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Sports is all about competition - there are two sides which are competing with each other. When the competition starts, a lot of plans and strategy can go awry. One needs to adjust to the circumstances which are changing every second and one’s success depends upon adapting to the situation and competition.
Taking that lesson to the business world, situations will always remain dynamic. The other side, i.e. the competition, is as good as you. One will have to continuously and dynamically adjust not only according to the competition but also according to the larger business ecosystem. To remain competitive in any field and achieve success, one needs to take dynamic inputs from the ever-changing business environment and do on-the-feet thinking.
That is a challenge for each of us in life, but more so in sports. In sports everything gets defined by the end result. One may philosophically say, ‘take it in your stride,’ but it is a big challenge to actually do it on the ground, when success and failure get defined by a particular outcome.
In order to remain successful over a longer period of time, during the game or competition, one has to remain focused and do one's best to win the competition through ethical means. But once the event is over, its outcome is a summation of how you were, what the situations were like, and how the competition was. It is not a mark of a failure or success of 'you' as a competent individual or an outfit. Once the competition is over, one needs to zoom out and understand that the outcome of that particular game will have little or no impact on one's overall performance over a longer time. Ruminating about the previous game again and again and allowing one’s performance to get impacted because of the outcome of the last game will not help in any way. Every fresh game starts with a 0-0 score and with a fresh perspective. One should ensure that one is fully concentrating on the competition in hand rather than what one has done previously and its outcome. You are only as good as the game you play on that day. This way you'll be able to produce results over a longer period of time.
Compared to the sports field, a business environment is much more forgiving, and everything is not a binary outcome of 0 or 1. The ecosystem in a business world allows your inputs, your performance to be counted, which contributes very largely to your success in business. While one’s competition may be doing well, one can still continue to do well, unlike in the sports arena where only one side comes out a winner.
In a business environment, you should concentrate on putting your efforts in acquiring the necessary skill sets, mix well with hard work and perseverance. If one can continuously evaluate and work on gathering the right ingredients and right skill sets, one will have a better probability of achieving success at a much higher percentage than the sports field.
For me, whatever goes into the journey of achieving success is more important. It may be the skill sets, the amount of time, perseverance and hard work that one has put in, in order to achieve a particular goal. There are always internal and external factors of achieving success. Maybe on a particular day, the external factors were too dominating and one may not have been able to achieve one's end goals.
But then if one is internally satisfied that one has put in the best efforts and has lost to a better partner, or better opponent, that is a fairly satisfactory way of looking at the entire journey.
If there is satisfaction about the efforts that one has put in, even if results are otherwise, it should still be considered a success in our minds. In a particular project, a particular journey, one may not be successful, but that failure helps us to fine tune the skill sets and ingredients to achieve success on another day.
