You Can Break My Jaw but Never My Heart – Boxing and Business

As many of you know, I love boxing and the sport has had a tremendous impact on the way I live my life. While now I am more of a part-time fighter and am focused entirely on business, below are some of the principles I take from it each and every day as an entrepreneur.

It’s the sweet science, and skills pay the bills.

You need skills and talent to reach the high levels in business. The refinement of your skills is very important as an entrepreneur. Whether you are a technology guy and you have to continue to stay on top of what’s new, a management guy, where you need to constantly sharpen your sword as a leader, or a sales guy, where practice and review can make you a deadly closer. If you think about the game of boxing, there are only so many punches and combinations you can throw at each angle. It’s a simple sport from maybe the view of an outsider, but those that have trained know that the finest boxers have practiced each punch millions and billions of times in order to prefect their craft. In business, you need to have that same level of dedication to making your skills perfect in order to be champion. Remember, talent you have naturally, skill is only achieved from hours and hours of working on your craft. Malcolm Gladwell says in his famous book, Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.

Nothing tests your will, perseverance and determination than a tough fight. Let me tell you something, you can break a man’s heart easier than you can break a man’s jaw. I would rather get knocked out than take a good liver shot in boxing. Nothing, and I mean nothing tests who you are on the inside than your ability to fight through that pain of taking a shot to the liver. A good body shot takes the breath right out of you, pain is shooting up your side, your legs are weak and the guy you’re fighting always knows it and is going in for the kill. This happens in business and you better be prepared to take your body shots. Your top client will leave you and 40% of your profits will be gone, the government will change the rules and your business model will be ruined, you will find out something is going to cost a lot more money than you have, and all the while, you still have to run the business and not piss your pants. If you can’t take the pain, don’t even get in the ring. It doesn’t matter how connected you are, how smart you are, if you can’t persevere and figure out how to shit into gold, don’t go into business for yourself.

You must go in there with supreme confidence, and you must have the mindset of a champion. Don’t let others tell you how you should think and certainly don’t wait for others to tell you that you are great. Muhammad Ali always said, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I even knew I was”. As entrepreneurs we dream big, we want to change the world and never will we let anyone tell us that we can’t. If you don’t believe in yourself, believe in your business, or believe in your product enough to risk it all, don’t even take that first step. True entrepreneurs are fantastic salesman, the reason we are fantastic salesman is because we sell on passion, we believe so much in ourselves and our product that we risked it all to be in business for ourselves, invested all of our money, took family money, took investor money, and bet it all. You bet your ass we believe we can and will do it.

You must be prepared both mentally and physically.

If you go into a fight out of shape, with the wrong mindset, and poorly prepared for your opponent, it doesn’t matter how great you are, you will surely lose. Floyd Mayweather as cocky and as arrogant as he is, prepares for a fight like no athlete on this planet. The man is the definition of hard work and dedication. He trains his mind too, so much so that he purposely works out at 2 or 3 in the morning so that he can tell himself that when his opponents are sleeping, he is working. You need to have the mindset to always prepare like an animal in business, mentally you need to be ready to go and prepared for the challenge, prepared for meetings, always challenging yourself to get better, get sharper for anything that you do.

Victory is so sweet, and defeat is embarrassing, and yet no matter what the outcome, the journey is almost always riddled with pain.

First round knock outs in boxing are rare and let me tell you, a boxer should never plan to knock someone out early. In boxing, you prepare to go the entire fight and you mentally and physically train for the most grueling fight of your life. At the end, there is a winner and a loser, and while one might look worse than the other, both of them got hit a lot. The same goes for business. You should never expect to be an overnight success, if you’re in the trenches, keep fighting, if you’re about to take the leap, be prepared to take the shots. Every boxer, no matter how good he is, gets hit. My coach always says, everybody gets hit, the important thing is to never get hit twice in the same combination. In business, that is reacting to the damage, and mitigating your loses so that you can come back stronger.

Split seconds determine who gets hit, and inches are the difference between victory and broken ribs.

I read the other day that the difference between how successful people act and think and those that are not is that successful people act quickly and pull out slowly. In boxing, you need to react to situations as if it is common nature. I don’t think, I act because I know what to do and am prepared. In business, when disaster strikes or opportunity peers its head, you cannot procrastinate, you must be prepared to make that move and commit to it.

And yet to me, there is something about the sport in the midst of the violence that is so pure, so right, and so fun. When I am in the ring I am laser focused and there is almost a sense of peace and calm to throwing and dodging punches. Its absolute havoc and chaos yet I love it and I never have more fun than I do when I am fighting in the ring. The same goes for being an entrepreneur. I am constantly stressed, I never sleep, I am working all day and night, I miss out on functions with my friends and would drive any relationship straight to the dumps. That being said, I have never been happier in my life than as an entrepreneur, I set an alarm every morning and have never woken up to it because I always wake up hours before, energized and ready to go. You have to love what you do, and if that is your life, the pain doesn’t matter one bit.