After the Meihua Lake triathlon relay ended, I lay on the grass, every muscle aching, yet my mind was unusually clear.
I wasn’t reliving the thrill of the race — though it was indeed thrilling. I was mulling over a question: why did this relay give me a deeper understanding of “team” than any corporate training I’d ever attended?
The answer lies in the rules. The rules of a triathlon relay are simple, and brutal: three people, each responsible for swimming, cycling, and running. If any one of them drops out, the whole team’s result doesn’t count.
Not a deduction. Not a discount. Straight to zero.
You can swim like a flying fish and cycle like a Tour de France contender. But if your running partner cramps up and quits in the final five kilometers — all your effort might as well never have happened.
Embodied Education in a Community of Shared Fate
Why is this rule so educationally meaningful? Because it creates a kind of embodied experience you can never learn in a classroom: your success or failure does not depend entirely on yourself.
During the race, you go through a strange psychological state. While you’re in the water, you’re thinking not only about your own pace but also about your teammate — will he be able to hold up on the bike later? While you’re cycling, two things are constantly on your mind: don’t go too slow and drag down the runner, but don’t go too fast and injure yourself, forcing the whole team to withdraw.
This feeling of “carrying others in your mind” can’t be taught through a teacher’s lecture. It needs a real situation, one with consequences, before it can grow.
And there’s an atmosphere at a race that no team-building activity can replicate. When a group of people with a shared goal come together, a force of mutual encouragement naturally arises. The moment you see your teammate sprinting into the transition zone to hand you the relay band, you know — he has given you everything he had, and now it’s your turn.
In that instant, you don’t want to let him down. Not because someone is watching, not because there’s prize money. Purely because — he gave it everything he had, so you have no right not to do the same.
This is group education. Not the textbook definition, but a living, embodied experience.
The Age of the Lone Bird Is Over
I’ve seen too many “lone birds” in the workplace.
These people usually share some common traits: excellent credentials, strong individual abilities, impeccable professional knowledge. But the moment you put them in a team, problems arise. They’re not used to syncing with others’ rhythms. They think meetings are a waste of time. They can’t accept their proposals being revised by the team. They believe they’re better than their colleagues, so they don’t need to listen to anyone else’s opinion.
To be honest, I had this mindset myself when I was young. As a graduate of NTU, NTHU, NCTU, I once believed that credentials were proof of ability, and that people with good degrees should naturally be the ones making decisions.
It was only after I started a company that I realized how naïve that thinking was.
The first lesson entrepreneurship taught me wasn’t “how to build a product” or “how to raise funding” — it was that you can’t accomplish anything on your own. You need people who understand technology, people who understand the market, people who understand finance, people who understand law. And these people aren’t your subordinates; they’re your partners. You can’t lead them with “I’m more capable”; you have to unite them with “let’s get this done together.”
The era when holding a diploma let you look down on everyone else is truly over. I discussed this in The Arrogance of the Elite, the Way Out for the Young — meritocracy makes winners believe they did it all themselves, but in the real world, no one can accomplish anything meaningful alone.
The Underrated Power of Sports
If group education is this important, why does Taiwanese education barely teach it?
Because the best arena for group education — sports — is severely underrated within Taiwan’s education system.
What’s the standing of P.E. class in most schools? “Let the kids run around and break a sweat,” “a way to refresh body and mind,” “something you can borrow for self-study before exams.” Sports is treated as a sidekick to academics — or even an obstacle, since too much P.E. eats into study time.
But think carefully about how much nutrient for group education is hidden within sports.
Team sports require you to sync with others’ rhythms — you can’t just play your own game; you have to watch where your teammates are. A relay requires you to trust your teammates — you can’t control how fast they run, but you must believe they’ll give it their all. You will lose games — and learning to lose, learning to face defeat alongside your teammates afterward, is an extremely important ability.
When leading teams, I’ve found that people with experience on a school sports team generally have better collaboration skills. Not because sports made them smarter, but because on the field they’ve already gone through countless drills of “having to coordinate with others.” Those experiences are etched into the body and activate without conscious thought.
The Real Core Training
In an era where you must “create your own work,” the value of a diploma is rapidly depreciating. What core abilities are taking its place?
The ability to spot problems and solve them. The ability to leverage resources and collaborate with people from different fields. The ability to express your ideas clearly. And one that’s hard to articulate but most useful in the field — reading the subtle cues in human interaction, knowing when to push forward and when to pull back.
These abilities share one thing in common: they can all only be learned in an environment where “others are present.”
You can’t develop collaboration skills on your own, just as you can’t learn to swim by watching instructional videos. You have to jump into the water, you have to choke on it, you have to learn to coexist with your own fear while in the water.
In Emotions Are Not a Private Matter, I discussed how EQ can only grow through group interaction. Collaboration is the same. It’s not a kind of “knowledge”; it’s a kind of “embodied feeling.” And embodied feeling can only be trained in real situations.
The triathlon relay is exactly such a situation.
See You at the Finish Line
Finally, a few hard-won lessons from doing triathlons.
Don’t get hijacked by adrenaline — everyone’s pumped at the start, and it’s easy to bolt. But a triathlon is an endurance race, not a sprint. Finishing at your own pace is far more important than dashing out stylishly only to blow up later.
Hydration is always more important than you think. Bring enough water; don’t count on the aid stations.
After swimming, then cycling, then running, your muscles will hate you on that final stretch. Muscle-relaxing spray is a lifesaver.
And — when you spot a photographer in the distance, remember to reel in that about-to-drop-dead expression. You’ll thank yourself later for at least one halfway decent photo.
The educational meaning carried by exercising together far exceeds boosting your metabolism. It is the most authentic battlefield of group education. And group education is the scarcest and most underrated education of our era.
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