I began swimming at the age of three, and ever since I started, it looked pretty bland.
Every day, I would swim early in the morning, the afternoon, and even on weekends.
I also started going to the gym on top of swimming, and I did this every day until I became an adult.
Your upbringing highly correlates to how you handle yourself in your adult life. For me, swimming had a significant impact on how I conduct myself in business. Here’s how.
Tenacity
Training competitively can be grueling, but you’ll often hear people push through the pain and continue training, always looking at a bigger goal.
In business, you have very grueling times as well, and you will find yourself questioning why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Was this the right decision? Am I learning enough to determine a reasonable path forward?
Tenacity comes into play anytime you doubt yourself, and swimming, like many other competitive sports, will teach you to keep going even when you don’t feel like doing the work.
Habits
I trained every day, twice a day on weekends until adulthood.
I guess you could say I got into the habit of swimming every day at the same time.
In business, getting into habits becomes extremely useful.
If you want to be a better engineer, you can get into the habit of writing code daily.
If you’re going to be a better writer, you can get into the habit of writing a page on a basis.
Do you want to be better at public speaking? You can introduce a habit of speaking to an audience daily.
Habits allow us to get better and make things that are difficult in the beginning easy to the point where we might not think about them anymore, and then we can build more habits on top of the ones we already have.
Competing against myself
One of my swimming habits was constantly recording my times during training and after competitions.
Doing so allowed me to understand if I was getting better.
I could track my progress over time and make sure that the changes I was introducing to my training were helping me get better.
Sure, I did compare myself to other swimmers, I wanted to be the best, so I would look up to them and wonder what they were doing to get to where they were.
In reality, I needed to compete against myself first.
As long as I was improving even one percent, those improvements compounded over time, and eventually, I found myself going to nationals with the same people I used to look up to.
In business, we often look at the competition, our counterparts at other companies and wonder how they got there.
The reality is that we need to improve ourselves first, and to do so, we need to measure how we’re doing and understand if the changes that we bring to our daily habits are helping us improve even that one percent that over time will compound.
When you least expect it, you will be at the same level or better than those you used to look up to.
Conclusion
My sport of choice, swimming, taught me about tenacity, good habits, and self-improvement.
I keep those lessons to improve myself and add value to society and my family by getting better every day.
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