As this post is going up on my website, I’ll be crossing the finish line of the Charlotte RaceFest Half Marathon. It’s a good little tune-up for the Pittsburgh Marathon on May 2. The full marathon (26.2 miles) will likely take me 5.5 hours but the winner will finish in about 2 hours; this in spite of the fact that I’ve been training for 6 months. Granted that’s training while I work 60 hour weeks, travel and work on my MBA; but believe me I’ve spent a lot of time running and the winner will literally run more than twice as fast as me.
Over the course of training for the marathon I’ve come to appreciate the simple fact that we as humans are not all built the same. I just don’t have the legs, lungs, heart, etc… to run that far that fast. This got me thinking, are human talents as widely spread in other disciplines? Sure it’s easier to measure someone’s talent in a marathon then it is in say engineering or graphic design, but does the same talent gap exist? Are there people that are more than twice as good at engineering as other engineers who have been “training” at it?
I’m going to assume that the same gap exists. This leads me to my next set of questions, where the unsolicited advice comes in. Are you doing something professionally that you can run in 2 hours? If you can’t run your current job in 2 hours is it because you haven’t trained for it or because you don’t have the talent? Is there something you can switch to that you can run in 2 hours? Are you employing people who are running 6 hour marathons in spite of their cheerful manner and best efforts? Are you properly rewarding your 2 hour runners?
