Entrepreneurship, a high level sport
Freelance, wage portage, startup, franchise… Are you attracted by the idea of entrepreneurship? Know that you are about to embark on a high-level sport! More than you might think, sports and entrepreneurship have a lot in common. Here are some of them.
Just like the athlete, success is the entrepreneur’s goal. Striving for perfection and surpassing oneself, the professional athlete has two primary goals: to be the best, and once there, to stay there. No matter what field you want to enter: artistic, social, humanitarian, sports or economic… As an entrepreneur, you must be able to set these same goals and put actions and energy into achieving them. This is how you will find stability, profitability and performance.
Sport and entrepreneurship: 6 common points
Being aware of one’s assets to exploit them, targeting one’s weaknesses to turn them into a strength, being rigorous, organized, determined, having good stress management, being mentally strong enough to accept one’s failures and make them useful, surrounding oneself well, knowing how to step back and question oneself, setting goals and reaching them… This long list of skills (not exhaustive) could be the definition of a good sportsman and a good entrepreneur. If high-level sports represent sporting excellence, in the same way, entrepreneurship must represent excellence in work. And to achieve this, these two environments, much more similar than one might think, have common values and characteristics.
● Passion:
In the same way as a top athlete, an entrepreneur dedicates a major part of his time to his business, to his projects, and invests himself fully to succeed and excel in his field. Launching an entrepreneurial project means evolving in an environment that we are passionate about, for which we have the desire and the motivation to get up every morning. In sports, as in entrepreneurship, passion is the main engine, the energy that allows you to move forward and overcome obstacles.
● Set goals:
Before you can run the marathon, you must first learn to walk: step by step. With practice, the athlete progresses and reaches the steps one after the other, until he or she reaches the final goal. In the business world, it’s the same thing. An entrepreneur who has just started his business cannot expect to become the world’s first fortune instantly. To succeed, one must set coherent short-, medium- and long-term objectives, give oneself time and the means to achieve them.
● Determination, rigor and risk-taking:
Not getting discouraged, being patient, and keeping an unwavering motivation when results struggle to come in: these are all values that are instilled in children to succeed in life. This is all the more true for a high-level athlete than for a company manager. In search of success, human beings in general must constantly push their limits. Getting out of one’s comfort zone and taking risks to evolve are the keys to success in these two closely related fields.
● Good stress management:
Sports and entrepreneurship are very demanding environments. In a similar way, competition and the systematic demand for results are a source of daily stress and pressure in these two fields. Knowing how to manage your emotions, and in particular these two, is necessary to keep your feet on the ground and preserve your mental and physical health.
● Team spirit:
A top athlete can quite perform in an individual sport, but he is necessarily surrounded by a staff: a competent team on which he can count to achieve and carry out his projects and objectives. Entrepreneurship is also a team sport. It is a work carried out with collaborators, service providers, partners… It is about federating a team around the same project and the same objective. Surrounding yourself well and having a team spirit are keys to success. It is well known, « alone we go faster, together we go further »!
● The ability to learn from failure:
Launching an entrepreneurial project is an obstacle course. In this exciting and tiring adventure, failure is part of the game. Knowing how to manage the highs and lows, by taking a step back from the situation, is a common point between the two environments. What doesn’t kill you must make you stronger, so entrepreneurship and sports are disciplines that require a great ability to get up after a failure and understand why, this time, it didn’t work. It is by stumbling that we learn to walk!