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Before I coached entrepreneurs, I coached professional athletes and there is a lot of overlap. Here are 10 entrepreneurship lessons that translate from from the world of Pro sports:

1. Manage your energy. Pro athletes know that the most important thing is recovery. In sports, you can’t improve unless you give your body time to rest and adapt. Learn to understand your physical body and how it best operates. Understand the aspects that provide you with that fire so that when you need to be on point, you are going to be performing at your highest level.
2. Self experimentation. Study yourself so you know how you perform best. Try different times of day, different foods, technologies, etc.
3. Seek progression. Find the best coaches, design your training around ways to keep getting better. Understand what the next level looks like by looking at the worlds bests. Hiring expert coaches and competitors to highlight the smaller and smaller areas for improvement
4. Make the basics unconscious. Get so good at the basic skills that you don’t have to think about them any more
5. Rehearsal. Pros understand what a perfect practice looks like. If you mentally rehearse the perfect stroke, you are going to improve much faster. They place themselves in a situation before it really happens making then comfortable when the situation does happen.
6. Mental toughness. Pros do workouts that are harder than their competition days so they know they will be able to handle the hardest situation
7. Understand your psychology. Notice when you lose focus, notice your self talk, understand your motivation
8. Optimize for the most important output. Define the rules of the game you are playing in life and how to win. You don’t have to be the best at everything to win – just key skills in your one sport or your one career output – getting too much muscle can make you run up mountains slower for example
9. Optimize your routine. Patterns, rituals, habits can help get you in the zone, and take care of the things you do over and over.
10. Embrace pressure, challenge, get comfortable with the difficulty
11. Keep the joy. Get to the place where you really love what you are doing. Enjoy mastering something, get back in as to why you were trying to enjoy that thing in the first place. If you don’t think you can find that joy, then something is out of alignment