Dan Martell - September 12, 2016


Could CrossFit’s Training Methodology Be Applied To Business？


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

182.97331

Word count

1,536

Sentence count

63


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, I share a story from my experience with CrossFit and how it can be applied to business. I talk about how CrossFit has a lot in common with business, and how business can learn from CrossFit.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.080 Are you good?
00:00:01.800 Yeah, I'm born good.
00:00:11.800 CrossFit and business.
00:00:13.600 This is a call to arms, a feedback from the community video.
00:00:18.440 I'm going to share with you guys some, just a quick story and some lessons learned over
00:00:23.280 the last pretty much year, getting into CrossFit, understanding the philosophy behind it, and
00:00:28.760 and then trying to extract some of the elements
00:00:31.360 that make it so powerful that many of you guys
00:00:33.300 may not be aware of and how that might translate
00:00:35.400 to business and in the comments below,
00:00:37.340 I'm gonna ask you to share your thoughts
00:00:39.300 on where this could go but this, to me,
00:00:41.140 is the beginning of a thought experiment
00:00:42.780 that I've been running with in my mind
00:00:44.280 for the last four months.
00:00:46.080 Pretty much last September, I got into CrossFit
00:00:48.480 and what really got me hooked was studying the philosophy.
00:00:52.280 What is fitness?
00:00:53.920 What, and then there's Coach Glassman, the creator of it.
00:00:56.720 It was one of the fastest growing sports health fitness
00:01:01.220 franchises ever in the history of the world.
00:01:04.220 I mean, just the business approach to it,
00:01:06.760 pretty much run like a motorcycle gang.
00:01:09.500 The fees charge every year is minimal, essentially.
00:01:13.000 I think it's like a couple thousand bucks to own
00:01:15.240 a CrossFit box or to use a CrossFit box
00:01:17.580 that you pay to kind of HQ.
00:01:19.980 And the way they've used content and media
00:01:23.020 and documents and storytelling
00:01:25.820 and really the community to extract some of the beliefs
00:01:29.840 and strategies and best practices in the boxes
00:01:33.840 is really unique and that's what I wanna share
00:01:36.580 with you guys because to me there's a corollary
00:01:39.800 that could be extracted for business, right?
00:01:41.840 Where CrossFit is for fitness,
00:01:43.380 what's the equivalent for business?
00:01:45.200 So in CrossFit you have the definition of fitness
00:01:47.780 which I think is step one.
00:01:48.860 It's like how would you define business?
00:01:51.900 If fitness, from CrossFit's term,
00:01:53.780 is increase work capacity across broad time
00:01:57.180 and modal domain, which you'd need to understand
00:01:59.420 what CrossFit is to understand that,
00:02:01.680 what would be the definition of business?
00:02:04.260 Is it to create value for shareholders?
00:02:06.620 Is it to create profitable revenue?
00:02:08.860 Is it to empower the employees?
00:02:11.600 What are your thoughts on that?
00:02:12.860 I just wanted to kind of use this video
00:02:14.760 as an opportunity to talk about this thought experiment
00:02:17.180 because recently I was at an event talking to this guy,
00:02:20.240 Mike, who owns a CrossFit box and he was like,
00:02:21.940 yo, so how long have you been doing CrossFit?
00:02:23.380 and I shared with him my story,
00:02:24.780 and I just said, look, dude,
00:02:25.620 I've been getting nerdy on this stuff.
00:02:27.160 Like, just going, reading, watching every talk
00:02:29.820 that Coach Glassman's ever given,
00:02:31.620 reading all the business literature
00:02:33.600 around how to operate and manage a box,
00:02:35.420 looking at the philosophies.
00:02:36.500 I even got my CrossFit level one certificate.
00:02:39.560 Very important to use the word certificate.
00:02:42.300 Just not because I still have an immature squat.
00:02:44.700 I still can't do double-unders at scale.
00:02:48.100 I'm not, like, actually great at CrossFit.
00:02:50.700 That's not my goal.
00:02:51.600 My goal was really to obviously improve my fitness
00:02:54.840 in all areas of life, and that's what I love about it,
00:02:57.200 and really dive into the philosophies
00:02:59.780 because I think that there's a correlation to business.
00:03:03.520 So number one is how would you define business
00:03:05.720 like CrossFit's defined fitness?
00:03:06.980 Number two to me is what are the inspirations
00:03:11.620 that we could take from other industries
00:03:14.460 to create businesses?
00:03:16.000 So in CrossFit, they have kind of three,
00:03:18.500 what they call training modals
00:03:20.520 that they are inspired from.
00:03:21.820 Gymnastics, weightlifting, and metabolic conditioning.
00:03:26.260 So G, M, and W.
00:03:29.720 And pretty much every CrossFit workout
00:03:31.420 follows a pattern and kind of mixes and matches.
00:03:33.920 I mean the whole point is constantly varied.
00:03:38.160 I mean if you've never done CrossFit,
00:03:41.080 you gotta check it out just so you can understand
00:03:42.360 the context, but every workout is completely different.
00:03:44.680 But they're based on these three big buckets
00:03:46.880 of training modalities, and I really think
00:03:49.940 that there's probably an equivalent to business, right?
00:03:52.880 Because it's one part marketing,
00:03:54.860 it's another part operations, it's another part product.
00:03:58.320 So, you know, I've heard guys like Marcus Leonis
00:04:01.180 talk about product, process, and people.
00:04:03.620 Maybe that's it, I don't know.
00:04:05.100 And really that's, the video, again,
00:04:07.060 is for you guys to leave comments with your thoughts
00:04:09.060 on where do you think at a higher level,
00:04:11.480 at the 50,000 foot view,
00:04:13.120 people should start thinking about business.
00:04:15.000 Because to me, this is an opportunity for us
00:04:17.420 to get really clear on kind of scientific approaches
00:04:20.080 to understanding where as an entrepreneur
00:04:22.000 should I spend my time?
00:04:23.200 How should I think about building my business?
00:04:24.920 What are the skills I need to upgrade
00:04:26.800 to increase my throughput or output?
00:04:29.940 Or business acumen.
00:04:32.860 And a lot of people have different programs out there.
00:04:35.640 I'm really thinking about how would you create
00:04:37.480 an open source framework for entrepreneurs
00:04:40.780 to understand business that's not tied to a university,
00:04:43.420 is not tied to an individual,
00:04:45.140 is there for the world to use.
00:04:47.280 So the training modalities and the equivalent for business
00:04:49.940 is an interesting area that I think a lot about.
00:04:51.920 The third is, and there's many,
00:04:55.520 but is the 10 kind of components of fitness, right?
00:04:58.900 So CrossFit's got things like agility and speed
00:05:01.520 and strength and flexibility and balance.
00:05:05.020 And again, there's 10.
00:05:06.680 And that, I believe, was inspired by somebody else,
00:05:08.500 but Coach Glassman brought that into CrossFit
00:05:11.100 as a foundational element to CrossFit.
00:05:14.060 You know, they have a prescription for diets.
00:05:16.620 But when you think about those 10 skills,
00:05:18.620 what would be the equivalent for business?
00:05:20.460 Would it be financials, marketing, sales,
00:05:24.500 leadership, et cetera?
00:05:25.960 If you have any literature ideas on that,
00:05:28.140 again, leave a comment below, link it up.
00:05:29.860 If you have a book, I'd love to hear from you.
00:05:31.840 I'm really, you know, I've been studying business now
00:05:34.740 for, you know, 20 years.
00:05:36.640 I've read over a thousand business books
00:05:38.440 and personal development books and leadership books
00:05:40.380 and psychology and all these different areas.
00:05:43.120 And what I'm doing now is I'm re-reviewing
00:05:45.820 all the material to kind of pull out the things
00:05:49.000 that I believe are patterns, are patterns of principles,
00:05:51.820 are best practices when it comes to business.
00:05:54.260 And the inspiration, the reason for this video,
00:05:57.700 is CrossFit because if you look underneath the covers,
00:06:00.600 there's some really incredible thinking,
00:06:03.000 science-based, physics-based thinking that went into it.
00:06:06.640 And I think we need the same quality of thinking
00:06:09.140 and community around business.
00:06:10.980 So that is the motivation for this video.
00:06:13.320 So if you want to, you know, leave your thoughts
00:06:15.220 on the definition of business,
00:06:16.640 if you want to talk about what are the different areas
00:06:19.520 of a business at a high level that we can be inspired from
00:06:22.220 to kind of start looking at the different buckets,
00:06:23.960 or even what would be the top eight to 12 or 10 skills
00:06:28.620 or kind of departments within a business
00:06:31.920 that need to be understood.
00:06:33.300 And then the big question that I want to leave with you guys
00:06:35.980 is, and this is why I think that that training fitness
00:06:40.200 modality of CrossFit is so interesting,
00:06:41.960 is the compete every day.
00:06:43.500 It's every day you can run through a series of movements
00:06:47.840 to get a number to give you a quantifiable feedback
00:06:52.040 into how well you did compared to your peers in the group
00:06:55.400 and also how well you've done compared to previous
00:06:58.140 historical performance.
00:06:59.440 And I think that feedback loop is what's missing in business.
00:07:03.280 So if you had to measure and create a set of tests
00:07:07.660 for an entrepreneur, how would you define that?
00:07:10.620 It may never, it might not be something
00:07:12.780 that could be figured out,
00:07:13.780 but if it could, I think it's powerful.
00:07:17.180 And personally, I think it's worth exploring,
00:07:20.820 investigating, and trying to define
00:07:23.080 for the rest of my life.
00:07:24.560 As an entrepreneur, I think that this is probably
00:07:26.620 the most interesting area that I continue to study
00:07:30.700 as a lens, as a filter for all the content information
00:07:33.780 that comes into my world.
00:07:35.240 This is kind of where I'm like,
00:07:36.660 okay, what would be the equivalent?
00:07:38.020 How would you define this?
00:07:39.060 Can we get some consensus on these areas?
00:07:42.300 And I would love to get your feedback and thoughts on it.
00:07:45.160 And if you haven't done CrossFit, go do it.
00:07:46.740 I'm not one of those crazy dudes with tattoos
00:07:48.780 and cult following.
00:07:49.940 I just think that there's some really interesting
00:07:52.940 philosophies that you guys should be aware of
00:07:55.180 and how that translate into business and entrepreneurship
00:07:57.720 and creating value in the world.
00:07:59.280 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
00:08:02.680 and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
00:08:05.180 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel
00:08:07.380 to get other tips on how to start and grow your business.
00:08:10.100 I'd also suggest you join my newsletter
00:08:12.460 for exclusive invites to events,
00:08:14.600 community contests, and other free training.
00:08:16.920 And if you want more content,
00:08:18.820 be sure to check out these videos.
00:08:20.720 As per usual, I will see you next week.
00:08:23.080 Have a great day.