World-Class Performers Don't Work - They Enjoy High Performance | Hacker News Reader

World-Class Performers Don't Work - They Enjoy High Performance

personalmba.com

80 pointsraju10 comments

I love that there is another reference to Born to Run on HN. I think that the book appeals to the hacker in us with the way Chris McDougall ignores any pre-conceived notions of running and just starts looking for what is the simplest answer that works?

Shoes? Why use them when your feet are evolved into perfect shock absorbing springs.

Training Schedules? Here is this tribe of people who run only for the joy of it and to get where they want to go and they are some of the best runners in the world.

The whole book reads like a great paper. It makes something that once seemed complicated simple, and after you wonder how you could ever have thought that it was complicated.

>It makes something that once seemed complicated simple, and after you wonder how you could ever have thought that it was complicated.

"There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult."

-Warren Buffett

I agree with the point, but may draw different conclusions from it than most will.

My point of view is informed by the book, First, Break All The Rules. That started as a study by the Gallup organization on what divides great managers from normal ones. They learned that great managers implicitly understand that people have skills and talents. Skills, like how to drive a car, you can teach. But you can't remain focused on the road for hours, enjoy doing data entry, or make someone feel listened to without having a talent for it. And grownups are too hard to change to make it worthwhile finding talents they don't have. So it is best to make people productive by shaping jobs to their individual talents, and not by trying to "grow" them into people they aren't.

So I absolutely agree that world class performers enjoy performing at that level. You don't reach that level without having a talent, and you don't develop that talent without being wired to find pleasure in what you do. But that's better thought of as a way of recognizing existing talents than as a way to change people.

When I read "The Lord of the Rings" for the first time as a kid, I remember reading the part where Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli ran "for two days and nights" (or something like that) chasing after the hobbits that had been taken by the orcs.

I thought to myself, "Two days, that doesn't sound too bad. I think I could do that." It seemed reasonable at the time.

I started out thinking this would be kinda silly, but I really enjoyed it. I think there is definitely something to be said for having fun at work.

I think there's a risk of overgeneralizing here. The title may hold true for world-class athletes, but the author offers nothing to suggest this would be causally related to performance in business.

The Tarahumara simply start running, and by the time they stop, several hours (or days) have passed and they’re tens (or hundreds) of miles from where they started.

This sounds like me programming. I simply start programming, and by the time I stop, several hours (or days) have passed and I'm hundreds (or thousands) of lines of code from where I thought I'd be. This isn't necessarily a good thing, but boy was it fun.

I know the feeling. But I also try hard to rein myself in -- isn't it a trap man startups fall into, over-engineering stuff that does not matter?

I can identify with this. I had to stop playing piano for about 20 years before I could really start playing piano.

I always did enjoy the flow experience, though. Mastery is its own reward. (not that I'm there yet...)

I think you can see the application to business where the efficiency expert's systems to optimize costs becomes so extreme that it has unintended consequences for morale and productivity plummets.

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