When I was a little kid one of my dreams was to become a footballer, but I did not make it because I got a bad injury ( and lack of talent of course). Since then I have been a massive football or as some call it soccer fan.
Being a football fan made me follow many footballers over the years, what they do, what they did before becoming famous, and what they do outside of the field.
I have learned a lot from them ( they do not know that I exist), the good the bad, and the ugly, but today I am going to share with you 5 things you can learn from footballers and use those things to change your life.
5 Things you can learn from footballers
So these are the five things that you can learn from footballers or sportsmen and sportswomen in general.
1) They take time to learn their craft
This is a big lesson for me, you know most footballers start their carrier at the age of between 5 and 8 years old, they will stay at the academy from that age to maybe 16 to 17 when they will sign their first professional contract or get released.
Some of them, like Lionel Messi, have to travel to Europe or different cities and countries at and very young age and face cultural change.
They do this because they know that they have a chance of making it at the top.
I meet a lot of people online and offline, when I tell them that in order to start their own business they will have to master a certain skill, which might take them 6 to 18 months to learn and master it, you know what they tell me? it is a too long time.
This is what most people do not get, all those celebrities we adore and follow on social media, practiced their craft for many years before most of us knew that they existed. Yes, they have natural talents but they had to develop them.
If you want to be successful in any area of your life, you need to learn your skill and practice it each and every day until your skill becomes second nature to you.
2) They embrace competition
Becoming a professional footballer is a lot of work and there is a lot of competition, for every average footballer you know there are thousands who did not make it from the academy to a professional league.
When they get to sign their first professional contract, they have to find to get into the first team, after getting to the first team, there is huge competition to get into a starting lineup, the competition is everywhere.
When a footballer gets dropped from the first team, you will hear them saying that they will train more in order to convince their coaches to put them back into the first team.
This is a huge lesson to learn. I know a lot of people who when things get competitive quit, start a youtube channel, and no one finds their channel their first action is to quit.
You need to start embracing competition, if you are not on the first page of Google, you need to find a workaround to reach there ( legally).
Your business is not making a profit? good find out who makes a profit in your niche, figure out what they do, and do similar things, your fortunes will change.
3) They are constantly learning
A few years ago, I went to a training ground of one of the football teams, what left me speechless is when I saw one of the famous footballers taking advice from a young coach on how to improve his shooting technique.
To be honest, I was not expecting that, the guy won a lot of trophies, played football for more than 15 years in Europe with big clubs, and yet was there listening to this your coach.
Most people do not do that. I had a cooperative job where you could not tell senior staff anything, they won’t listen to your ideas even if they will improve the workplace.
Another day, I was chatting with this gentleman who makes money online by selling products on Twitter, from what he was telling me that he was making around $100 per week.
So I started to explain to him that he could make more money doing the same amount of work if he used email marketing in his business.
But since my account was new( Twitter can tell people when you joined it), a few days Twitter suspended his account and lost his source of income.
These situations happen a lot in society, it reaches a time people stop to learn, they assume that they know everything, but not footballers.
If you want to be successful you need to keep learning.
4) They have the ability to block hate
There is a notion that footballers are loved and adored all the time, this is not true, especially when they do not perform to the expected standard or if the team is not doing well.
When they have a round of bad results they receive a huge amount of abusive and hateful comments online.
Once I read a hate comment that was aimed at a footballer, and the person who wrote that comment was telling the footballer that they will find their house and rape his little girl.
I felt very disgusted and disturbed by that comment. imagine the receiver of the comment.
But most footballers manage to block that type of hate, they ignore those types of comments and move on to doing what they do best, playing football.
I remember a few years ago I had a blog about solar energy, and I wrote a piece about the bad side of the solar energy industry that no one talks about.
I got a lot of abuse from people from the solar industry, people left some very bad comments on my Linkedin profile and in the blog comment. I decided to remove it.
The blog was making me decent money through Adsense, but I had to let it go because of bad comments, probably that is why I did not make it as a footballer( not the lack of talent at all).
This is another lesson that you need to learn from footballers if you want to become successful, people will criticize your looks, your accent, and the way you write, in a few words no matter how good you can become, they will find one thing about you and will leave very bad comments about it.
Ignore them and keep doing what you do.
5) They came back from adversaries
Footballers are humans (maybe Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are not) and bad things happen to them as they happen to the rest of us.
From getting released by their clubs after spending too many years in the academies, horrific injuries, missing a penalty in the final of a major tournament, a bad spell of playing really bad, etc. Most of them came back from all of those situations.
In anything you do, you will have some adversaries, you will have moments in your life when you think everything is going against you and you’ve hit the rock bottom.
You need to have this mental toughness and belief that no matter what happens you can do it again, someone got into your house and took everything? you can start from scratch and get everything back.
Did Twitter delete your account? create another one and start over, there is nothing you can not overcome.
I know this is easier said than done, but I have seen a lot of people who came stronger after facing adversaries, this is something you will never know that you have until surviving is the only option you got.
Conclusion
That is it, those are 5 things you can learn from footballers and improve your life.
How many of the five things or skills mentioned do you possess? Let me know in the comment section below.