The Point Is: Sports Enables Life Success

Published: 2021-07-31

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Are athletes more successful in life?

Well, that answer may come after solving the chicken or egg origin mystery, yet there are many worthy efforts offering guidance.

Perhaps some of the more impressive anecdotal guides are the successes of celebrity business and professional leaders who led strong athletic careers before their ultimate stardom ensued:

Futurist and genius Steven Hawking before disease confined him was coxswain of the Oxford University rowing team.
Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, was the captain of the swim team and also played varsity lacrosse, tennis, and basketball in high school. At Princeton University she played NCAA squash and lacrosse.
Barak Obama’s dream of NBA play somehow got otherwise directed. Bill Bradley’s didn’t.
Dwight Eisenhower’s Augusta National weekends were renowned.
Collegiate cricketer Indra Nooyi is Pepsi’s Chief Executive Officer
Richard Branson Guinness Book records on the water and in the air are rivaled by Ted Turner’s Americas Cup and Atlanta Braves pedigree.

During March Madness the NCAA trots out its gaggle of promos allowing that nearly half a million collegiate athletes go on to vocations other than sports, but take the lessons learned on the fields, rinks, rings, and pitches with them to board rooms and corner offices.

One of the greatest collections of been-there-done-that narratives is curated by Executive Athletes, the organization comprised of nearly 20,000 that was developed for the working professionals who still compete in sports.

As a motivator, we might suggest immersing yourself in the group's narratives where more than 150 CEOs and business leaders share asks and experiences.

For instance, John Haine President of New Edge Performance asks: Do You Feel the Pressure Cooker? And, Ken Lubin, Managing Director ZRG Partners wants to know, How Bad Do You Want It?

Articles abound elsewhere as adjacencies to the subject of sports and life success, asking questions like:

Formal studies on the matter include:

Before you begin your sports-for-success knowledge infusion, New Yorker magazine makes one final and apt anecdotal observation:

Mark Zuckerberg’s stick-to-it formula points back to his captaincy of the Philip Exeter Academy’s fencing team.