Olympic weightlifting helped me build a million dollar business.

Focus and Mindset

Lifting nurtured my growth mindset, leading to my ability to stay motivated, consistent, and to maintain discipline over a long period of time. I attribute a lot of my resilience to lifting, and found that it correlated to my fortitude in business.

Goal Setting

In Olympic weightlifting, we set specific goals for amount of weight lifted, focus heavily on technique & form, and closely track nutrition, sleep and other factors that directly affected overall performance over a period of time. In business, this translated to setting measurable goals and tracking key metrics like revenue targets, customer acquisition costs, contractor retention and engagement, and so much more. Both require a strong focus on goal setting, reviewing metrics and outcomes closely, frequently, and measuring progress over time.

Discipline and Training

Lifters have to train consistently and work hard to develop the technique and strength required to succeed in this sport. There would be days that I was in beast mode and felt incredibly strong and other days where I could barely stay coordinated and missed every movement.

In my startup, there were times when I had patients that I cared for and became very close to that passed, and within the next hour I would be training a new nurse for their shadow shift. Or times I missed dinner with my daughter because of working 100+ hour weeks consistently. Working at a high growth startup is incredibly tough, especially in an industry like healthcare. It requires a lot of discipline, strength, and showing up – even when it feels everything is going wrong. On the hard days, when things felt impossible to overcome, I found peace in the fact that I stayed disciplined enough to show up consistently. This helped me cultivate a high level of grit and discipline and allowed me to view success on a macro level over a longer period of time rather than focusing on days that didn’t feel like successes.

Resilience and Adaptability

There were times when I overtrained, or or didn’t prioritize nutrition, which led to major setbacks physically and mentally. This is where focus and adapting came in. By prioritizing sleep, increasing mobility work or protein intake, I was able to persist and pushed through the setbacks. This perspective tremendously strengthened my ability to adapt when facing adversity in entrepreneurship. There are so many obstacles when building a company from the ground up, but with team effort, navigating the lows and ability to learn from mistakes allows for resilience to build, regardless of ever changing circumstances.