The swimmer Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of all time, with 28 medals, 23 of them gold. He is a former world record holder in the 200m freestyle, 100m butterfly, 200m butterfly, 200m individual medley, and 400m individual medley.
But let’s just analyse his world-record time for the 200m freestyle – an amazing one minute and 42.96 seconds. Amazing, that is, until you do the maths. Over 200 metres I make that 6.99km/h or 4.34mph. Here’s my problem. I am a fat 58-year-old man, and I can run faster than that. In wellies. In Alabama there are 300lb, heavily tattooed chain-smokers who can pull a Mack Truck for 200 metres faster than Phelps can swim it.
It’s true that Michael Phelps is an amazing swimmer. But as a form of locomotion, swimming is rubbish
It’s true that Phelps is an amazing swimmer. But as a form of locomotion, swimming is rubbish. You expend a huge amount of energy to attain the kind of speed which sees you overtaken by a toddler on a tri-cycle. We applaud him for his achievement when we should be deriding him for expending his energies in such a peculiarly inefficient way.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that effort is not a good proxy for effectiveness. When judging work, we often assume that the hardest-working people are the most productive but, as Olympic swimming shows, this is not always true. Indeed, if Phelps had read his Peter Drucker (‘There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all’) he might have abandoned swimming for a more energy-efficient mode of propulsion such as the pogo-stick or the gondola.
And here’s what bothers me. I keep reading articles in the newspapers which read: ‘It’s time to get back into the office full-time.’
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