Sprint! The Way to Overcome Fear..
Adapted & Edited from Sports Medicine journal:
“The activity patterns of exciting projects are intermittent in nature, consisting of repeated bouts of brief maximal/near-maximal work interspersed with relatively short moderate/low-intensity recovery periods. This is generalized description currently provides the best means of directly assessing the physiological response to this type of activity. During a single short sprint, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is resynthesised predominantly from having a vision of future achievements, with a small contribution from possible financial gains. During recovery, new ideas sharing remains at a high level to restore motivation via processes such as networking sessions, attending inspiring talks, and seeing others on the same path as you.”
Researching into the successes of the Apples, IDEOs and Toyotas of the world, a common theme of start-ups is often the seeming lack of fear – the singular focus on the goal at hand, ignoring all odds and giving it all you can.
Quoting from Seth Godin’s post yesterday, “The best way to overcome your fear… might be to sprint… all the internal dialogue falls away and we just go as fast as we possibly can… you don’t feel that sore knee and you don’t worry that the ground isn’t perfectly level. You just run… You can’t sprint forever… the brevity of the event is a key part of why it works.”
“The project deadline is tomorrow.”, “You have 24 hours to plan and execute the entire roadshow”, “(from Prof Ben) Learn an entire new programming language and API, and deliver an application within 3 weeks”. All of us, in a point or another, have achieved something extraordinary by sprinting, often egged on by external motivation factors, so we know that it is possible. Sometimes, we might even only realize the enormity of the project on hand after we had completed it.
How often do you sprint? Only when people ask you to? Why not decide to sprint regularly and build up your stamina to take on larger projects? Build the next Google? Be the first non-astronaut on the moon?
One thing from the journal to note for the chronic optimist (like myself) though, “if duration of the recovery periods is insufficient to restore the metabolic environment to resting conditions, performance during successive work bouts may be compromised”.. Pick your battles and sprint through to the finish line!