The Meniscus That Changed Everything

Six days before the Houston Marathon, my knee threw in the towel.

I couldn't finish a Monday training run. Months of training, the race circled on the calendar, the whole plan. Gone. I went to urgent care. They thought it might be arthritis. It wasn't until I got to the Steadman Clinic that we had the real answer: torn meniscus, surgery required.

Once we had a date for the operation, something kicked in. I started training again. Not for Houston, but for recovery. I wanted to be in the best possible shape going into the OR so I could come back faster. I had a trip to Singapore in between, so I rode the stationary bike there. Read a lot. That's where I found Chris Bailey's work on intentional living, the idea that your energy should follow your values, not just your calendar.

I took the FindYourValues assessment — a real one, mapped to established psychology. My top values came back: Health, Universalistic Concern, Self-Direction. I could see them on the page. They made sense. And then I tried to actually use them.

I tried to connect those assessed values to my goals, to my daily plans, by hand. Bailey makes it sound like a natural flow — values guide priorities, priorities guide goals, goals guide your day. The concept was clear. Doing it was not. I wasn’t practiced at this. I’d spent decades setting goals without once asking what value they served. Now I had the answer sheet and I still couldn’t wire it together.

That gap — between understanding the concept and actually living it — would become the entire product.

Then I came home and had surgery.

If you've never been non-weight-bearing for weeks, here's what happens: you can't do anything. You can't run, obviously. You can't cycle. You can't fill the gaps with activity. You just sit there.

I was listless. Not depressed. Listless. There's a difference. Depression has weight to it. Listlessness is lighter and worse. It's the feeling of not knowing what you're supposed to be doing when you can't do the things you normally do.

And that's when the question caught up with me.

What was all that training actually for?

Not the marathon specifically. Everything. The goals, the plans, the systems I'd built across thirty years of productivity habits. I'd spent my career as a software developer, a tech lead, an MBA, a product director. I'd always had a plan. But sitting on that couch with my leg elevated, I couldn't answer the most basic question: were the things I'd been doing connected to what I actually care about?

I didn't have a framework for that. Nobody does. I had surface-level answers — I wanted to compete, I wanted to win. But not deeply. Not across the ebbs and flows of thirty years.

The irony is, I'd been looking for one. My wife journals successfully, and before the Singapore trip I'd started too. The Five Minute Journal. The Productivity Planner. Brendon Burchard's High Performance Habits really spoke to me, and I tried the High Performance Planner that went with it. James Clear's Atomic Habits had me tracking habits for months. All good tools. All doing different things. All in different notebooks, different apps, different pieces of my day that never talked to each other.

I had a gratitude practice over here, a goal tracker over there, a habit scorecard somewhere else, an Atomic Habits tracker on my phone. None of it was connected. None of it answered the question I was now stuck with on my couch: what ties all of this together?

Here's the thing I keep coming back to. From 2004 to 2008, I coached marathon runners for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Over a hundred athletes across four seasons. Most of them had never run more than a few miles. By race day, 95% of them crossed a marathon finish line.

That's not a normal completion rate.

These weren't elite athletes. They were regular people. Teachers, accountants, parents. They signed up because someone they loved had cancer. Their kid. Their mom. Their best friend. The training was brutal. The long runs hurt. The early mornings were cold. But they kept showing up.

They kept showing up because the goal was connected to something that mattered more than the pain.

That's what I watched for four years. Not fitness transformations. Something deeper. People who had a clear reason, a value, even if they never called it that, could endure things that objectively didn't make sense. Twenty miles on a Saturday morning doesn't make sense unless it means something to you.

The connection between the goal and the reason was the whole game.

I was so moved by what those runners accomplished that it stuck with me for two decades. And sitting on that couch, I finally understood why.

Not everyone has that. Most people don't.

Most people set goals because they feel like they should. Run a marathon. Get promoted. Read more books. Lose twenty pounds. The goals are fine. They're just not connected to anything. And when the training gets hard, when life gets in the way, when you miss a week, when the plan falls apart, there's nothing underneath to pull you back.

That's why people abandon planners. Not because the apps are bad. Most of them are beautifully designed. But they track what you're doing without ever asking why it matters. They give you checkboxes and streaks and habit scores, and when you inevitably miss a few days, those same systems punish you for being human.

I've abandoned a dozen of them myself.

Sitting on that couch after surgery, Bailey's frameworks came back to me. Not as theory this time. As architecture.

What if a planning system started with your values, not as an afterthought but as the foundation? What if every goal you set was visibly connected to what drives you? What if your daily plan, your morning intentions, your evening reflections, threaded back to those values so you could see the connection in real time?

And what if, when you missed a week, the system didn't shame you? What if it just welcomed you back?

I'm a software developer by training. Thirty years of building things. Three patents. An MBA. A career in product management. I'd spent two decades building tools for other people. For the first time, I needed to build one for myself.

So I did.

Azimuth is the tool I needed during those weeks on the couch. It starts with a conversation that helps you identify your values. Not what you think they should be, but what actually drives you. Then you set goals and see how they connect. Every day, your plan reflects that connection. And an AI coach named Polaris reads your real patterns: your habits, your energy, your progress. And it helps you stay on course.

It's the system I wished I had when I was coaching those LLS runners. They had a built-in connection between their goals and their values. The work was already done for them. Tragedy did that work. Azimuth tries to do that work for everyone else. Not through tragedy. Through reflection.

I'm 54. This is my first startup. I built Azimuth on nights and weekends while working full-time. I'm not naive about the odds. But here's the thing that gets me:

I was already living values-aligned. I just couldn't see it.

When I trained through the injury to be in the best shape for surgery, that was my health values talking. When I treated recovery like a marathon training block, methodical and patient, that was the same drive that put me on the starting line in the first place. Health, competition, pushing my limits. Those values were running the show the whole time.

But it was accidental. I didn't choose it. I didn't name it. I couldn't have told you why I was doing any of it in those terms. It took the forced stillness of recovery, and then months of building this app, before the connection became obvious.

That's what Azimuth does. It makes the invisible connection visible. Not just for athletes recovering from surgery. For anyone who's going through the motions of a productive life without being able to name why any of it matters.

Those LLS runners had tragedy to make the connection for them. I had a torn meniscus and a couch. Most people have neither. They just have a vague sense that their goals should mean something more than checking a box.

Azimuth is for them.

Find your direction.