Life is not a marathon.

It is an Iron Man.

I was thinking recently a lot about the skill sets we need, to proceed from this point.

My core belief is, that thinking is here our superpower.

What I talk about when talking about thinking, is thinking in the full holistic way. Both our, admittedly impressive, processing abilities, our logical thinking, our connecting dots features, and our sensing, feeling, being part.

When you think about marathon, it is uni-directional. One start - one end. The first one wins. You are running the whole time. The grounds may change, but throughout it is the same kind of ground more or less.

On the contrary, participating in an Iron Man is based on a different skill set.

Besides the running part, it involves swimming and biking.

Swimming is a whole different set of muscles, than running is. It demands a completely different training than running.

Same goes for biking.

If you consider the world around us, we left solid ground already a while ago. We entered the in-between-worlds world, the archipelago of emergence, as I like to describe it.

It is a mix of solid ground, islands of the known and the foreseeable. The water in between, the sea of emergence that bears the ability to confront us with emerging islands, or rocks, and demands from us to adapt to currents, winds, and tides.

You can see how this relates to the skills needed for walking but also for swimming.

To move forward widely use our technology as a supporting factor (some even transfer the duty of the captain to technology, but that again is fuel for another contemplation). Like the bike in the Iron Man.

In an Iron Man, you are competing mostly against yourself. It demands from you the will to stay in the game.

To conclude: Life is not a sprint nor a marathon. It is not a uni-disciplinal task, where the quickest wins.

No one wins life.

But that is even more reason to stay in the game to see what's happening.

P.S.: After sharing this metaphor, an esteemed colleague in the future realm called me out, that the metaphor of running is a modern paradigm-related one. It is based on the idea that there is only one time, that it moving in one direction. Whereas a more fluid approach of time could lead to new ways of thinking. I will explore that idea in upcoming posts.