In the gym, doing reps until you fail is perfectly fine. In business, the story is different. Why?
Today’s written piece has more of a general coverage. Still within the business topic though. Its point is to test and poke at the way we look at things: life, business and failure.
Yes, failure is over-talked today — we’re part of a culture that, despite promoting the message of “it’s okay to fail, I failed my way through success”, mental health rates are not going up. In fact, suicide rates do. I haven’t got specific data on business people and mental health but it’s quite easy to infer that it’s never been a picnic to fail something in business.
You don’t even need to go gym to understand the analogy. For context, there are sets which are made of reps. Do this exercise 8 times (which would mean 8 reps) and that’s a set. However, some workouts involving doing reps until you can’t push anymore. “As many reps as possible” — AMRAP, you’d hear in bodybuilding discussions.
Business is AMRAP as well
Business is always AMRAP. The more you could get, the better. The more hours put in, the better. The higher the ROI, the happier.
Plan didn’t go as expected? Huge toll on us.
Why is it that exercising until failure is perfectly fine in the gym and not in the business world? Not only that — you might do this “train until failure” multiple times in a session.
Is it just because it’s a social norm to do that in the gym and in business there are social costs associated with failure? Maybe even worse: costs on one’s self image if things go south?
Is it because we “plan to fail” in the gym? That’s surely a strong one, having the expectation of failure. Even better, no expectation perhaps.
Is it that there is less to be lost in the gym? I’d say body and mental health
Is it that tomorrow is going to be there if we fail today in the gym? The same can be said about the gym.
Let’s end on a high note. Let’s think expectations and results are what exactly that: what we set them to be.
About Ch Daniel
I run Chagency_, an experiences design agency that specialises on helping tech CEOs reduce user churn. We believe experiences are not only the reason why users choose not to leave but also what generates word of mouth. We’re building a credo around this belief.
If I’ve brought you any kind of value, follow me and get in touch here: LinkedIn | Twitter | Email | Quora | YouTube (same content but in video)
I’ve also created an infinitely-valuable app for sneaker/fashion enthusiasts called Legit Check that impacted hundreds of thousands over millions of times – check it out at chdaniel.com/app
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Illustration Credits: Krystian Dawidowski, Mark Boardman
