Business lessons from a CEO
By Dan Espinal, Founder & CEO, Rarebreed Veterinary Partners
Every summer for the past several years, I’ve tackled a continuous goal: train on a bike and push myself to suffer a little. Suffer? Yes, suffer.
This year, my training pushed me further than I ever had. I experienced new routes, longer distances, steeper climbs, and a few days where quitting could have tempted me. That was the point. I wasn’t chasing a personal best in cycling. I was chasing the version of myself that comes from putting in the hard work.
There’s a Japanese concept called “misogi.” Once a year, you take on something hard enough that there’s a real chance you fail. Not a stretch goal for your calendar, but something that scares you a little. The idea is that growth doesn’t come from comfort. It comes from choosing the hard thing on purpose. It’s been on my mind all year and this summer, when I was cycling across parts of Europe, I was inspired by the leadership lessons I picked up along the way.
The Idea Behind the Discomfort
Traditionally, misogi is a Shinto purification practice — standing beneath a waterfall, or immersing yourself in cold water, to wash away whatever needs washing away. In its modern form, misogi has been reinterpreted as the annual ritual, even facing the possibility of failure. I’m not talking about reckless risks, but rather strategic investments designed to push just hard enough that you have to dig for something you didn’t know you had.
And the Japanese aren’t alone, almost every culture I’ve studied, served alongside or been inspired by has some version of the same insight. People don’t grow in comfort, they grow at the edge of their limits, on purpose, with intention.
Through my military and entrepreneurial journey I’ve learned that you put a person through something difficult enough that it changes what they believe is possible for themselves.
I spent years of my life deliberately seeking the uncomfortable. Training to think differently, testing my personal limits and climbing when I could quit. I did them because I understood, even before I heard the Japanese term misogi, that the hard thing is usually the point.
Quitters, Campers, Climbers
A few years ago I came across an idea from Erik Weihenmayer. He was the first blind person to summit Mount Everest and his clear framework stuck with me ever since I heard him speak. He talks about three kinds of people:
- Quitters walk away from the climb entirely.
- Campers work hard, get partway up the mountain, reach a plateau that feels safe, and stop. Not because they’re lazy. Instead, because the plateau is genuinely a good, comfortable, defensible place to be. But they stop climbing.
- And Climbers. Climbers get to the top of one peak and are already looking at the next one. Not because they’re incapable of satisfaction, but rather they understand that the summit was never really the destination. The climb is what builds you. There’s always another peak on the horizon, another hill to summit, another obstacle to overcome.
I’ve thought about which one I am, and I’ve thought about which one I want the people around me to be. I don’t think it’s an accident that the military experience, my entrepreneurial pursuits and my cycling training are intertwined for me. They all demand discipline before motivation, training before the moment that matters, and a refusal to mistake “good enough” for “as far as we can go.”
Bringing the Climb Back to Rarebreed
I don’t share any of this because I think a hard cycle across Europe is impressive – we honestly ate, drank and cycled our way through quaint villages and toward beautiful vistas. I share it because I think it’s the same muscle we ask our teams to use every single day, and I want them to know I see it.
Veterinary medicine is not always a comfortable profession. It asks people to hold grief and hope in the same hour, to make impossible-feeling decisions with imperfect information, to keep showing up with skill and compassion sometimes on the hardest days of a pet parent’s life. That is a climb and they continue to do it by leading with love. Every single day, our veterinary professionals choose to keep climbing it.
And it’s not one-sided. None of that climb is possible without the lasting trust pet parents give as they walk through our doors in the first place — who know that our team will provide compassionate, accessible veterinary care of what they love most. That trust is not something we take lightly, and it’s not something we ever want to plateau on.
So here’s what training for a cycling trip across Europe has reminded me, heading into the second half of this year: discipline compounds. The training you do in one arena shows up in every other arena of your life, whether that’s a mountain pass in the French countryside, a hard conversation with a team member, or the next stage of growth for this company.
We’re not interested in camping at Rarebreed. We’re climbers. And I’m grateful every day to be surrounded by people — on our teams and in our clinics — who are climbing right alongside me.
Dan Espinal is Founder and CEO of Rarebreed Veterinary Partners, headquartered in Portland, Maine. A combat veteran and Airborne Ranger-qualified former infantry officer, Dan holds an MBA from MIT Sloan and co-founded Rarebreed in 2018.
