How Becoming an Entrepreneur Took the Emotion Out of Sport

My partner often scratches her head about why I’m so heavily invested in sports, particularly my beloved North Melbourne Kangaroos. It made no sense to her that a grown man’s emotional state could move like a yo-yo depending on the score of a game.

Seth Godin defined a tribe as, “any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, or an idea”. By this definition, sport is a breeding ground for extremely strong tribes consisting of loyal, passionate, and unashamedly proud tribal members who are more than happy to tell the world which team they support.

This is the magic of sports, with its incredible ability to build tribes that form part of its identity on the whims of a team. And whilst the romanticism can be intoxicating due to it’s ability to take you to a euphoria few experiences can match, most times it will take you to a far darker place.

Becoming intensely committed to anything can lead you to think irrationally, and behave emotionally. Sports offers arguably the most visible examples of this on display. Check it out for yourself:

This leaves you vulnerable to a number of cognitive biases. Apart from groupthink, how often have you defended your team even against a mountain of contrarian evidence? What about clustering seemingly unrelated events into rationalising sporting outcomes? And why does your team always get screwed by umpiring decisions?

Sports makes you behave irrationally. Sports leaves you susceptible to following narratives that either reinforce something positive or explains the unexpected negatives. As an entrepreneur, you grow to become disciplined at resisting these biases.

When we expose our ego to the big, bad world of real-life, we quickly realise that the market works independently to your assumptions. Gary Vaynerchuk sums it up nicely in this quote:

“The market is the market, and the market will decide if you’re good enough to be consumed”.

So when things don’t go as planned, you are left to either blame everything but yourself, or embrace and seek the challenges and obstacles that come your way. Over time, you understand that you need to see things for what they truly are in order to overcome them, and this requires the ability to see things in an objective manner.

Last Saturday, the Kangaroos held a slender 2 point lead against Richmond at half-time. The third quarter began with 3 fifty meter penalties that resulted directly in 3 goals, giving the Tigers all the momentum they needed to run away with a comfortable victory.

At least two of those penalties were questionable and my emotional state predictably spiked on those incidences. Then the biased thoughts came racing through: There is no justice, the umpires ruined the game, the Tiger’s played unfairly and milked the free kicks.

That anger and frustration then became despair and sympathy for the beloved players of North Melbourne: They don’t deserve this, they train so hard for no return, they are great people who have done everything right and for what?

Those thoughts and emotions are all pointless and are incompatible with reality. Before my entrepreneurial journey, that game would have ruined the rest of my Saturday, kept me in a grumpy mood, and likely soured the rest of the week.

This time around, I let those thoughts come and go, and before I knew it I was back in my normal state. Taking the bias out of it, my team was simply outplayed. The beauty about sports is that in the end, the team with the higher score wins. Simple.

I mean there will be times when there are unjust outcomes (e.g. cheating) but on the whole, the better team on the day will win. There is no ruined narrative, no external forces conspiring against you, no other bullshit involved. The same applies when your team wins too.

After the Warriors game 1 win over the Cavs, Steph Curry had this to say, “So I said to the team going into the game we just got to be ourselves, don’t worry about any other story line, anything that doesn’t matter to the game.” Players can get sucked into the tribal narratives too, and just to focus on what it is (a game) takes maturity and perspective.

So now that I have taken a more stoic-approach to sports, has my enjoyment of it dampened? I think I have much better control over how I want to feel about a game and it doesn’t drag me down as often anymore. Overall, my enjoyment has probably increased. But that’s not to say that I won’t act like the village fool if North Melbourne wins a premiership.

This article was originally published on https://medium.com/@jimmy.zhong