How Playing Professional Sports Helped Prepare Me to Start and Run my Business

by | Jul 4, 2017 | blog | 0 comments

Looking back at my career playing soccer and reflecting upon characteristics that have molded my path, I found that it was the high level of sports that taught me everything I needed to know about business.

Playing sports helps you quickly understand the value of hard work, accountability, competition, and being part of a team.

The formulas is the same in sports, as it is in business. It pays to be a winner, you can be mor successful by surrounding yourself with competitive people. I like to view other companies as rival teams, analyze what they do well, where their shortcomings are, and how to exploit them for our company’s benefit.

 

This helps rally our employees and gets everyone’s competitive juices flowing. It is rocket science to see why fortune 500 companies highly recruit former athletes to join their team. In most businesses you work in groups and have to perform with different personalities. Having experiences with teammates and dealing with stress and pressures on game day help serve you in the daily workforce. With the fact that I played soccer at the highest level, it made me have perseverance beyond what I thought imaginable. I suffered many setbacks that could have deterred me at any given point. I was a goalkeeper at 5’10”, the most unlikely of goalkeepers. But I had a determination to keep forging forward. If any business person applies the same perseverance to their job or vision, they can’t fail.