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Week of 20 June 2022
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This week's recommended article & book
Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance
Behavioural Economics in Business

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance

Alex Hutchinson

Why we recommend this book

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson. Hutchinson's book is the best available science-journalism treatment of a question that looks physiological but is substantially psychological: what determines how long a person can continue effective effort before stopping, and what separates the people who push through the point at which stopping seems rational from those who do not? Drawing on sports science, neuroscience, and the psychology of endurance, Hutchinson examines the central-governor theory, the role of perception of effort relative to actual physiological limit, and the evidence on the psychological and relational factors that move the point at which a person decides they have reached their limit. The long-horizon entrepreneur is not an endurance athlete, but the research Hutchinson synthesises is more applicable to the experience of building a business across years — the extended difficult periods, the gap between investment and return, the question of when to continue and when the evidence has genuinely changed — than most of the explicitly entrepreneurial literature. The book is rigorous, readable, and genuinely surprising in its conclusions about where the limits of sustained effort actually sit.

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