Interview Puzzle/Question
I was having a dinner with a few people I should say from McKinsey as a part of an informal interview and a general get to know you situation. Granted, McKinsey has a set way of doing things but seeing as I had some relations with the firm, there was additional face time outside the interview process.
Long story short...
At one point in the dinner, one of the consultants asked me a question and said that my job acceptance was on the line (I was more focused on what the question could be tbh,,and I think he was just baiting me). The question was, "How do you determine how difficult a sport is?".
I kid you not, the table went silent and people were putting their utensils down.. thought it over for a second. and went off saying you had to define "sport" and "difficult", assume "sport" was limited to official Olympic sports because they are an internationally agreed-to set of sports with a high level of competition and "difficult" broke it down by physical intensity, mental skill, and level of domestic and international competition. As I write it, I think my answer is definitely not what I would say now, given I've had time to think it over.
This has been really bugging me. But my question to you is, how would you have answered? No need for anything long, just shoot from the hip. Thank you. Trolls need not reply.
I'd break difficulty down by genetics, physical intensity, and mental intensity. Genetics is basically a measure of how important it is to have the right genes and how rare those genes are (eg. genetics play a huge role in the 100m dash while they play much less of a role in BMX). Without considering the role of genetics, I think that any measure of difficulty is meaningless because what's physically impossible for one person might be easy for another (eg. most skinny twigs don't even have the genetic capacity to become Olympian weightlifters while there are other people who are just naturally jacked).
Clearly the most difficult sport is the ironman or the decathalon
Used to work with a guy whose friend participated in a Double Deca Triathlon - 20 times Ironman in a row so swimming 76 km, cycling 3,600 km and running 844 km back to back. Never heard of anything comparable to that.
Depends how you define difficulty. Physical intensity is one way to do it, you really need a metric so you could think in terms of total calories burnt during an event, and weight that some way based on calories burnt per hour - burning 1000 calories in one hour is a lot harder than doing it in three hours.
Perhaps a more "McKinsey" answer is to say that the goal of a sport is to win. And so the hardest sport is the one that is hardest to win. In that case you'd look at the number of competitors/teams in a given competition; assuming a uniform distribution of skill (which is obviously a poor assumption but is probably what you'd use in an interview) the probability of winning would be 1/(# of competitors) and the sport with the lowest value of this would be the most difficult. Of course then we can debate whether winning any event counts as winning or if you've got to win at the Olympics to have truly 'won'. Or maybe you have to set the world record?
I think that's pretty interesting that you raise the idea of "win" when questioned about how "difficult" a sport is as opposed to looking at the physical exertion of the sport. Yea I should have definitely used that. I suppose the question they ask has a hidden question under the surface, and the gap is the "why". Why do they want to know which is the most difficult sport? Because they want to know which is the easiest to win, and thus the real question is, how do I find out which is the easiest to win. Thanks for pointing that out.
there are two ways to look at "difficulty":
1) the amount of physical/mental hardship endured while playing the sport: you can use a composite score that includes number of calories burned in an hour (as mentioned in above post), average heart rate sustained, amount of weight pushed/pulled/lifted relative to bodyweight, injuries per hour, number of votes in a survey, etc.
2) the ability of an average human to achieve excellence in the sport: this is harder to assess because excellence is an arbitrary benchmark.
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