Something immortal has just entered the world.
What we can learn from elite athletes about being our best selves.
The Delly Scoop
"You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful."
- Marie Curie
Startup founders share more than you might realise with elite athletes. There is the irrational pursuit of the probabilistic impossible, the decision to go all-chips-in on a singular venture, the resilience, and the willingness to withstand emotional and physical pain. Both are, in the words of Roosevelt, in the arena:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
And yet, athletes obsess over preparation, and process, and especially their mental health, in a way founders rarely do.
It has been with fascination over the past few years that I’ve got to learn from a few elite athletes in particular:
NFL left tackle Kelvin Beachum Jr (great interview about his preparation, and process here on the Whoop podcast, where he is an angel investor).
Former Australian test cricketer Ed Cowan, who helped catalyse his firm TDM’s investment in Culture Amp late last year (Ed’s excellent podcast is here).
AFL Player Matt De Boer, who has evolved late in his career to become the AFL’s best tagger, and this week announced the launch of Athletic Ventures, an early stage fund backed by some of Australia’s best athletes that has just invested in Eucalyptus.
When I say learn, it’s in little ways, and often around mindset. For example, I messaged Matt earlier this year, after reading an article from his former coach admitting he’d made a mistake by letting him go.
Me: “Must be satisfying to be seen now as an elite leader/standard setter.”
Matt: “It’s not something I think about to be honest but I find it fascinating how the external narrative can evolve. I’m just big on ‘control the controllable’ and have an unwavering belief in yourself: luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I haven’t done anything different since then. I’ve just continued to be myself in a new environment.”
In 2015, I wrote about The Most Awesome Sporting Experience of My Life, when my Sessions co-founder Ben Hartney and I got to watch the Cleveland Cavaliers play the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals as part of a feature for NBA Inside Stuff.
On the floor that night was the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Australian point guard, Matthew ‘Delly’ Dellavedova. This week, in a slightly surreal full circle, I spent 40 minutes chatting with him on the Delly Podcast.
Watching yourself back in these kinds of things is excruciating (why am I not looking at the camera?). But I can see in this interview the results of my own work with an executive coach over the the past few years.
In our first session, my coach Ben said to me - a big theme of our work will be self-acceptance. It made no sense at the time - and was certainly not on the long list of things I felt I needed to improve - but three years later, I can see self-acceptance in this interview.
I am imperfect, and I am enough.
1. Personal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you? (2011)
Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article was a revelation when I read it for the first time.
“That one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years. It had been strange and more than a little awkward having to explain to the surgical team why Osteen was spending the morning with us. “He’s here to coach me,” I’d said. Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice. Like most work, medical practice is largely unseen by anyone who might raise one’s sights. I’d had no outside ears and eyes.”
Related: Better All the Time How the “performance revolution” came to athletics—and beyond. (2014)
2. The Art of Self Coaching - Ed Batista (2015)
“The Art of Self-Coaching is a course that I designed and taught for the first time at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) in Spring 2015. (I'm also in the process of writing a book on the subject.) I define self-coaching as the process of guiding our own growth and development, particularly through periods of transition…
[Within'] you can find the current syllabus, condensed versions of my slide decks, and references to course readings and related materials. (During the academic year I update the slides below with the current deck from each week's class.)”
Related: It was Delly who first introduced me to Ed Batista’s work, and Ed is now coaching one of the founders I work with 🔄 🔄 🔄 My two most revisited Ed Batista posts are: Rules Aren't Norms (On Better Meeting Hygiene) & Feedback Is Not A Gift.
3. Learn Like An Athlete - David Perell (2019)
“Knowledge workers should train like LeBron, and implement strict “learning plans.” To be sure, intellectual life is different from basketball. Success is harder to measure and the metrics for improvement aren’t quite as clear. Even then, there’s a lot to learn from the way top athletes train. They are clear in their objectives and deliberate in their pursuit of improvement.
Knowledge workers should imitate them.”
Related: Tyler Cowen - How I Practice What I Do
4. Looking Back at LeBron's Decision 10 Years Later (2020)
We are now 10 years on from The Decision - LeBron James’ reviled ESPN special in which he announced his departure from Cleveland to join the Miami Heat.
What looked like a terrible mistake at the time, has turned out to be a Rite of Spring, and a transformative moment in the history of global sport - where an entire generation of athletes suddenly realised that, in fact, they held the balance of power relative to team owners, and legacy media.
Look at how James’ now Laker teammate Anthony Davis, ten years his junior, talks about that sense of empowerment.
Related: Naked Brands - The Future of Basketball
The Shop is awesome. Case in point: this conversation with Lil Nas X (yes, the Old Town Road one).
In his book, Something Like the Gods: A Cultural History of the Athlete from Achilles to LeBron, Sam Amidon wrote: “The Greeks believed that the athlete performing at the top of his game could also briefly occupy the rarefied borderland between man and god.”
Which is about the best explanation I can find for Patrick Mahomes’ deific new $503M contract - the richest in sports history.
5. How Patrick Mahomes Became the Superstar the NFL Needs Right Now (2020)
“I understand my platform,” Mahomes tells me. “I understand that my part in the video is a big part of it.” He was working out a new contract, and knew that speaking up might prompt some blowback that could negatively affect those talks. “I'm in the middle of negotiating my next contract, to hopefully be a Kansas City Chief for a long time, but I still thought this was important enough and this was something that had to be said. It wasn't something I could sit back on and worry about my next contract, because I needed to use my platform to help. Sometimes it's not about money. It's not about fame. It's about doing what's right.”
Related: The Zealot: Bryson DeChambeau
6. The Misunderstood Genius of Russell Westbrook (2017)
“He had few of the skills that defined a traditional point guard: panoramic vision, flawless ball-handling, a deadly outside shot. But his personality was more suited to leading than Durant’s was. This, in fact, was a major part of why the team drafted Westbrook, for his unique psychological profile: his ability to withstand crushing stress and pressure and doubt without losing confidence or focus.”
This article was so good, we ingrained it into our investment process at Blackbird, asking ourself for every investment we do - does this founder have the “ability to withstand crushing stress and pressure and doubt without losing confidence or focus”?
Related: Psychological Foundations for a Better Life
7. Nick Kyrgios: talent to burn (2018)
“Most professional athletes are obsessed with winning, or at least with not losing. This fixation almost always predates them becoming a professional, and sometimes even comes before playing serious sport. It is pronounced in tennis players, and especially pronounced in Nick Kyrgios. He approaches everything from the men’s tour to the video game Call of Duty with the same obsessional thirst for competition, and has done ever since he was an overweight, asthmatic kid playing juniors in Canberra.”
“For us, the athlete’s apotheosis comes at Olympic stadiums and in World Series locker rooms; on the pitch at Wembley or center court at Wimbledon. These spaces, not churches or cathedrals, serve as the modern equivalents of Zeus’ temple. They are the sites where, every so often, time can be momentarily stopped in the belief that something immortal has just entered the world.”
"It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set." – Josh Waitzkin
I need to read it again