Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? By Harriet Beveridge & Ben Hunt-Davis MBE
Four Stars: The Olympic experience was fantastic but the review of that was mediocre
“An Olympic gold medal is a crazy thing to want, and a crazy thing to work towards. The odds — even if you are a world-class athlete — are stacked against you. I discovered that the only way to reach our crazy goal was with concrete, everyday habits.”
-Ben Hunt-Davis
Neil Bearden taught my favorite course in MBA titled “Management Decision Making”. That course kind of readjusted the course of my life. During one of the classes, he mentioned & praised a book titled Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?, and I had to read it.
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What is this book about?
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? is on one hand an Olympic Gold winner’s first-person account and on another a review by an executive coach. Ben Hunt-Davis was at his third Olympic Games, participating in Men’s VIII Rowing, representing the British Rowing Team. Despite losing in his previous two outings, Ben won Olympic Gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
Ben co-authored this book with Executive Coach, Harriet Beveridge, to tell his story and show us how we can adapt the strategies used by the team to improve our own life.
The book follows an interesting pattern. In each of its 12 chapters, Ben starts by recounting his experience in vivid detail. This section is followed by Harriet dissecting the actions of the team to find distilled insights and strategies.
For example, the first chapter talks about Goals. Ben shares what happened in the morning leading up to the race. Harriet then talks about the goal the rowers had in mind and how to have a layered goal grounded in reality.
The other chapters talk about motivation, beliefs, bullshit filter, how to make things happen, teams, processes, momentum, change, bouncebackability, risks, and the final race itself.
Review: Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?
There are few things I loved and liked about the book and some I felt like skipping:
Positives:
- Ben is an excellent storyteller. He has the gift of making the readers visualize his story. He uses just enough detail to transport the reader to the event itself. My heart was pounding when he described the final race.
- I got to go through a journey with the team by reading this book. This opportunity to learn about the team and what they did was precious.
- Ben and the team had their share of missteps and demons to handle. The story walks us through how they handled them and improved.
- Some of these concepts are pretty cool, like the bullshit filter.
- Harriet also added a lot of detail in describing each of the learnings. Those made the learnings more actionable.
Negative:
- I was not fond of the two-writer approach. There was a tone and momentum break whenever Harriet took over. Her writing style is also quite different so it took some adjusting.
- Few of the strategies Harriet mentioned felt forced.
My Rating
I have given this book four stars. Ben’s portion was flawless and I would give that a perfect score. When it came to reviewing his actions, the book felt a bit flat in some places.
However, I can see why this book would be useful for readers. First of all, the experience of winning an Olympic Gold is an amazing story to read. Secondly, some of the learnings are written in good detail so readers can benefit from them. Lastly, even if someone takes only one thing from the book, which is related to the title, that is a very strong guiding principle.
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