What Sports Can Teach Entrepreneurs

Sport was really the foundation for how I've thought about being an entrepreneur. There's so many similarities. There's so much overlap. Let's start with the role of team. I learned pretty early on that to forge a professional sporting career, I didn't need to be good at everything. I needed to be good at— at one or two things and do that better than anyone and that if I made myself irreplaceable within the context of a team, that I could make a professional career. Now, let's be really clear. I'd come out of university in America, didn't make it in the MLS, had gone to the Galaxy and got promptly booted out, went down to one of their feeder teams. I'd battled my entire career, but I realized that if I tried to be all things to all people, I wouldn't make it. If I was incredibly honest about the 1 or 2 things that I felt like I could do better than anyone else, that I could craft a career as a professional athlete. That's what I did. I also realized that being a part of a team, there's the star players and then there's the people that drive community creativity, drive the sense of team. You'll know those people in your classes. The people that give energy, the people that bind people together, you can go an enormously long way by being one of those people. I think within sport, there's the star players. I was never one of those, but I was a team person. I felt like I was the Shane Battier, who I actually met recently, that intangible person that was going to help that group win. That was my superpower. I managed to to make that a career and be part of a New Zealand team that went to the World Cup. It was a great journey. I think the second thing about sport, it's a funny thing with sport. You chip away at something for a long time, usually the same skill over and over and over again. Oftentimes, you don't really see the improvement, but you just got to trust in the fullness of time that that's going to compound and you're going to get really, really good at something. I think oftentimes, particularly in entrepreneurship, you're looking for a silver bullet. You're looking for that big idea. Oftentimes, this is about grinding on something that you believe in deeply. In the case of a wool shoe, I didn't invent wool, didn't grow up on a sheep farm, as good as that would have been for the story, didn't invent shoes, had a an obvious idea, and I spent 6 years, over 100 prototypes, trying to make a shoe made out of wool. And lo and behold, stuck with it long enough to get good at it. And I think we tend, Ravi, to massively overestimate what we can achieve in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term if we stick with something. And I think sport taught me that, and I think it is really maybe my superpower in the context of entrepreneurship alongside the team piece. The last thing, I think the resilience. I remember a Monday night in a supermarket not long after I'd become a professional where a fan came up to me and said that I'd played particularly poorly in the last game as I was shopping for my vegetables. You learn to understand that you have the ability, far more than maybe you give yourself credit for, to pick yourself up and go again. And I think sport gives you a pretty, a pretty strong education in that. And as an entrepreneur, you don't get anywhere without that.