Fitness Business School – 5 Lessons Baseball Taught Me

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I’m going to talk with you about the five lessons that baseball taught. If you know anything about me, you know baseball has been a big part of my life as a player, as a coach, as a parent, but it’s also been probably my best learning tool and it’s helped me in every facet of everything that I’ve done moving forward. So I’m excited to share these lessons with you. Let’s get to it.

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Hey, Pat, here. And in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about five lessons that baseball taught me. Now I’ve been around or involved in baseball for over 40 years as a player, as a coach. And then, you know, as a coach of, of both of my boys, and what I’ve noticed is so much of the things that have worked for me as a business owner have really been rooted in lessons that I learned in baseball. So I want to share with you five of the most prominent most impactful lessons that baseball taught me.

The first is how to handle adversity. Now, baseball is a game that I think best prepares you to deal with the challenges and adversities and failures that we encounter in everyday life and make no mistake. We’re going to have those adversities. It teaches us to keep little things little when you’re seven or eight, crying after a strike out’s common. But when you learn that, it’s just part of the process. You’ll discover that to achieve anything, you’re going to have some bumps in the road.

The second lesson that I learned was the important being both a good teammate. Well also being the best version of yourself. You’ve heard the phrase that when you’re on an airplane and it’s about to take off that, they tell you that in the event, change in cabin pressure, your oxygen mask will drop, and then they tell you to put yours on before assisting anyone else. That’s baseball more than any other sport. It’s the perfect blend of personal responsibility and opportunity as well. As much as it’s also about being a team player, no other sport gives us an almost equal opportunity to shine as individuals, but also requires us to play thinking about others. You bat, it’s just you, no one blocking for you or setting a pick. You hit, you strike out and you won’t bat again for half an hour to an hour. Probably. Now you have to dwell on this. It’s not like just moving to the next play in basketball or football or soccer, but on defense, everything involves multiple players. You can’t pitch without a catcher. You can’t be the best shortstop on the planet without actually having to still throw it to first base that’s life. Whether you’re an employee or an employer, you’ll have individual responsibilities and opportunities that you can’t do it alone. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a business or raising a child, you’ve got to do your job, but yours isn’t the only job.

So the third thing that baseball taught me was the need to stay the course in professional baseball. At least during a normal season, they play 162 games. In the NFL, it’s 16. Baseball teaches you to never get too high or too low because you have to come back tomorrow, a loss isn’t the end of the world. The goal is to simply do your best and get better each and every day, baseball teaches you perspective that no one goes undefeated. The best teams still lose a decent number of games. But what I’ll tell you is this over time, I’ve discovered that nothing worth having comes without that commitment and persistence in time in the grind of a baseball season, prepares you for that in a way that few other sports could.

The fourth thing that baseball taught me was that there are only a few things that are crucial to success in almost any pursuit, when you get right down to it. Now this one isn’t obvious when you’re in the middle of it, but it’s so true in most things in life, you can boil what success is based on down to just a few things in business. It’s figuring out how to get customers and profitably, give them what they want in baseball. It’s about run creation, run prevention, that’s it. Some people create runs by employing bonds and hit and runs. And I personally didn’t use either and didn’t ever even call for a hit and run. And during my last three years as a college baseball coach, I called for a whopping three months. That was my approach, but there are plenty of people who create runs with small bull run prevention could just be having a hard throwing pitcher, striking everyone out, or it could be throwing ground balls and having your defense work behind you. But it all boils down to run creation and run prevention, just like everything else in life. If you figure out the real drivers of success in what you’re doing, rather than focusing on all the trivial stuff, you’ll be able to beat the competition more often than not.

And the final lesson I wanted to share was the importance of appreciating today. This one was probably the hardest for me to grasp. I was always chasing the next thing, the next goal, the next job, I can only remember enjoying about five wins as a college coach. The rest were really just more of a relief. See, now I can look back and know what mattered it was. The people, it was the shared experiences. Now, when I talked to my former players and understand that I stopped coaching at the college level well over a decade ago, but I had talked to at least a couple every few weeks, and it’s always about the people and the experiences. And that’s really my favorite memory. More than any win, any accolade or anything else, the relationships and the shared experiences. In fact, I talked with my best friend who I played ball with from little league through high school, at least a couple times a week, probably more. And baseball was really the foundation of our friendship, that initial common bond. Now our families vacation together, our kids play together in spite of us living three hours away and baseball was the cause of that. And when we talk about baseball, we often talk about what would give to go back and have just one more practice together at our old high school, the time with our teammates, the way that we would challenge one another. So enjoy the moment. That’s another thing that baseball taught me because before you know it, those moments have passed and you don’t get them back, enjoy them all. So hopefully there’s at least one or two lessons that you can borrow from the lessons that baseball taught me. I know how important they’ve been to me. And I think they’ll probably be pretty valuable for you too.

Thanks for listening. I’m giving away a bundle of my bestselling books, the ideal business formula, the fitness entrepreneur handbook in the path. All you have to do is go to patrigsby.com/podgift to get it. Also, make sure to subscribe to The Fitness Business School with Pat Rigsby so you don’t miss an episode and you get yourself on the fast track to creating your ideal business.