There’s a reason why taping your wrists is a lousy way to train on a heavy bag. You will never, ever get in a fight with a heavy bag at the precise moment that you’ve just taped your wrists and put on your gloves. This is why so many training programs are useless when it comes to behavior modification and why so many bad decisions are made in business.

This is why theory without practice so often fails.

This is why first-person experience beats the alternative.

This is why your MBA is the beginning of your professional experience, not, as our former Dean of Students at Wharton once said, “the FBI Witness Protection Program.”

This is why brands who truly embrace customer insight always out-maneuver their competitors who don’t. They know things that others only guess at. They understand the product, the problem, your question so well that it’s “under their fingernails,” as Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Company would say.

This is hard work. You’ll sprain your wrists a few times training this way. You’ll find that changing from right crosses to combinations throws you off and you forget in all the movement to keep your wrist locked, which hurts. But you learn to throw combinations the way you would in the ring or in the street. And this is completely, irrevocably different than being “fairly certain” you know how to do this right. Because the time may come when you need to put your training to its practical application, when you need to understand the nuances of your customer’s problem better than they can articulate it. When the proverbial chips are down, you don’t want to learn the hard way that you don’t really know what you’re doing.

So train like you mean it. When the time comes, everyone will know you trained the right way.

Regards.