Explain how playing 10 seasons in the NFL compares to your journey as an entrepreneur.
The experience and parallels are very similar. Every season you’re trying to build something with yourself and the team, while fighting through challenges. In sport, it’s winning games to have a winning season. In business, it’s trying to achieve goals and accomplish the targets you’ve set, while building your business amid challenges. In both sport and business, you need to consistently make plays to continue to “win” and get to the next level.
In my NFL journey, everything I wanted I didn’t get right away. The life of an undrafted athlete is not easy. It was perseverance, patience, grit, grind, and fighting through pain to get to a 10-year career. The journey of an entrepreneur is similar – perseverance, grit, grind, patience – all the same lessons I learned in the NFL correlate directly.
One difference and what I loved about sport is, it’s brutally honest. When someone on the team underperforms, there is no hiding. A spotlight is shown on those who excel and on those who underperform, and teams take steps to remove those who are underperforming right away. In the corporate world when it comes to performance and winning, that same idea of celebrating the winners and replacing the underperformers is different. For me I think it’s much easier to win when you have that unfiltered conversation of “you need to make the play or someone else will,” rather than tiptoeing around an underperformer.
Like a coach once said, “Be the standard.” That correlates to every facet of life. If you’re the one making the plays, you won’t be cut.