CrossFit: More money, more problems...more solutions?

More money, more problems?

CrossFit, it seems, has a target on its back. The world of fitness can be polarizing. When you’ve got a movement with a founder who proclaims to have revolutionized the industry, you can bet people will take shots. When that founder is actually right, you can bet those taking shots will number in the hundreds. When he’s both right and builds a global behemoth that grows geometrically, the numbers of detractors will increase correspondingly. 

Sometimes CrossFit provides the target, sometimes it is the target.

Erin Simmons ignited an internet firestorm when she posted her piece, Why I don’t CrossFit. Here’s my rejoinder. 

Erin Simmons Doesn't do CrossFit

Perhaps the biggest complaint lodged against Crossfit—and, frankly, the most important—is that it’s dangerous. This blog is interested in two guys’ ideas: Greg Glassman and Charlie Munger. I think their respective notions of general physical and intellectual preparedness are amazing. And very similar. But Glassman’s do run a risk that Munger’s don’t: physical harm. (Glassman might rejoin that sitting on one’s ass for hours on end doing nothing more than reading is likely to produce a lot more physical harm than his program ever would…and he’d probably be right!)

CrossFit can be dangerous. Poor coaching is always bad; coaching that ignores movement that is inherently dangerous is worse than bad. No doubt, there are some CrossFit coaches who fail to protect their clients. But there are a lot more CrossFit gyms and CrossFit trainers who never fail their clients that way. Scroll down to the Hackenbruck stuff for a wonderful counterexample to Simmons’s rant happening at Ute CrossFit.

Lift Big Eat Big’s Brandon Morrison, though makes a wonderful point, any physical activity comes with risks. When people are ambitious in their physical goals and training, then there’s inherently more risk. Anyone familiar with the story of Icarus—the guy who borrowed his dad’s chariot to try to fly to the sun—is aware that doing stuff that others can’t or won’t do necessarily runs risks that those others aren’t exposed to. (Of course, poet William Blake’s point, “No bird soars too high / if he flies with his own wings” is a helpful corrective).

Let he without stiffness or injury cast the first stone

Morrison, who doesn't do CrossFit, but is fed up with those who would criticize the program, notes that, “it is very easy to call something dangerous, when you are on the outside looking in.” Of course CrossFitters get hurt and they get sore. Morrison offers some perspective, “but think about it this way: a race car sitting in the garage may require no maintenance, but it also isn't going anywhere. Wear and tear is normal across all strength sports, and let he who is without stiffness or injury cast the first stone.” 

What a great line.  

Brandon Morrison Doesn't do CrossFit...but likes it anyway.

Of course, no one who walks in a gym for the first time after 20 years of doing nothing more strenuous than sitting on a coach should not be doing Olympic lifts or heavy loads on their first visit. While I doubt very much that has ever happened in any CrossFit box, I’m sure some questionable stuff does in some gyms on occasion.

I follow Morrison in not holding, “the entirety of Crossfit responsible for the irresponsibility of the minority of new Crossfit coaches.”

CrossFit is hugely popular. It will continue to grow in popularity so long as it continues to produce results for people, and as long as it keeps producing facilities, athletes, and coaches like those found at Ute CrossFit. I love CrossFit. I think Greg Glassman’s definition of fitness is amazing and has produces truly incredible results. The notion of developing general physical preparedness in response to life’s unpredictable demands is as good a fitness idea as I’ve ever come across.

CrossFit on magnanimity

Because of CrossFit’s status and profile, it is in a position to be generous, even magnanimous. CrossFit’s and CrossFitters magnanimity is on display in activities like fighting for a cure for children’s cancer, providing clean water for Kenya, supporting the families of fallen firefighters, and making sure kids are safe around water, just to scratch the surface. It can even (especially?) be seen in supporting athletes injured while participating in CrossFit, like Kevin Ogar.

As great as their work in fitness is, it’s this kind of altruistic work that makes CrossFitters, including founder Greg Glassman, live up to an even higher ideal than the libertarian dream of non-interference.

Morrison points to another way CrossFit is generous, writing, “I challenge all non-Crossfit strength athletes to think of another fitness movement with thousands of gyms around the world, where we can bring in our Strongman equipment, have a big open floor to do whatever we want, and most importantly, not be surrounded by treadmills, mirrors, and ‘no deadlifting’ signs. LBEB lifters are eternally grateful to all the Crossfit gyms that have let us use their space in the past, because without them, we would be screwed.”

How am I grateful to CrossFit? Let me count the ways…

How are you grateful for CrossFit?

Mental models in our schools

I have a dream

I have a crazy idea. More of a dream, really. I’d love to see schools try to teach something like the latticework approach to multidisciplinary ‘mental models’ Charlie Munger thinks is the surest path to becoming wise.

I’d love to see rival entities competing to flood the marketplace with Munger-inspired projects.

Of course, there is a market for Munger’s ideas (see, for example Think Mental Models or it's better, free alternative Farnam Street blog). Unfortunately, these mostly would have us take an individual, isolated route to discover the principles and practice Munger offers.

I would greatly prefer to see people taking an approach to cultivating institutions and supporting practices that brings people together and involves classrooms, teachers, and students working and learning together. I’d prefer that people try to revolutionize the places—including our public education institutions—where we go to learn and be taught.

I prefer Ben Franklin’s project to Charlie Munger’s. Munger’s ideas, no doubt, have had an outsized effect on elite institutions in this country. Perhaps that influence will continue. It might even become more pronounced. But I’d prefer the kind of audacity that Franklin attempted in his radical redesign of curriculum for the Penn Academy.

Because I have such high hopes for such a project, I have mixed feelings when I come across a piece like this piece from Outside magazine: Can the National Pro Fitness League Become the Next Big Thing?

National Pro Fitness League Arena

 

New Pro Fitness League?

Tony Budding, former longtime co-director and executive producer of the CrossFit Games left CrossFit to pursue the pro fitness league. And the reason he found the enterprise viable-and needed—is interesting. “All of the competitions that we were doing in CrossFit were limited by the need to prove fitness,” he said.

That’s great. So is, both Budding and I agree, CrossFit’s definition of fitness: being competent in the following ten skills: cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. 

One of the biggest drivers of the CrossFit movement is the CrossFit Games. Because of the sport’s peculiar definition of fitness, Budding recognized that “If you want to test fitness, you have to do a wide variety of things.” There’s a downside, though: a lot of what’s needed to test fitness doesn’t “end up playing very well for spectators and for TV.”

I wonder if we can look at Munger’s idea of cultivating a latticework of mental models in the same way. Munger, too, has a peculiar, and peculiarly demanding, idea of wisdom. You’ve got to have competencies across a very wide range of disciplines. Just like CrossFit. 

Moreover, Munger’s rationale, like Greg Glassman’s regarding fitness, for needing such a wide array of skills and abilities is pragmatic—you have to have a wide range of skills because that’s how life works. 

Defining functional (mental and physical) fitness

Because we can’t predict what we’ll need to know and do given the tasks life throws at each of us, we need to be able to have a broad, multidisciplinary skill set. Or, in Munger’s terms, we need to have a full toolkit of mental models. Either way, Glassman and Munger argue for general physical and mental preparedness, respectively.

Yes, the ability to do advanced mathematical modeling is wonderful, but not particularly helpful if you’re trying to determine the character of a CEO running a company you’re considering investing in. Similarly, the ability to lift a 100 kilogram stone off the ground is great, but doesn’t do a lot of good if you’re 400 meters away from a friend who fell out of your boat who can’t swim. 

It’s not that the strengths and skills a person needs to construct complex math models or lift heavy weights are completely irrelevant to those tasks—in fact because someone possesses either is a decent indication that they may be more likely, all else being equal, to have the wherewithal to accomplish other difficult tasks. But anyone who wants to swim a quarter mile to rescue an endangered swimmer or hiring a CEO will need to draw on different attributes and abilities than making math models and picking up heavy stuff.

To only have a single ability and attempting to apply that single (even if singular) ability to any problem is, as Munger puts it, like going through life as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Making fitness telegenic

Anyone who’s even remotely familiar with CrossFit is aware that fitness can be photogenic.

But Tony Budding thinks fitness competitions aren’t as friendly to television as they could be. Here’s his idea: two teams of ten, five women, five men per team compete on a playing field the size of a basketball court. Matches entail eleven races in which teams of five must perform a certain number of functional fitness exercises, such as deadlifts, rope climbs, and handstand pushups. 

Budding made his idea telegenic by ensuring a format that fits into a two-hour time slot—including time for commercial breaks and personal interest stories. He wants to make it attractive to the general populace to attend events—and sponsors and advertisers to help fund them. “We are a spectator sport which means we exist for the fans.”

Culture matters

CrossFit, as I’m sure Munger has been, has been approached many times by those who would take CrossFit and turn it into something that can turn a profit. Because Munger’s and Glassman’s respective enterprises are so richly rewarding, “Huge companies like Nike and Under Armour want[ed] to be involved,’” says William Imbo, Associate Editor at BoxLife Magazine, a CrossFit lifestyle publication.

Like Munger, CrossFit founder Greg Glassman didn’t bite. The reason: control. Those companies “wanted to have a say in how CrossFit is advertised and marketed and he shot them down,” Imbo says. Glassman recognized that CrossFit’s success 

While some would argue that the CrossFit Games have been a huge success, selling out tickets, drawing a half-million viewers on ESPN, and winning title sponsorship from Reebok, Budding believes he can do better.

“CrossFit is a fitness program,” Budding says. It’s a participatory sport whose Games attract fellow CrossFitters. “Our goal is to make our teams and our athletes so compelling, so exciting, so speaking for the metropolitan area that they’re from, that people want to just be fans of the team”—even people that have no intention of ever performing a snatch.

Mental models in public school?

I wonder what we would need to do to be able to say about Munger’s articulation of how to acquire a latticework of mental models something like Budding did about CrossFit, “They’re in the gym business. They’ve given people the opportunity to make a living doing what they love, and that’s very cool,” Budding says. “But that’s not a spectator sport. That’s not a sponsorship business. That’s not a TV business.” 

Budding hopes that the NPFL he’s launching will be bigger in the United States than the National Hockey League is. 

I wish Budding well. While I do, I’ll hope that someday we’ll have public schools that look every bit as different because of Munger’s ideas as our colleges and universities do because of the work Ben Franklin did in establishing Penn Academy.

Ben Franklin's Penn Academy

Many now Benchmark physical progress...Benchmarking Mental Models?

Benchmarking Physical progress

Billed as "the easiest way to track your performance on benchmark workouts for CrossFitters, weight lifters, runners, rowers, and other serious athletes. Get some!," the website Bnchmrk.me let's people easily track their physical performance over time.

Capitalizing on the CrossFit Games Open's first workout (and some sparkling photography courtesy Ali Samieivafa), Bnchmrk created a nice graphic arguing for the power of data collection. When a person can take a look across time at how they perform at various workouts, they have real access to a and are in a position to take a critical look at what's working and what isn't. Variables in performance can be isolated and meaningful changes to work, rest, nutrition can be implemented.

Knowledge, indeed, is seeing how much you've improved between 11.1 and 14.1. The CrossFit Games Open included a workout it had previously demanded of its competitors. I'll bet most of the people who did both workouts will do better this next time around. And I'll also wager that CrossFit selected that workout again as a way to make the not-so-subtle point that it works as an exercise regiment.

Setting the bar high.

One philosopher has asserted that, in philosophy at least, to know only the gist is to know nothing. That's a pretty high bar to attain. And, I'll admit it was a little daunting, though not really discouraging, to consider what he meant. The CrossFit Games Open workout 14.1 doesn't set the bar too high in terms of the work it demands: 75 pound power snatches and jump-roping double-unders (when the rope swings under the feet twice each jump) are attainable by a large segment of the general population. Of course, each person set her own bar quite high in trying to reach her maximum potential in completing these exercises.

Recently, a man I admire set the bar even higher regarding what it would take to have a handle on what I've taken to calling CharlieMunger's Mental Models. This very smart man counseled me that I shouldn't focus "so much on the individual items of your checklist as on the general idea behind them." So far so good.

Like the philosopher I cited above, though, knowing 'the gist' of the general idea isn't nearly enough. Instead, my friend cited the Japanese proverb (he also cited Wittgenstein, but this post is already a little heavy on philosophy): “The frog in a well knows nothing of the mighty ocean." He offered the New York Times Crossword puzzle as a good metaphor for the real multi-domain, holistic fluency mastering Munger's Mental Models requires. "Those [who] can complete it must have massive knowledge across multiple domains: the English language, literature, pop culture, etc. Bring anything less than that broad domain base of understanding, and it can’t be done." He thought this a good metaphor because it's easily recognized as a yes or no proposition: one either has sufficient knowledge or one doesn't. "If you don’t," he added, "no dice."  

Across many domains & disciplines.

My friend described the challenge of attaining what Munger would call 'worldly wisdom' this way: "understanding life realities requires actually knowing the mighty ocean, at the NY Times crossword level or 'no dice'."  Learning the mighty ocean isn't easy. Doing so demands that we digest "the big ideas from all domains." 

Yes or No. And BroReps are no.

The idea that you either have the capacity or you don't might have been penned by Greg Glassman. His definition of fitness was radical in that it was a) empirical, and b) aimed at comprehensiveness. 

Contrast Glassman's notion of fitness with this: "true levels of fluency required -  across broad domains -  in order to genuinely understand the world’s complex systems is well beyond the scope of structured courses within an educational institution.  Rather, a full commitment of one’s entire life, within and outside of school years, is required."

One thinker puts the matter this way, "'Judgement', the ability to think, appears first not in merely being aware that information is to be used, that it is a capital and not a stock, but in the ability to use it — the ability to invest it in answering questions."

To have any hope of grasping complex systems as Munger has requires us to "agree to approach [our] learning in a way fundamentally different than the rest of the world, i.e, not by the usual route of being devoted to one main specialty, with some things thrown in on the side, but rather holistically, and committing to that journey for a lifetime." 

The way people benchmark in CrossFit is pretty clear. And pretty amazing. I'd love to hear how people working with Munger's mental models benchmark their intellectual progress. Whatever it looks like, I'm sure the intellectual equivalent of BroReps are 'no dice.'

CrossFit Games App #1 in Sports...how would a Munger Mental Models app fare?

The CrossFit Games announces the first workout in the open entry portion of its competition. It's a great thing.

If you've never heard of it, sign up for the Games. It'll cost $10. It's worth at least 10 times more. If you have heard of it, get ready for a series of inspiring stories about the amazing things people in the Open are doing.

One bit of information that stood out among all of the incredible personal profiles and absurd Danny Broflex commercials (see video below) was a simple picture Zach Wentz recently tweeted: 

CrossFitGames App is #1 in Sports. Thanks Zach Wentz.

The CrossFit Games app is the most popular free app in sports. More popular than the NFL, NCAA, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, and every other sports app. Turns out it reached #1 for sports in several countries.

CrossFit Games App international ranking.

It's a cool piece of information. And the underlying reality that makes it possible (that 1. lots and lots of people like CrossFit and are participating in the movement's signature competition, and 2. that those people also have iPhones) is really staggering. CrossFit and the Crossfit Games have come an impossibly long way in a short period of time.

Contemplating the way Greg Glassman has revolutionized the fitness industry--and in a way that extends far beyond the vast reach of his own company and its thousands of affiliates--I'm excited. I don't see a Munger's Mental Models app going #1 anytime soon in any category or in any country. But Glassman's success provides hope in the capacity of the business titan Charlie Munger's ideas to transform society and our educational practice. After all, how many people currently clamor for education reform? Contrast that with the number of people who, at the time Glassman founded CrossFit in the early aughts, would have ever considered that fitness needed even a minor overhaul?

It's nice that the CrossFit Games has stirred me from a too-long, work-induced break from this blog. I'll have more soon about a few ideas I have about Munger's ideas and how those who are interested in them might work together to put them to good use. Any ideas on that topic either in advance or after that effort are welcomed, as always.

As promised, here's Danny Broflex's invitation to sign up for the 2014 CrossFit Games:


  

Don't Forget To Eat Your...Dandelions?

I have no intention of dedicating this blog to nutrition, but a recent New York Times article on phytonutrients caught my eye. An earlier post on this blog notes that learning is at the bottom of Munger's cognitive fitness pyramid and nutrition at the bottom of Glassman's physical preparedness pyramid.

New York Times graphic on phytonutrients in contemporary food.

The New York Times piece by Jo Robinson opens with an argument nearly verbatim to advice my grandfather used to give me. He'd say, "it's always better to get your nutrients from food, not pills." Robinson's piece recites the idea that "food can be the answer to our ills...if we eat nutritious foods we won’t need medicine or supplements."

Robinson cites Hippocrates who, in addition to providing medicine's guiding principle more than 2,500 years ago (do no harm), also offered this insight that has become conventional wisdom, "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." My foods & nutrition instructor in college liked to point out that the French were in the habit of making fun of 'Americans' for their habit of popping nutrition supplements noting that in addition to our poorer health and higher obesity rates, we also had a lot more expensive urine.)

It is a nearly universally held maxim today that optimal health can be achieved by eating lots of fruits and vegetables. (CrossFit founder Greg Glassman, interestingly, isn't crazy about fruit and hates sugar). And food may well be the answer, but Robinson notes that farming--even before Monsanto!--has robbed a lot of the stuff we eat of a lot of the stuff that is the most beneficial to our bodies. Phytonutrients--the parts of food scientists tell us are most likely to keep us from cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia--have been disappearing from our diets for about 10,000 years.

Robinson's piece tells a bunch of fascinating stories--most notably the story of how our corn came to be super-sweet, about 40 percent sugar, and devoid of phytonutrients after a scorched earth campaign launched by soon-to-be U.S. President George Washington against the Iroquois.

"If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables," Robinson argues, "we must choose the right varieties." And the right varieties are getting harder and harder

Form Before Function.

CrossFitters chase performance. They don't care so much what their bodies look like (the CrossFit Turning 7s into 10s video notwithstanding), but they're invested in what they can get their bodies to do. Just as many people exercize in order to look good rather than perform well, 19th Century gentleman farmer Noyes Darling set out to create an all-white, sweet varietyof corn. He succeeded in ridding corn of its erstwhile "disadvantage of being yellow."

Robinson's piece is a helpful corrective to crooked thinking about what's good for us to eat. She even offers some easy, practical advice for modern-day foragers, "Look for arugula. Arugula['s] greens are rich in cancer-fighting compounds called glucosinolates and higher in antioxidant activity than many green lettuces....Scallions, or green onions, are jewels of nutrition hiding in plain sight. They resemble wild onions and are just as good for you. Remarkably, they have more than five times more phytonutrients than many common onions do....Herbs are wild plants incognito. We’ve long valued them for their intense flavors and aroma, which is why they’ve not been given a flavor makeover. Because we’ve left them well enough alone, their phytonutrient content has remained intact." 

When Two Great Thinkers Come Up With A Similar Idea, I Pay Attention

This post's headline is a paraphrase of a wonderful piece by investor Mason Myers. Here's his opening line verbatim: "When two great thinkers come to a similar idea from different starting points and careers, I pay attention."

Investor Mason Myers

Obviously, I agree. This blog is founded because two guys with very different starting points and careers came up with strikingly similar ideas. 

CrossFit founder Greg Glassman thought that the fitness industry was failing people by being too specialized. He came up with an idea that would develop greater general physical preparedness. Berkshire Hathaway partner Charlie Munger, similarly,  had previously come to the conclusion that the way people had learned (and were taught) to think was too narrow and too specialized. He came up with an idea that would combat what he saw as the 'fatal disconnectedness' of academic training: a acquiring a latticework of mental models. Munger's aim is cognitive, rather than physical, fitness. But the ideas are virtually identical.

Charles T. Munger Sr.

Myers has identified similarities that Munger's approach shares with another thinker and businessman: Clayton Christensen. This Harvard professor's ideas illuminate how to use Munger's approach, and signal how one can become adept at recognizing when and how to apply the various models Munger thinks are important.

Myers' piece is a must read in full for anyone interested in putting Munger's ideas into practice. But here's a snapshot of his argument:

"When I took Christensen’s class in 2001 or 2002, I remember being handed at the beginning of class a couple of summary papers with maybe 15-20 different hieroglyphic-like symbols representing different theories and models that are “true” in some circumstances." 

Clayton Christensen. Famous, among other things, for being Mason Myers' teacher at Harvard.

"For Munger, his ideas of “worldly wisdom” have been circulated from talks he gave in the 1990′s. The idea is that a wise person needs a “latticework of mental models” rather than the ability to crunch numbers in his head or regurgitate facts.  He explains that multiple models are better (shades of Christensen emphasizing a collection of frameworks rather than the singular focus of some academics), the models should be cross-disciplinary, and the best people can figure out which models are relevant to which situation."

Those at all interested in Munger need to read the full piece; it's one of the best, most useful things I've ever read on Munger.

Scientific Revolution, Fitness Revolution...Education Revolution?

CrossFit founder Greg Glassman made some waves (and enemies, no doubt) when he wrote about his befuddlement at Outside magazine calling Mark Allen, then the world's best triathlete, the fittest man alive and putting him on its cover.

Glassman argued that the cover's claim was absurd. Instead, he averred, Simon Poelman, a seven-time New Zealand national decathlon champion, was fitter. Glassman thought that Poelman was a better model for fitness because he, like Allen, had plenty of endurance and stamina "yet crushes Mr. Allen in any comparison that includes strength, power, speed, and coordination.”

brian mackenzie

brian mackenzie on Fitness

Author and noted CrossFitter brian mackenzie recently had the opportunity to interview Mark Allen and wrote this about the exchange, "FWIW, Mark Allen says he makes sure he is surfing and in the gym every week, lifting, not logging miles. Let that resonate if it bothers you before you defensively react to it. Mark Allen prefers to lift now rather than log miles for health and fitness. Mark Allen."

So, now, even the guy who was the paragon of long distances is mixing things up. That's what Thomas Kuhn's acolytes (and MBAs who were fed his ideas 30 years later) would call a paradigm shift.

Ben Franklin on Education

Long before Kuhn wrote his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Benjamin Franklin wrote a pamphlet that ushered in an even more impressive change in people's practice. 

Ben Franklin's Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania.

Franklin's treatise Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania was revolutionary. Franklin had a simple thought: why not teach people the stuff they'd need to do the jobs they'd get upon graduation: "Things that are likely to be the most useful and most ornamental, Regard being had to the several Professions for which they are intended."

Doesn't seem groundbreaking, much less revolutionary. In fact, it seems obvious. But Franklin's pragmatism was a significant departure from the education then offered. So significant, in fact, that the guy who ran the university Franklin founded quit doing it! Here's how the University of Pennsylvania's current website explains it:

Franklin's educational aims –- to train young people for leadership in business, government and public service -– were innovative for the time. In the 1750s, the other Colonial American colleges educated young men for the Christian ministry, but Franklin's proposed program of study was much more like the modern liberal arts curriculum. His fellow trustees were unwilling to implement most of his ideas, and Penn's first provost, the Rev. Dr. William Smith, soon turned the curriculum back into traditional channels. 

Franklin's picture adorns the $100 bill. Coincidence?

Charlie Munger on Multidisciplinary Education

Charlie Munger loves Ben Franklin. And he has adopted and amplified his hero's call for a multidisciplinary education. He argues against the intellectual specialist in favor of a broader, more general cognitive fitness or general intellectual preparedness. Munger's brand of thinking produces cognitive decathletes rather than triathletes.  

He thinks that to be smart, one must have models in her head. And one isn't enough, because reality requires more. That why we make fun of the guy who can bench press 500 pounds but can't run 500 meters or throw a baseball 50 feet. Munger cites the old addage: "To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." 

He thinks that much education is insufficiently multidisciplinary, and the result is that we produce the cognitive equivalent of chiropractors instead of doctors. Just as Glassman thinks traditional fitness routines had been producing too many triathletes and not enough decathletes.

And Munger thinks that's a "perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world." So, just as CrossFit requires people to be able to perform across a broad range of physical activities, Munger requires people to be able to think using multiple mental models. 

"And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That's why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don't have enough models in their heads. So you've got to have models across a fair array of disciplines." 

Did Ben Franklin Invent CrossFit?

Franklin in his 1749 treatise, by the way, not only provides a nice template for Munger's multidisciplinary 'mental models' approach to education, but a template for Glassman's functional fitness program as well. One of the most important, and my favorite, parts of the CrossFit charter is this: regularly learn and play new sports. Here's Franklin circa 1749:

Ben Franklin: Founding Father...of CrossFit?

Looking for a Few Good Men (& Women to Teach Munger's Mental Models)

CrossFit instructor and participant Josh Everett has landed his dream job. He provides strength and conditioning training to U.S. soldiers in the Naval Special Warfare Group.



Few if any jobs place more, or more unpredictable, demands on the human body. Being physically prepared to be a special forces soldier is a tall order.

CrossFit founder Greg Glassman's formula: constantly varied, high-intensity, functional movement is just about a perfect recipe for a special forces soldier. And Josh Everett is just about the perfect coach. He's right when he says that the training he provides has a "real world analog," and that the exercises his troops do "carry over very greatly" to the demands of their jobs. When you don't have any idea just what your job will require of you, it's good to be broadly, generally prepared. 



A 'real world analog' to the physical demands placed on special forces soldiers is your job. Few if any jobs in today's economy (at least any that anyone would want) draw on neatly-defined, unchanging mental skills and capacities. Even the best training by the greatest teachers and leaders in any field will inevitably come up short.

I've taken a look at what Warren Buffett called the life-changing moment when he encountered Benjamin Graham's book. Buffett went on to study with Graham. But, as great as the education Buffett got from Graham was (Charlie Munger said that what Buffett learned from Graham was enough to make anyone rich), that if his partner hadn't learned anything else Berkshire Hathaway would be a pale shadow of its present self.

CrossFit recently re-tweeted CrossFit Games runner-up Julie Foucher who wrote, "Two hour AMRAP of practice questions, 100 flash cards for time, then time for the gym!" with the analysis: Cognitive fitness.

Med Student Julie Foucher is Physically & Cognitively Fit.

Charlie Munger's ideas on building a latticework of mental models prepares people for general intellectual fitness even better than the advice from this Harvard Business Review piece on 'cognitive fitness' (some examples from HBR: manage by walking, read funny books, play games, learn a new language or instrument, exercise). Not surprisingly, the HBR piece cites Charlie Munger's partner Warren Buffett as someone who defies "the widespread belief that our mental capacity inevitably deteriorates as we get older.

Now all we need are a few Josh Everetts to teach Munger's mental models and some educational institutions with the will and wherewithal to do it.

 

When Will Education Copy Charlie Munger Like The Fitness Industry Copies CrossFit?

I came across an advertisement today from an established, well-respected shoe company. It announces the 'Asics training collection'. The ad doesn't really show what the shoes look like. and it doesn't really matter. The point is that the company is designing shoes for a market that CrossFit (and CrossFit-type movements) makes possible.

Asics shoes, CrossFit movement.

The ad is linked to a site that proclaims 'what's next' for Asics fitness (of course, it's a look in the rear-view mirror for regular CrossFitters), and has a pic of a guy with a prosthetic leg using the kind of 20 lb. medicine ball popularized by CrossFit.

And that's a good thing.
 
I've long been frustrated by the lack of citations in educational literature for Michael Oakeshott and Richard Flathman who offer clear-headed writing on the theory and practice of the engagement of teaching and learning.

Just as frustrating is the relative lack of influence Munger's thinking has had on educational thought and practice. Many (even many academics) would agree with his diagnosis that the academic disconnectedness is the worst plague higher education faces. It's a topic that gets a lot of lip service in academic circles. But almost no one would adopt anything close to Munger's multidisciplinary 'latticework of mental models' approach to addressing that plague.

And that's a shame.

Because his system works. Just like CrossFit works. Perhaps Munger's models need an evangelist (strange that he's not enough, given that he and his partner Warren Buffett regularly draw thousands to hear them talk, an audience Munger often remarks is full of cultists!). Maybe it's because the people devoted to implementing the kind of system he suggests would rather spend their time making money and investing in the stock market than changing educational practice. 

But the opportunity is there. As Munger argues, “There will be immense worldly rewards, for law schools and other academic domains, as for Charlie Munger, in a more multidisciplinary approach to many problems…and more fun as well as more achievement.” 

I look forward to the day when I come across ads for education companies that mimic Munger's mental models. Because that will mean that someone, somewhere has implemented his ideas. 

Greg Glassman with a reason for optimism: "Suppressing truth is like holding a beach ball under water; it takes constant work against a tireless resistance."