Sports can be so brutal at times.
This week I watched Nick Kyrgios play at the Miami Open for the first time in 2-3 years.
This was the first time that he would play after a series of trying injuries that left him outside the top 100 ranking and unable to play at the majors.
He faced career-ending injuries; a wrist with two torn ligaments and a knee that forced him to get a surgery.
Yet he emerged with a level of play that was scary. The mechanics of his serve matched the same intensity from when he was still healthy.
Keep in mind that he didn’t play at the major league for almost 3 years.
For those who aren’t aware, the Miami Open that takes place every year and is hailed one of the most prestigious tennis events along side Indian Wells and Monte Carlo.
The players that come to compete here are of the highest caliber. In fact, just after winning his first round at the event, he was taken out by Karen Katchanov – a top 20 player – in straight sets.
As a maverick you can never be sure what Kyrgios is going to bring on the court, but this is just a clear example of the intangibles and uncertainties we all face.
We can be the most “talented” person in the field, yet we’re aren’t sure about how it translates into real progress.
Think about where you are right now for a second.
At any point in your life, you can face the reality: you aren’t were you need to be and that there will be a price for you to pay.
The top 1% of players are able to pay that price every day and stick to it until they can afford to succed. That didn’t sit right with me at first. You don’t pay this “price” with an expensive coaching team. You pay the price through the daily commitment towards your goals.
The 1% Player
To paraphrase the great sport psychologist Bill Beswick, in any organisation, they are three types of team players:
- Those who train to compete
- Those who train to win
- Those who train to dominate
The challenge is be able to make the diasctintion between each of these archetypes.
There is a truckload of things that go into the development of a team: physical, mental, organisational.
The best leaders understand this and then set out to put real systems in place to ensure there is real progress made.
If you want to join the 1% elite of players then it’s clear you will need to:
- Find your own definition of “winning”
- Transform the physical, mental, and technical aspects of your work into measurable metrics and achieve real progress.
- Develop what is known as the “fighter’s mentality” to stand against the setbacks of the industry.
It doesn’t matter weather it’s sports, music, gaming, business or art – everyone has a goal that is greater than themselves.
You need a team – a winning team.
That’s what we’re going to talk about next.
By the end of this letter you will have everything to start recruiting people into a central space for your portfolio. Sponsors, partners, and clients can use this place to better understand the culture of your goals and be more likely to invest in you.
You can think of this as a beginner’s guide. No prior experience or track record to pull this off. However, if you’re looking for a personalised program to all this then consider joining the Sponsorship Collective. This is my flagship product and it reveals the exact blueprint to building an audience on social media and attract people to your portfolio. No fluff. No expensive tools. No complicated funnels. Just systems that work. Enrolment will close on the 31st of March so be sure to book your slot on time.
How To Build Your Winning Team
For the lessons I impart here, I’ve taken the principles rather than specialities or one-off strokes of genius in some of the greatest sportspeople I know.
You will still gain a ton of value from this. Over the years there were three main pillars that made mestand out and eventually attract the people I wanted to work with.
Let’s break down each of them.
I) Identify Your Source Of Truth
To paraphrase Beswick once more, he had a simple exercise for young promising talents that weren’t sure about their own potential.
Pull out the a pen and paper and answer the following questions:
- What do you want?
- How badly do you wnat it?
- How much are you willing to suffer?
The questions become synonyms with building a source of truth for yourself and everyone who gets involved in your work.
A source of truth is how you build an organsiation for open collaboration and honesty.
A source of truth is the place where you can check in with yourself and re-establish the priorities for your life.
Even further, you can use places like Notion to turn this into a “team vision and culture” page that quickly establishes your aspirations and goals.
Simply open Notion (or create an account here…not sponsored but would be happy to work with them in the future :) and create a new page to start documenting.
Feel free to be as detailed and granular as you would like. I recommend that you experiment with specific processes for documenting in your field, but you might want to stick around with me as we move to the next part.
II) Implement Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
Most people are familiar with SOPs in the corporate sense – but it’s much more than a set of tasks that you implement in a team.
Standing operating procedures (or SOPs) is a tool to make your work tangible by using a consistent set of metrics.
These metrics becomes the foundation for how you track and measure towards your goals.
Since we’re keeping this as beginner-friendly as possible, you can think of it as adding structure to the Notion workspace you’ve just created.
You can create a new page, label it “Standing Operating Procedures” and keep in mind the following points:
- An overview of the goal. This means to break down your goal into sub-problems and bottlenecks, with a clear analysis and actions plan for each of them.
- A clear access point. This provides a reference on all the different ways that you (or your team) can access the document
- A set of instructions. This is a clear step-by-step instructions on how to use the page properly (as well as any general housekeeping)
- Extra resources. A section to include any supplement videos, courses, or education that will contribute towards your goal.
You don’t need to complicate this. It’s as simple as creating a “to-do list” for your goal and adding a few links that could help.
Then you can use the structure for this page as a template for any other pages that you want to create. You could create an onboarding page or a [sponsorship] report dashboard using the same format.
The possibilities are endless at this point.
III) Cultivate The Fighter's Mentality
The top performing athletes needed the cultivate the conditions that will allow them to perform in the field without compromising other areas of their life.
Koby Bryant had a ‘mental switch’ that would allow him to place himself in the match and play the role he needed to play outside of the noise and distractions from the world.
Today we call this the Mamba Mentality, The Fighter’s Mentality, or simply the alter ego.
We spend some time at the beginning of this letter arguing about the top 1% player and this is their secret.
This mentality ignores all the noise form the world and puts all their work straight to the arena.
Now that you have the basics of setting in up a team in place, this calls one place: the battle.
It’s time to ruthlessly promote yourself.
Chase down that lead. Put yourself in spaces and conversations that you wouldn’t dare before. Take that leap and trust that the systems will keep you from hitting rock bottom.
But this doesn’t mean that you need to do this alone thought.
That’s why we’re bringing everyone together in one place through the Sponsorship Collective. During the 6-week program, I’m going to be your sparring partner in building your own unique system that you can start implementing along with everything we’ve covered today. Even if you don’t see results (which I doubt) you will have a process that you can iterate as many times as you want until you can afford to succeed.
And for those who were expecting me to delve deeper about it today, sorry for the tease. I did say this was a beginner’s guide and not a masterclass.
Anyways, I have more guides like this that you can explore here if you’re interested.
Thank you for reading.
-Michael
