Punching Above Your Weight Class Is a Medical Decision

Nobody invented weight classes to protect the feelings of small men. They were invented by people who got tired of writing incident reports, obituaries and condolences. The logic is not moral, it is anatomical. A well conditioned fighter at sixty kilos who steps in against a hundred kilo opponent is not an underdog story waiting for a soundtrack. He is a set of predictable injuries with a ticket price attached. Skill compresses the gap. Mass decides what happens when skill has a bad night. Divisions exist because the sport learned, expensively, that courage does not distribute impact force. Business borrowed the phrase and dropped the medicine. In the corporate translation, punching above your weight class became a compliment. It appears in board decks next to the word audacious, which is doing an enormous amount of load bearing work in most board decks. It shows up in performance reviews as growth mindset. It shows up in founder interviews as the moment we decided to go after the big…