What We Can Take Away from Grinding Away in Sports
As I reflect on the ups and downs of my investment career, I can’t help but draw parallels to other experiences in life. Investing requires its own specific skill set, and those skills vary depending on one’s approach—value, growth, quantitative, momentum, and so on. But for long-term investors, one idea has become increasingly clear to me: when viewed through the right lens, participation in competitive sports offers meaningful behavioral lessons that translate well to investing.
What follows is purely anecdotal, but I believe there’s substance to it. Feel free to roll your eyes and disregard it. And to be clear, I’m not suggesting that athletes make better investors—only that there are useful parallels worth considering.
Focus on the process, not the outcome
In sports psychology, outcome-oriented thinking describes what happens when an athlete shifts focus away from the immediate requirements of performance toward the end result—imagining the medal ceremony, worrying about an upset, or staring at the scoreboard. This mindset increases anxiety and weakens focus.
One common remedy is to emphasize process goals—simple, controllable actions like “follow through on every shot.” Investing is a near-perfect parallel. When investors fixate on outcomes such as daily price fluctuations or short-term performance, stress increases and decision-making deteriorates. The better approach is to focus on process: following one’s checklist, adhering to a disciplined framework, and consistently applying sound decision-making systems.
To stand out, you must do something different
Henry Cejudo won an Olympic gold medal in wrestling for the U.S. in 2008. When he asked his mentor, Terry Brands, what it would take to win gold, Brands’ response was simple: do things no one else is willing to do. He pushed Cejudo through grueling conditioning sessions others would quit, and encouraged him to forgo the typical college experience. While his peers competed in NCAA duals, Cejudo focused exclusively on freestyle wrestling.
The lesson applies directly to investing. If you want results that differ from the average—or from an index—you must invest differently from the average or the index. That differentiation may show up in patience, in how companies are evaluated, or in the willingness to hold uncomfortable positions that others reject, but that you believe in based on your principles and philosophy.
Setbacks are part of the game
Anyone who has competed in sports knows that setbacks are inevitable. You can choke in a championship when it matters most. Injuries happen. Referees make questionable calls. Sleep gets ruined the night before a big competition. Setbacks may be self-inflicted or entirely external.
Roger Federer once remarked that the best players in the world aren’t the best because they win every point, but because they deal with losing better than everyone else. The same is true in investing. Whether it’s a market crash or a temporary setback at an otherwise high-quality company, investors must stay the course, stick to their process, and separate substance from noise. Setbacks are a fact of life in business and investing, and they must be continually grappled with.
Circle of competence and transfer
I attended McMaster University and wrestled on its team. In my first year (fall 1996), one of the assistant coaches was Chris Woodcroft, a former two-time Olympian. He taught us the concept of transfer. We would drill techniques endlessly, knowing that the payoff might not come for months—or even years—when practice finally translated into execution under pressure.
In competition, where results matter, you stick to the moves you know well enough to execute against real opponents. In other words, you stay within your circle of competence. The same applies to investing. Venturing outside one’s circle of competence can be disastrous. At the same time, just as in sports training, we should continually work to expand our knowledge and skills so that effort today may one day transfer into compelling investment opportunities. The world changes quickly, and investors must evolve with it.
Absolute progress versus relative progress
In sports, most of us will eventually watch a once-in-a-generation talent fly past us—due to raw ability or superior psychological skills. If you allow that to determine your happiness, you’re in trouble. Instead, satisfaction should come from personal progress, skill mastery, and achieving your own best.
Investing is no different. You should measure yourself against yourself, not against others. Some will always have better returns; others will have worse. What matters over the long term is compounding—an absolute outcome that does not depend on anyone else’s performance. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality for many professional fund managers, whose jobs may be at risk if they underperform an index or peer group for too long.
Still, for long-term investors with the right mindset, the lesson holds: progress, discipline, and process matter far more than relative comparisons.
