What Is Your Professional Horsepower?

I’m constantly exposed to ads and conversations that treat horsepower as a flex—the more, the better. The message is clear: If it has more horsepower, it performs better.

What I found surprised me—and ultimately gave me a helpful reframe.

What does horsepower actually measure?

Turns out, when James Watt coined the term, he wasn’t chasing peak performance. He was trying to define how much steady, reliable work a horse could do—so he could compare it to his steam engines.

Horsepower was never meant to measure maximum output. Watt's intentions were about measuring sustainable output.

In modern terms:

• 1 horsepower = 550 ft-lbs of work per second

• A strong horse? Can sustain ~1 hp, and spike up to 12–15 hp in short bursts.

So Watt’s number wasn’t about chasing extremes. It was about creating a standard, trustworthy baseline for what power looked like over time.

💡 It reframed my thinking:

Maybe performance isn’t just about how much you can output at once (AKA peak performance) it’s about maintaining the kind of steady output that creates impact without costing your wellbeing.