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In the long run: What leaders can learn from an Olympic gold medalist
By Philipp Hillenbrand | McKinsey & Company | July 10, 2024
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Alistair Brownlee, two-time Olympic gold medalist, four-time triathlon world champion, three-time Ironman winner, and bestselling author, isn’t one to shy away from making a mantra his own: “If you want to achieve something no one has achieved before, you have to approach the challenge in a way no one has before.”
In a keynote fireside chat at the Unleashing Disruptive Growth event in Barcelona, Alistair sat down with McKinsey’s Philipp Hillenbrand to discuss invaluable lessons business leaders and entrepreneurs can learn from elite athletes.
Key insight #1: Determination drives long-term success and fuels persistence through pushback.
Philipp Hillenbrand: Alistair, you were studying medicine when you made the decision to become a professional athlete. You told me that people tried to discourage you by saying you would regret your decision. How do you deal with these voices?
Alistair Brownlee: The truth is that deciding to become a professional athlete was a very difficult decision. Fortunately, I had a great support system of family and friends, but I also dealt with the negativity by having a strategy. I always remember that success happens over many years. It’s one of the greatest sporting clichés—but for good reason. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I gradually got better at sport. I went from being the worst in my school to being the best in the city, and then I became World Junior Champion at 18, weeks before I started university at Cambridge for medicine.
Key insight #2: Remove as many barriers as possible to build productive habits.
Philipp Hillenbrand: How did you train your personal mental resilience muscle? What keeps you going when you get up at 5:00 in the morning?
Alistair Brownlee: In its simplest form, all sport—especially endurance sport—is a dose-response relationship, meaning the more of it you do in small doses over a long period of time, the more your body responds by getting better, faster, stronger, and more consistent. I had three strategies for achieving this. The first was making sure that what I was doing became a habit. Second, I was obsessive about removing the barriers to do what I needed to do. I didn’t give myself a choice of whether I should train or not. It was like going to work. It was who I was. Establishing those habits and removing those barriers made me more resilient. Third, as cliché as it sounds, you have to find motivation and enjoyment in the process. I truly believe that you can’t motivate yourself to do hard things every day to achieve a goal that might happen in two, four, or eight years unless you celebrate small achievements along the way. And you have to find what motivates you.
Key insight #3: Increase the bar without breaking it.
Philipp Hillenbrand: You once told me that every race is a little bit tougher than the prior one. In such a competitive environment, how do you manage to outpace your contenders?
Alistair Brownlee: I believe a sporting career is innovation that happens in many ways. I tried to be innovative first in my training. My body was changing, and the training that worked last year didn’t work the following year. Training is a process of consistent iteration. Each week was a chance to experiment. Could I do a few more minutes? Could I run a bit faster? I challenged myself to find different modalities of training that would give me a better result without risking injury. I think constant but simple innovation by iteration is an undervalued approach. Maximizing the yield from everyday training by optimizing the routine impacts your body’s adaptation and compounds improvement; this is what leads to outliers in performance, in my experience. As a person new to the sport, the second way was figuring out how I could innovate differently than the competition in terms of the dynamics and tactics of the race. The third way was being analytical and scientific about my approach. I enjoyed reading about the latest scientific approaches to things like altitude training or certain nutritional supplements, just to stay on top of the game.
Being an athlete is like being a start-up. You’re doing a lot on your own and have to innovate. You’re only as good as your last race. But the analogy stops when you say, “Go fast and break things.” Because if you go too fast, you just break yourself. I think one of the keys to sport is finding how to increase the bar as much as possible without increasing it too much.
Key insight #4: The bigger the rock, the bigger the gain.
Philipp Hillenbrand: Let’s stay with start-up clichés. Silicon Valley promotes getting 1 percent better every day, but you say to focus on a few areas that result in 70 to 90 percent progress leaps while still improving daily habits. How do you identify and prioritize these high-impact areas? How do you balance these transformative opportunities with small improvements?
Alistair Brownlee: I think it’s a question about where you focus your resources. Ten years ago, there was a popular sports mantra: “Leave no stone unturned.” While I thought that was fine, you can’t look under every tiny pebble and forget about the big rocks, because that’s ultimately where your biggest gains are.
Key insight #5: Effective leadership stems from conviction and assembling a supportive team.
Philipp Hillenbrand: Is there anything that business leaders, investors, and start-up founders can learn from you as a top athlete in terms of leadership?
Alistair Brownlee: You wouldn’t think there is much leadership in an endurance sport—you stand on the starting line by yourself, you race by yourself, you cross the finish line by yourself. In reality, you have a team of coaches, physiotherapists, doctors, masseurs, mechanics, and more. You have to take these people with you on what is ultimately a very selfish, self-indulgent goal of winning races. I was forced into a leadership position as a 21-year-old world champion, and my strategy was to find people who were just as committed as I was. But I realized that I was never going to find people like that. Like I said earlier, this had been a passion of mine since I was eight years old. Readjusting my expectations was important, as was finding people who were passionate, just at a different level than my own. Because I was doing the training and racing, I made sure that I was making the final decisions. I could seek out the opinions of world experts for something specific, like an injury, but I was the one who closed the feedback loop when it was time to move on. Finding people who supported that approach and having my own convictions in making those types of decisions made me a more effective leader.
3 key takeaways from the article
- Alistair Brownlee, two-time Olympic gold medalist, four-time triathlon world champion, three-time Ironman winner, and bestselling author, isn’t one to shy away from making a mantra his own: “If you want to achieve something no one has achieved before, you have to approach the challenge in a way no one has before.”
- In a keynote fireside chat at the Unleashing Disruptive Growth event in Barcelona, Alistair sat down with McKinsey’s Philipp Hillenbrand to discuss invaluable lessons business leaders and entrepreneurs can learn from elite athletes.
- His five key insights are: determination drives long-term success and fuels persistence through pushback; remove as many barriers as possible to build productive habits, increase the bar without breaking it; the bigger the rock, the bigger the gain; and effective leadership stems from conviction and assembling a supportive team.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Resilience, Habits, Sports
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