the language.
Don’t use self-beating, pejorative language, like
“go run now, you <x, y, z>, if you want to stay in shape.”
Instead, remind yourself:
“if you don’t do this, you won’t be able to play with your kids as much as you’d like to. You can do this, and you will.”
Something simple, compassionate, like that.
Set an alarm. When the alarm sounds, just check the text.
And now the most important part: if reading the text gives you the instant fuel to do it, do it. Now. Don’t wait. If the text doesn’t give you that instant fuel, that’s okay. Experiment. Learn what triggers you. Use it in your favor.
Just make sure that whatever voice you use reinforces the identity you want to see, instead of discouraging you.
In our next paid companion, I’ll share some katas, practices to train your brain to assimilate this, along with some mental models that can make the work of walking today for the benefit of tomorrow a little easier.
As one final note, Abbey teaches founders, career-changers, and early-stage builders the product strategy they need to lead app development, and it doesn’t require any experience.
She offers a free course. In it, she writes about tech education, building in public, taking care of yourself, and what it actually takes to go from idea to launch.
To take the free course, check out this link.
Have a wonderful week!
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