Starting A Company Is Like Playing Sports As An Adult

To be, or not to be, that is the question

Live as a working adult long enough and you have to deal with all kinds of external things — other people, foreign countries, maybe even outer space. Countless problems and glitches lie scattered across them, and they shake your heart with the question, “shouldn’t this be solved?”

A sound mind resides in a sound body

Not doing what should be done is stressful. Even more so if you’ve already spotted the solution yourself. That’s deeply unhealthy. But every working adult also knows there’s more than one thing that should be done. Solving a social problem is fine, but what if it means leaving your own family out on the street? That large-scale development project might genuinely be meaningful, but do you have to push it through to the end even if it causes a string of human disasters and breakdowns along the way? No — in other words, it’s about balance.

Muscles achieve supercompensation by being damaged, and through that they gain a higher potential than before. But what matters is adequate rest and a proper diet. Without those, the muscle fibers just keep tearing endlessly. 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. People who want to improve performance do high-intensity training. That’s how you build a body that can run for a full 90 minutes, or a shoulder that won’t break even after throwing 200 pitches in a game. Training aimed at maintaining health, on the other hand, should be low intensity, and what matters most is simply avoiding injury and being able to keep enjoying it.

People in various fields with various specialties would each have something to say about whether you should play sports or whether it’s fine not to, but speaking from my own experience of playing soccer up through an adult amateur league, I think it’s not necessarily something you have to do.

Thinking back to childhood, though, it’s better to do it. The benefits sports bring aren’t limited to improving body control — they especially help with 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 learning phase is over. In other words, without “something beyond that kind of calculation,” there’s no motivation left to take sports seriously.

A certain book had a line: “from your 30s on, it’s cycling.” It’s saying something like this: once your 20s — spent charging ahead full throttle, brushing off every small failure — come to an end, and you find yourself surrounded by a society that won’t go the way you want, there’s comfort in having something you can control by your own will, something that gives back exactly as much as you put into it, and exactly as little if you slack 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 the way you want them to. So gaining something healthy outside of those, and precisely regulating your hormones through things like a heightened sense of purpose or the fulfillment of achievement, reflects a very objective sense of self-assessment and no small amount of intelligence. Turn to alcohol or gambling instead, and you just end up piling on more stress, sinking into gloom, or, in some cases, wrecking your body.

But ask one of “them,” “want to play soccer seriously on our team?” and the answer would of course be no. They’re in shape, they have stamina, and didn’t they even go to the national tournament back in high school? Why not do it? you might think, but here’s the reason.

There’s no need to do it

In short, necessity — meaning motivation as they themselves experience it — is severely lacking. No one else can gauge another person’s inner state, and changing it is probably difficult too. This is something I felt strongly while recruiting members for an adult amateur team. In an adult league, there’s actually a match almost every weekend. Some people, like those in the Self-Defense Forces, put themselves through grueling training every single day as a matter of course. Others work fixed hours and can basically move their bodies every evening. And then there were people like me, working late into the night, sometimes on brutal overseas business trips, who still had to drag themselves onto the pitch on the weekend on sheer willpower and whatever stamina was left. Even so, the match kicks off. From that point on, since it’s serious competition, there’s an exchange of mind, skill, and body beyond words, and after 90 minutes, one side wins and the other loses.

Excuses are deeply unhealthy. What should be done should be done. If you’re not going to do it, you should 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 and start moving to make it happen. Within a company, say. Even so, things often don’t go well, and in the end it lands in the “won’t do” box. When that happens, if you can’t find a reason “equal to the weight” of not doing it, I have to say that’s deeply unhealthy. But a working adult has plenty of options. You can cycle, you can jog, and if you want to push yourself even further, you can even take up triathlon.

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

There are times you feel that way. You might call it the moment when necessity is at its fullest. 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.