Starting A Company Is Like Playing Adult League Sports

To do or not to do, that is the question

As long as you live as a working adult, you inevitably deal with all kinds of external worlds — other people, other countries, maybe even outer space. Countless problems and dysfunctions overflow within them, and they shake your heart with the question “shouldn’t this be fixed?”

A sound mind resides in a sound body

Not doing what should be done is stressful. Especially so if you’ve already spotted the solution yourself. It’s deeply unhealthy. But at the same time, every working adult knows there are always multiple things that should be done. Solving a social problem is fine, but what if it leaves your own family out in the cold? That large-scale development project may well matter, but does it have to be pushed through even at the cost of repeated human disasters and breakdowns along the way? No — in the end, it comes down to balance.

Muscle achieves supercompensation by being damaged, and through that gains a higher potential than before. But what matters is adequate rest and a solid diet. Without those, the muscle fibers just keep tearing. In the end you get injured and can’t move at all.

Training comes in two kinds: training to maintain or adjust condition, and training to improve performance. The difference is the intensity applied. Those who want to raise their performance do high-intensity training. That’s how you build a body that can run for the full 90 minutes, or a shoulder that won’t break even after 200 pitches in a game. Training aimed at maintaining health, by contrast, should be low intensity, and what matters most is avoiding injury and being able to keep it up enjoyably.

On whether you should play sports or whether it’s fine not to, I imagine people from various fields and specialties would each have something to say. But speaking from my own experience playing football up through an adult amateur league, I think it’s not necessarily something you need to do.

Think about childhood, and it’s better to do it. Among the benefits sports bring, beyond improving body control, they especially help mental growth: learning about teamwork, the joy of winning and the frustration of losing. The earlier these come, the better. But once you move past adolescence, that phase of learning is over. In other words, without “something beyond that kind of calculation,” there’s no motivation left to take sports seriously.

One book put it this way: “after your thirties, it’s cycling.” What it was getting at was this: your twenties, when you charged ahead full throttle without worrying about small failures, come to an end, and surrounded by a society that won’t go as you wish, you find comfort in something you can control by your own will — something that gives back exactly as much as you put in, and where slacking off brings back exactly the consequences of slacking off.

As an extremely health-oriented way of thinking, this is wonderful.

For most people, the center of life is roughly “work” and “family.” But those don’t go as you wish. So finding something healthy outside of them, and precisely tuning your hormones through the fulfillment of raised self-awareness and a sense of achievement, is a highly self-aware and intelligent approach. Turn instead to alcohol or gambling, and you’ll only end up more stressed, gloomier, and in some cases physically broken.

But ask “those people” — “want to seriously play football on our team?” — and the answer is of course no. Their bodies are built, they have endurance. Didn’t they even go to the national tournament in high school? You might wonder why they wouldn’t do it, but the reason is this:

There’s no need to do it

In other words, necessity — meaning motivation within them — is severely lacking. You can’t gauge another person’s inner self, and you probably can’t change it either. This is something I felt strongly when recruiting members for an adult amateur team. In an adult league, there are actually games nearly every weekend. Some people, like in the Self-Defense Forces, put themselves through tough training every single day as a matter of course. Others work regular hours and can basically move their bodies every night. And as was true for me, amid late-night overtime and grueling overseas business trips, there were people who barely dragged themselves to the pitch on weekends, running on fumes.

Even so, the match begins. From here, since it’s a genuine contest, there’s an exchange of heart, skill, and body beyond words, and after 90 minutes, one side wins and the other loses.

Excuses are thoroughly unhealthy, because what should be done should be done. If you’re not going to do it, you should be able to shut the question down with a reason equal to the weight of not doing it. Sometimes you come up with a business model or a new venture idea and move to make it real — within a company, say. Even so, it often doesn’t go well, and in the end it ends up in the “won’t do” box. When you can’t find a reason equal to the weight of that outcome, you have no choice but to call it thoroughly unhealthy. But a working adult has several options available. You can ride a bike, you can go jogging, and if you want to push yourself even harder, you can even take up a triathlon.

Still, there are times when now is when it has to be done!

Times like that do exist. Call them times when necessity is fully present. At times like that, I hope you’ll steel yourself and take the step forward.

Jeff Bezos It’s hard to make money on things that change, because you don’t know the answer. If you simply want to make money, you should make it steadily from things that don’t change.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2019/10/433/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.