Last Saturday, I was invited by one of friends Kirk Wang, who has been living in Tampa area for a long time and is becoming a well-known artist (http://www.kirkkewang.com). We have quite a few commonalities. Kirk and his wife graduated from a university in Nanjing where my father taught many years ago. We have experienced the same period of years back in China.
While enjoying the delicious food accompanied with glasses of wine, we exchanged many topics about professions, life, pursuits, and so on. It turned out that Kirk and I have another commonality as we talked about jogging when we are off work. I mentioned to Kirk that jogging is the activity (if not a sport for me) that I love for a few reasons: (1) Simple and low cost, no need to have any equipment except a pair of (good) shoes; (2) No dependency. I don't need any partners since it is not a group activity. Just run by myself anytime anywhere. (3) Unlike any other activities or sports that need one's concentration and mindset, jog just needs you to move your two legs. This means that I can think about anything while I am jogging. During my 30-40 minutes running time, I am used to thinking about how to solve the problems with my work and what I should do with my business intent. This is impossible with any other sports, for example, when I play tennis I have to concentrate on playing. I cannot afford for distracting my mind to anything else.
One thing surprised me was Kirk mentioned that he suffers with jogging, however he is still doing it. I didn't completely realize his point until this week. After coming back from a trip out of town and raining days in FL, I haven't run for about 10 days. When I made my mind of running this morning, only after about a mile, my right knee became a little painful and hip joint was rigid. At that moment, Kirk's comment about suffering with running reflects in my mind. Suddenly, I agreed with Kirk.
Even through pain and suffering, I made through almost 3 miles today. Although it is less than what I usually do, I am quite happy about it, more importantly, the conventional wisdom "No pain, No gain" prompts to my mind. Jogging a few miles is a small achievement. To accomplish it, one (like Kirk and me) needs to undergo some kind of pain. This is almost exactly true for anything else, such as in the business. For instance, any company seeking excellence and leading position needs to go through transformation & innovation. These can cause many pains to the company such as organization, technology and culture changes. The change can definitely be a painful process. But it will bring you a whole different result and landscape.
