Hello August! We hope that you have been having a fantastic summer so far!
It has been all Olympics, all the time, on every social platform this last week. My eyes glued to the screen to watch Team Canada go for gold.
Olympians are at the top of their game—both physically and mentally. We can learn much from their pursuit of greatness and strive for our own “gold medals.”
Their journeys to the Olympic Games may have many parallels to those of entrepreneurs, and they may offer some key lessons.
🏅 Goal Setting: Olympic athletes set specific, measurable goals to guide their training and performance. It is essential to have measurable goals to track your performance. And they constantly revisit these goals with continuous improvement in mind. Entrepreneurs should do the same by setting both short-term and long-term goals to steer their business ventures effectively.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is a gold medal performance for the following great Canadian startup. Quantifying goals makes it easier to track progress and know when you have reached the finish line.
🏅Mental Toughness: Olympic athletes compete at the highest level under immense pressure. Perhaps the most important tool they have is mental resilience to handle the pressures of competition. Mental toughness is a collection of skills, including unshakeable self-belief, resiliency, motivation, focus, and the ability to perform under pressure and manage physical and emotional pain. Many Olympians may work with a sports physiologist to develop these skills.
The commitment to mental wellness and well-being can offer many lessons for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs can benefit from developing mental toughness to stay focused and calm under business pressures. Building a repertoire of skills like meditation and mindfulness and using the help of a professional where needed can be a game changer for entrepreneurs.
🏅Resilience: Athletes can face setbacks, failures, injuries, and losses but continue pushing forward. The goal is the next milestone—whether that is the next competition or a particular time or goal in the sport. Athletes embrace failure as a learning opportunity, and so should entrepreneurs. View each setback as a stepping stone to success. Analyze what went wrong, learn from it, and apply those lessons.
Breaking down significant goals into milestones or smaller project sizes can help build resiliency. When the milestone is small, the setbacks are also minor, making it easier for them to bounce back. Focusing on the milestones (like reaching $1 million in MRR) and then the next milestone rather than the end goal (such as an IPO) is crucial. Preoccupation with a result always leads to disappointment – and often, this creates milestones and checkpoints with little meaning. Like athletes who focus on the smaller competitions and events leading up to the Olympics, celebrating big and small wins is essential. Still, it’s equally important to work towards the next meaningful milestone!
🏅Discipline and Consistency: Athletes train consistently and maintain strict routines to achieve peak performance. Consistency can be hard to find as a startup founder – all variables constantly change. Managing your schedule as a founder is complex, but establishing a daily routine that prioritizes crucial business activities and using exercises like time blocking can significantly benefit you.
🏅Teamwork: The benefits of teamwork are obvious in an event like soccer or volleyball, but even individual sports athletes rely on a team of coaches, trainers, and support staff. Entrepreneurs should build strong teams, leveraging diverse skills and perspectives to achieve business success. They should assemble a team with complementary skills and foster a collaborative environment where everyone’s contributions are valued.
🏅Seek out Feedback: Criticism and judgment are part of the game for athletes. When you watch, Simone Biles competes for her 8th (!) Olympic medal, pay attention to the athletes’ reactions. Instead of expecting to see anger or frustration for a low score, you’ll often see looks of introspection. Athletes, for the most part, graciously take the score as constructive criticism rather than an all-out attack on their skills.
Entrepreneurs should seek out feedback and be open to accepting constructive criticism. Communicate directly. Canadians have a reputation for being polite, but we shouldn’t let this hold us back from receiving and giving feedback.
Drawing from the practices of Olympic athletes, entrepreneurs can boost their performance and improve their likelihood of succeeding in their business ventures. The discipline, resilience, and training that propels athletes to excel can also drive entrepreneurs toward their hypothetical gold medals.
This August newsletter was adapted from an article I originally posted on my LinkedIn page. It is the first series about the parallels between high-performance athletics and entrepreneurship.
We hope you have a great August! We have an exciting fall planned and are excited to share more details soon! Keep watch on our social channels for more details!
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