Personal Capacity: Perishable and Pliable
My wife loves to tell the story of a coworker who once told her, “David has an amazing capacity for meetings!” It was meant as a compliment, and it’s true. I enjoy meetings! I love engaging with others about the organization—about the shared vision, the problems, the cool things we get to do, and the awesome people we get to work with. But my capacity is not unlimited.
Years ago I mentored a student at Marshall University—Go Herd!—who was on the US National Duathlon team. Not to be confused with the biathlon, the one where you shoot at stuff while exhausted from skiing. The duathlon is the one where you are exhausted from running and biking, so then you run some more. It’s the triathlon for people who hate swimming.
My friend had a ridiculous capacity for running! I thought I was pretty cool for running my 20 miles each week. He consistently knocked out 70 or 80—and then he trained on the bike! We once ran the same 5-miler. He won the race in 25:05, about the time I was cramping up at mile 3.
Like my friend and I, runners have different potential capacities. An athlete’s maximum potential capacity is determined largely by genetics and biomechanics. But just because you’re predisposed to be a great runner doesn’t mean that you will be a great runner. Potentially great runners need to work to be great. Great runners need to keep working to stay great.
Two things are true about personal capacity, whether we’re talking about running, meetings, leadership, or shooting at stuff in the snow… capacity is perishable and capacity is pliable.
Perishable makes me think about something in my fridge. “Honey, what’s that smell!?!” Perishability is the tendency for something to decay, rot, or spoil. Abstractly, it’s when something is transitory and impermanent, requiring attention lest it fade and fail. Berries and bananas and milk and meat are perishable. So are services and skills and empty airline seats.
Elite athletes know that if they take a break (detraining) it will take even longer to get back to their previous level of fitness. For example, while a short 2-week break from running may have only cost my super-ft friend a 5-10% reduction in his VO2 max—a measure of the amount of oxygen the body can absorb and use during exercise—, it might take him as much as 8-weeks of work to regain his previous super-humanness.
This use-it-or-lose-it rule isn’t only a runner’s reality. It applies to every area of our personal capacity. Because your capacity is perishable, it needs your attention to remain fresh.
Be consistent in your effort to maintain personal capacity. Challenge yourself with assignments and responsibilities that stretch and develop you. Build rhythms of rest and recovery into your challenging schedule, but keep challenging yourself so that your capacity is ever-growing, never going.
Be realistic and gracious with yourself. There will always be someone who appears to have more capacity. Resist the temptation of comparison. You don’t know their full story—the areas of their life they might be neglecting in exchange for extra capacity in other areas. Like comparing yourself to the perfect online personas of social media celebutantes, it’s unhealthy to compare your actual capacity to others’ apparent capacity.
Be selective in the capacity you maintain. There are real capacity tradeoffs in life. Achieving greatness in any area—physical, intellectual, familial, vocational—takes years of focused effort. So make good, adult choices based on the values and aspirations of your best self and apply yourself there.
Pliability is the quality of flexible responsiveness. It describes something malleable and stretchable. Something that can be built on and built up. Pliability also means that something is impressionable and can be influenced and bent.
The fact that capacity is pliable means it needs to be managed and shaped to be most useful.
Be planful in developing your capacity. How do you effectively measure that development? For me, it’s a combination of intuitive lead measures in all areas of my life—social, emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual—as well as knowing how to game myself to keep striving and learning.
Be opportunistic. In college, I went through a week of fraternity initiation that largely consisted of sleep deprivation, mild public embarrassment, and lots of pushups. I was pretty sore from the pushup part. After day one, I could barely lift my arms, but by day three the pain was starting to subside. At the end of the week, I realized something—I now had the capacity to do hundreds of pushups! There may be natural, even accidental, events or assignments that build your capacity in surprising ways. Recognize the serendipity of the opportunity and continue to build on the newfound capacity.
Be careful in your push for capacity. Athletes are trained to push through pain and become comfortable with the uncomfortable. They also listen to their bodies and learn the difference between fatigue, the pain of exertion, and the acute pain of injury. In your pursuit of capacity, become a keen observer of self. How are you handling stress? Are you experiencing signs of burnout? What is your emotional state? How healthy are your relationships? Don’t hurt yourself, and don’t hurt others in your quest for capacity.
In my pursuit of capacity, both as an athlete and as a leader, coaching has been key. The right coach can both see and extract potential. They can push you and encourage you without breaking you. My advice is to seek out coaching and welcome it when it is offered.
If you’re interested, I’d be happy to talk more about designing a personalized program to help unlock your full potential both professionally and personally. Or I can help you build a speed-work interval ladder so you can crush your next 5-K. Your choice.
