we met a dude named Mahathir on Langkawi. (I know…)
He works for his father-in-law on a horse stable + farm. A self-described city to islander boy, Mahathir is training up for an Ironman. If you don’t know what that is, completing an Ironman means:
- a 2.4-mile (3.9 km) swim (in open sea waters!!)
- a 112-mile (180.2 km) bicycle ride and a
- marathon 26.22-mile (42.2 km) run completed in that order,
…for a total of 140.6 miles (226.3 km).
I’ve never once even considered signing up for a marathon, much less train for what sounds like paying for pain. So I had to ask Mahathir:
what motivates you?
motivation is consistency
He said, motivation is consistency.
I guess I was expecting something about the feeling of accomplishment, or self-improvement/mastery, or maybe even health. He mentioned he lost almost 20kg in 6 months training – you’d think that would be motivation!
But he said motivation is consistency. If you’re consistent, you will be motivated.
Motivation in his eyes then, isn’t a feeling.
In fact, it’s in spite of feelings. According to this normal guy doing all this with a full-time job and two toddlers, the best trainings he’s ever had was when he felt malas/lazy and still did it anyway.
Waking up at 4am everyday to solat tahajjud, he said, was just as hard a commitment. But like training, to do it consistently and especially when feeling tired or lazy was motivation.
Motivation then is less of a state of being, and instead the answer to the question: how do you keep going?
You keep going by being consistent.
dream big, act realistic
Mahathir got onto this path thanks to his father in law, who if you remember, is also his boss. We didn’t meet him, but you can hear the awe in his son in law’s stories about this man.
Apparently, with little experience in running, swimming or cycling (he was a horse man through most of his life), the boss of this company decided to train for an Ironman at 65. It was so new to him that they laughed at how he straight his horseriding posture was when running.
But he made it. And he’s still going.
A confession: these days, I am highly skeptical about the dreamer narratives. When you work with the marginalised, who have extremely real barriers to success, who were born fighting for the right to exist as a human, hearing someone say “you can do anything if you work and want it hard enough!!” seems delulu at best and privileged at worst.
but it is also true that believing this about yourself, with all your heart, opens up doors you otherwise assumed were closed.
your dreams will be moderated by reality, and it’s good to make peace with that. but to go too far and stop dreaming is a tragedy for any life.
good business makes good people
but how did father in law’s journey lead to Mahathir – and in fact, every single employee in this family business – each have their own personal fitness goals and training regimes?
on one hand, it comes from the top. they have to submit daily training updates on WhatsApp. if they represent the company at a sports event, the rule is that they have to beat their personal best…or answer to why in a meeting.
oh, and no training allowed during working hours.
in a world pushing back against overbearing bosses and invasive work culture (it’s just a job vs our parents’ my career is life), this seems a little bit crazy.
but at its heart? maybe the value of a business has never been about maximising shareholder value. maybe it was truly about manifesting shared values.
how does integrity look like? discipline? culture of excellence? service-orientedness?
We had core values in Majulah and I remember feeling incredibly proud when someone in the team questioned a decision by asking: how does this align with them? In that moment, I knew these weren’t just words, or top-down. We shared those values and we tried to live them everyday.
In the process, we helped each other become better people and in truth, a better company too – because no company values exist in opposition to the work! they’re there firstly because they are core to the actual work, whether it’s youth work or taking good care of 15 horses on a farm.
In contrast, a struggling social enterprise / non-profit with toxic work culture and terrible humans? that’s the polar opposite of the Good Business, Good People spectrum. But that’s another story.
At the end, Mahathir said his boss/father in law was ready to sponsor his next Ironman…but he didn’t want to take it up until he could be confident to do well (swimming in open waters at the same time with 100s of people is as scary as it sounds).
Until then, he’s still training.
to complete an Ironman, sure. but also to be a better man.