Learning from Endurance Sports, Education at Risk and Future of Fitness
Three interesting stories that I came across last week:
A deep dive article appeared in NYTimes on what can ‘long-distance runners, cyclists and triathletes can teach us about how to move through extended periods of discomfort’. This is especially relevant in the current pandemic, but lessons are well applicable outside it also. The article is focused on four Ps: Patience, Pacing, Process and Purpose. Patience is acknowledging the tediousness of the task. It’s best described in this quote from the article: “when you go into a race expecting it to be difficult, you can always be pleasantly surprised, which helps performance. But when you go into a race expecting it to be easier than it will be, the moment it becomes hard, you quickly spiral into panic, losing your ability to bounce back and run a good race.” Pacing is about not becoming overconfident in the beginning and perhaps even going slow to ensure consistency throughout. Best put in this quote: “You’ve got to slowly chip away, very gradually increasing the pace.” Process is about ‘breaking a goal down into its component parts, and then concentrating on tackling those parts’. The final P, Purpose, is about a shared purpose, one that motivates us to the task or the race at hand. A shared purpose helps ‘fend off fatigue and despair and carry us through’.There is so much outside our control that it’s important to identify a few essentials and control them to our best ability. The concepts described in this article deserve to be expanded into a book.
Under chauvinist governments, education always runs the risk of being politicised. This has happened in several countries, including India, where the political establishment wants to colour out particular impressions and paint the historical canvas in black and white. This essay in The Economist highlights yet another such attempt, this time in Hong Kong. The case in focus is an exam question that asks whether Japan did more harm than good in its colonial period. The intention was for students to critically reason and form a view without ignoring some of the goods that may have come along with the brutality (for instance, Japan becoming a model for modernisation for China). However, the razing controversy means teachers are self-censoring themselves. As the essay states, there are now ‘rewards to point out teachers who spread dangerous ideas’. What loses out in the end is education.
The Atlantic is laying off writers, and it's unfortunate given the fact that they come out with very interesting essays, like this one on the future of gyms. We have all possibly wondered how the ‘new normal’ after the pandemic will look like, and it won’t be an understatement that many industries will transform, including the fitness industry. This long-form piece does a deep dive on future of fitness. While home fitness platforms such as Peloton have seen tremendous success (‘66% increase in sales’), the traditional gyms will not disappear in the future. We will still need to have them to keep our motivation high. Working out at home is “a little more challenging when you’re doing it with your fiancé eating breakfast and you just moved your table out of the way in your 500-square-foot studio apartment. You really, really have to hold yourself accountable, and some days you’re just not feeling it.” The gyms will most likely transform, for example, we may see more spaced out or phased participation and increased focus on attentive teaching. Also, it will be interesting to watch how both digital health and digital fitness streams play out in the new normal, and how soon the kinks of nascent communication technologies are sorted out to accelerate these trends.
A mental model that I discovered:
A problem solving strategy:
If you’re stuck, shift up a level or two (think bigger picture) or down a level or two (think finer details). Many problems are solvable at a different level.
This works for strategy too. You’ll often find a better opportunity at a different level.
