'The Most Overrated Trait In Business Is Intensity,' says marketer Kedar Ravangave

A few days ago, I completed Ironman Subic Bay. The race took me more than fifteen hours. What surprised me most wasn't how hard it was. It was how little intensity mattered. Standing on the start line, intensity feels like an advantage. Adrenaline is high. Energy is abundant. Everyone wants to attack the day. But Ironman has a way of exposing flawed strategies. The athletes who start hardest often suffer most. The race doesn't reward intensity. In many ways, it punishes it. Instead, it rewards something far less glamorous: restraint. Pace. Consistency. Patience. Discipline. The ability to keep moving when conditions deteriorate.

Somewhere during the 180-kilometre bike ride, riding through rain, fatigue and uncertainty, I found myself thinking about business. Because many organisations make the same mistake athletes do. They confuse intensity with effectiveness. We celebrate the leader who responds to emails at midnight. The team that pulls all-nighters. The quarter with explosive growth. The campaign that dominates conversation. Intensity is visible. What we rarely celebrate are the quieter forces that create enduring success. The brand team that reinforces the same memory structures year after year. The leader who earns trust through hundreds of small interactions. The organisation that improves a process every day for a decade. The entrepreneur who keeps building long after the excitement has faded. These are not acts of intensity. They are acts of endurance. This distinction matters even more in the age of AI. Technology is making speed abundant. Output abundant. Information abundant. The ability to produce more faster, is becoming increasingly commoditised. What remains scarce is judgment. Consistency. Trust. The ability to stay focused on a meaningful objective long enough for compounding to work. The longer I spend in business, and the longer the races I choose to undertake, the more convinced I become of one thing:

Intensity gets most of the applause.

Endurance creates most of the outcomes.

And in business, as in Ironman, the people who ultimately win are rarely the ones who start fastest. They are the ones who stay in the game long enough for the long game to work.