I like to observe what is going on around me. Now that i’m in my 30’s I get to see the journey that some of my friends and family are on, and relate that to my own experience. Here is why I believe being an athlete sets you up so well for life.

1. You learn to live on absolutely nothing

Maybe I should preface this by saying “amateur athlete” or “Canadian athlete” or “badminton athlete” or a combination of all three. But either way, I can promise you anyone in those shoes is doing what they’re doing for the love of their sport and not for the money.

For almost 10 years I lived on 15k/year or less, and I was absolutely happy doing so. In fact, it was one of the most freeing times of my life. I would wake up, practice a sport that I loved, be challenged physically and intellectually by some of the best people in the world, go home to focus on my nutrition, and go for coffee and learn from world class athletes.

Now as a business owner, anything that I make over 15k is just icing on the cake. In fact, it’s actually a bit confusing what to do with the extra money when you really don’t need anything. My happiness is not at all tied to my money or the things that I own and I know I can live really well off of nothing. That will make you a great saver and it will give you emotional stability knowing that if things hit the fan you can live a happy, fulfilled life off of nothing.

2. You take monstrous responsibility for your own results

Anyone I know who is successful at anything has at one point taken complete responsibility for getting their own results. Meaning they accepted that the world doesn’t give handouts and they took it upon themselves to build, create, and manifest their vision.

An athlete is the extreme version of this. Essentially, they are saying that they believe so much in themselves that they can do their sport better than some of the most elite humans on the planet. Most importantly, they are taking ownership of their own pursuit.

I can honestly say that when I look around I see so many people that have a sense of entitlement. They act like the world owes them something and they often sit by passively waiting for that to happen. So many people have whispered around me that they would be as good or better than me in Badminton if they had moved to Vancouver or Denmark. Then do it. I booked a one way flight- so can you.

3. You learn that teamwork is a necessity

Being an athlete has absolutely given me a deeper appreciation of teamwork. You hear about teamwork a lot growing up: you learn to work in groups with your classmates, you learn to play nice, and you figure out how to interact with others. But i’ve realized that teamwork is really so much more: it is the ultimate time saver.

As an athlete, you have a short time span to reach your athletic potential and a lot has to go right for that to happen. This means that the only path to success is to spend your time doing things which will yield the highest impact for performance. This means you have to surround yourself with other people to help you with the rest. Believe it or not there are people out there who love doing things that you hate to do. Even random tasks like washing dishes, inputting data in excel, fixing circuit boards, which may seem obscure to you, there is someone out there who absolutely loves and is extremely good at doing those things. As soon as you can wrap your head around that you can start to find those people, which will absolutely accelerate your performance potential.

Example: right now I am printing new binders for my athletes. I have been battling ideas on how I want them to look since January. Two days ago, I went in to Mary (the absolute GOAT of anything to do with printing) at Print Digital in Saint John. Within 5 mins she knew exactly how it should look, what types of binders I should use, and what type of paper, gloss, thickness, and sizing it should be put on. It took a fraction of the time and now I can sit back and wait for a world class product to come in.