She uses these stories as a jumping-off point to talk about goals and failure. When the goal is to finish the marathon, anything other than that is a failure. Despite the change in circumstances, the risk of doing more damage to themselves, and the fact that no one would find fault in them for stopping, they went on with this myopic focus on hitting their goal.
It got me thinking about OKRs. You know, those quarterly, semi-annual, or annual goals we set for employees during performance reviews, and then measure them solely on whether they hit those goals or not. As if the world doesn’t change in the middle of the time period and forces us to react in a way that might not be part of our stated goals.
It also got me thinking about company-wide goals like market share, revenue, etc.