~6 min read

Sports taught me something that business later confirmed: if you don’t define the rules of the game, someone else will. And when that happens, you can spend years — good years, energetic years — chasing things that were never actually yours to begin with.

But with any game, you’ve got to decide what you’re actually playing for, because not everyone at the table is playing for the same reason, and most people never stop to ask which reason is theirs.

Health was the goal

Growing up, the purpose of sports in our lives was health. Not scholarships, not fame, not status — not even just a healthier alternative to screens. Health. Full stop. Because if you don’t have your health, you don’t have much of anything else to stand on.

When health becomes the goal, something quietly shifts in how you show up. Rest matters. Recovery matters. Nutrition, strength, endurance — they stop being obligations and start being things you’re genuinely curious about, because they’re all in service of something you actually care about. You develop a real relationship with your body, one built on listening instead of overpowering. And from that listening comes something that doesn’t get talked about enough: compassion. For the vehicle your soul uses to move through the world.

What’s interesting is that when you approach it that way, the outside world often sees “success.” Medals, recognition, performance. But those things were never the point. They were a byproduct of doing the right thing for the right reason — and there’s a version of that available in every domain of life.

What sports actually taught me

For me, sports were never just about performance. They were about learning myself — building the kind of resilience that only comes from being in an honest, ongoing conversation with your own body. Studying yourself. Bouncing back. Becoming so attuned to yourself that you can actually hear what you need, and then — this is the part most people skip — listening when it tells you.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us hand that relationship away. We outsource it. We stop listening inward and start deferring entirely to the experts — coaches, doctors, trainers, gurus — and to be clear, expertise matters enormously. There is real wisdom in learning from people who have gone before you. But there’s a line, and it’s worth knowing where it is. Because the people whose rules you’re following are almost always optimizing for something. Their metrics. Their business model. Their version of success. That doesn’t make them wrong or even bad guides — but their game is not your game, and if you’re not paying attention, you can drift so far into playing their game that you forget you ever had your own.

This is where self-agency lives — not in the mind racing through strategies and frameworks, but in that quieter, deeper place of self-knowing. The place that gets loud when something is off. Most people have been taught to dismiss that signal, to override it with logic or defer to whoever has the credentials. But your body has been tracking your truth longer than any expert has known you exist. The relationship with yourself is not soft or secondary. It is the source.

As I got older, sports became less about proving something and more about self-expression — about asking how far I could take this, how fully I could show up in this dimension of myself. And again, when you do that, the outside world tends to see “success.” But success was never the goal. Health was the goal. Self-expression through self-alignment was the goal.

Business has the same problem

There is so much noise in the business world — and honestly, it can be a playground for ADHD minds that naturally lock onto shiny objects every few minutes. New strategies, new tools, new energizing problems to solve. And of course, money. Lots of it. The whole machine is designed to keep you reaching.

If you don’t define the rules of your game before you step onto that field, you will get dragged. Make a million dollars — for what? At some point, many people hit a threshold where more money no longer changes the quality of their life in the ways they imagined, and by then, they’ve often traded the things that actually mattered to get there. Uncle Sam takes his chunk regardless. So what’s the real goal?

For me, it’s always been freedom — and I use that word deliberately, because I think we’ve let the culture define it as something you buy. A bigger house, a nicer car, a watch that signals something to a room full of people you may not even like. That version of freedom requires an endless amount of money and never quite arrives. My version looks different: I start my day when I want, end it when it feels right, pick up my kids from school, coach their teams, make dinner, and grow things in a garden. I work with people I genuinely want to work with. I wear what I want. That’s it. That’s the whole vision.

Yours will look different — it should. But the point is that “enough” is almost always a smaller number than society’s version of success would have you believe, and once you’re honest about what your life actually needs to feel full, the financial target often becomes a lot less daunting and a lot more achievable. The noise quiets down. The decisions get easier.

Whose rules are you following?

In business, people sometimes call this zigging when others zag. Not because you ignore reality or reject everything that exists, but because you’ve gotten clear on what matters to you — your values, your constraints, your actual definition of a good life — and you’re willing to build around that instead of around someone else’s blueprint.

Your business has its own vision. In the early stages, especially, not everyone will see it yet, and that’s normal — it’s not their job to see it yet. Your job is to bring it into form. To trust the thing you can feel, even when you can’t fully articulate it. Once it exists in the world, people can encounter it, engage with it, and decide what it means to them. But first you have to build it, and you can only do that if you’re building toward something that’s genuinely yours.

Whether it’s sports, business, or just the shape of a day, the question is always the same. What game are you actually playing? And who defined the rules? Because those are two separate questions, and both of them matter. The first is about clarity. The second is about agency. You need both.

So I’ll leave you with this: have you defined the rules of your game? And if not, whose rules are you following?