James Laughlin argues business and sport look similar but differ fundamentally: athletes need to win to feel satisfied, while business people can succeed without winning. A tennis player ranked 30th faces Federer and loses constantly, but a business ranked 30th in its market can still be profitable and happy.
How much joy and fulfillment do you get from business? Well, I've always said to guys that it's very much like sport but you don't have to win to be successful and that's the real difference. The problem with professional sport is if you're not winning, it's not very satisfying. You might be getting money, but if you're, you know, say you're a professional tennis player and you're ranked 10th or 20th or 50th in the world, you're not going to win a lot of tournaments. And so there's not going to be a lot of satisfying moments. And as well you're going to face if you're going up against Federer or something, you know you're going to lose, you might pull up a miracle win once every 20, you know what I mean? So there's a lot of downside there. Whereas in business it's not like that because the competition isn't as harshly applied.
