New Years Resolution #1: Write more…on this website….ha
It’s the new year, and I’m sure you have new goals for better or worse. Of course, I do, too. The book of faces reminded me that 4 years ago I posted this:
I joked that the only thing I needed to change was that 5.12 to a 5.13. Other goals include learning about training more, coaching, more photography, getting rid of all the sh*t I don’t need in my new digs, better budgeting, writing more, and a few other work / artsy related projects (and some others!).
New years resolutions, improving in climbing, pushing grades: I personally feel it is so, SO important to me to find people to surround myself with who understand what training is. It is not performance. It does not mean showing up to the gym 100 % and looking / feeling like a badass. It does not mean onsighting the grades I expect all the time or succeeding on the routes I wish. Pushing yourself, growing, getting outside of that comfort zone means failure. It means a LOT of failure, and if I feel too much competitiveness with those I climb with, I hate it (and will not climb with those people). My best and favorite climbing partners laugh along with me when I try super hard and fail, because they know…it’s all part of the game of progress.
Coaching a robotics team and generally teaching students to do project management type work while working on their various STEM projects has me look at a ton of things. I ran across some fun statistics and just want to completely un-relatedly apply them to rock climbing goals for a moment.
Team Gantt discusses some fun statistics about businesses at https://www.teamgantt.com/blog/seven-shocking-project-management-statistics-and-lessons-we-should-learn/. I’m stealing the first one!
– Only 2.5% of companies successfully complete 100% of their projects.1(Study source)
Gallup Business Journal remarked on the study:
PricewaterhouseCoopers, which reviewed 10,640 projects from 200 companies in 30 countries and across various industries, found that only 2.5% of the companies successfully completed 100% of their projects.
2.5 % of projects…is not a lot. It’s disparaging even. If you succeed in 3% of your goals you’re a success! Can you even imagine?
There a few interesting questions to ponder for this to even apply though…
– Businesses have timelines. Do you? (Do you have a SMART Goal?)
– Let’s pretend time in training is weirdly somehow the equivalent of your budget for said project. Are you overspending or underspending your time training? Are you training efficiently? Do you feel the amount you are training is paying off directly? or is some of this lost time? Lost how and to what?
– Are your projects hard enough? (Are you choosing the “right” projects?) If your success rate is way about 3%, I dare say you are not trying hard enough. Raise your product value a bit there buddy.
– How do you define success? Obviously, for this statistic to be true, businesses survive without having amazing perfect returns on their products. Of course, climbing is not about one route, one goal, one boulder problem, at least not to me, but even in businesses centered around product development, there is hopefully a bigger goal to the company where improvements are made.
This might be a ridiculous post…partly aimed at me forcing myself to write more in a limited amount of time. But if you can ignore that…and reflect on your time spent in the gym, projects chosen, or definition of success…maybe this year can be a little more fruitful in the most important ways.
<3 <3