^{Let’s skip the small talk…}

Speed is everything; People who can accomplish more in a less amount of time are going to be more successful than their peers. When it comes to entrepreneurship, athletes need to unlearn a couple of habits. Wow, have I had to unlearn a lot of what I thought was “correct”.

Greatness takes time. It takes years to develop a lethal pull up jumper, or the ability to kick a soccer ball in the top corner from 30 yards away. However, when building a successful product or service, you don’t have time to make sure it’s absolutely perfect before taking it to market. You need to “ship” faster. Get your crappy version of what you’re building out in the market faster than the competition to see if there’s interest and/or traction. Understand the feedback, iterate, and then ship again. What I see a lot of athletes-founders do when they start their own company is spend too much time overthinking. Perfecting brand, launch party, the user experience (UX). These long hours can be worthless. You don’t have time to be worried about a beauty contest if your competitors are already shipping. 

Speed allows you to fail faster. Athletes have egos, they don’t want to be embarrassed. I know I don’t. But the people who fail the fastest learn the fastest about their users. It’s embarrassing to post content and barely have any likes. It’s embarrassing to build a tool for businesses that don’t even want a trial run. However you know what’s even more embarrassing? Spending a year working on the same version of a product, exhausting time and money to finally learn that your users don’t really care because you didn’t gauge their interest earlier! This practice is fatal for many startups. It’s embarrassing spending too much time resume crafting before you submit an application to a company filled with hundreds of applications and one of them already got the job. Faster decisions, less overthinking. More success. Speed. 

How can you implement more speed into your life? You spend more hours in the day on one thing that you’re good at, and less time worrying about being super diversified. You post more, you double the amount of conversations you’re having with users a week. Increase your attention to organizing your life. Notice I didn’t say your day, I said your life. Lastly, putting yourself around other people who are fast. Not necessarily athletes, but other entrepreneurs, professionals, investors, who make decisions with speed.

Success loves speed.