How To Leverage Your Passions of Marathon Running and Entrepreneurship

Leverage your passions is the key to a happy life

How to jump into the sneakers and start running at 5 AM? What motivates a guy to go out and running 30km on Sunday morning, instead of staying in bed and rest? What leads to that a 62 years person quit his corporate job to start his own business?

You can deliver the answer in different shapes, but in this particular case, it’s all about passion and how to leverage your passions.

You can take advantage of most passions in life, but to leverage your passions of marathon running and entrepreneurship, works perfectly well. This article pretends to streamline what it takes to leverage your passions in a feasible way.

First, both activities have the base on long-term goals. You can impossibly start training for a marathon race and successfully execute the race two weeks later. Entrepreneurship works the same way. There doesn’t exist any serious business where you start today and two weeks later, your business is complete and profitable.

What happens in the mindset when you start to train for marathon races? We are talking about 42,195 meters or 26.2 miles. For sure a lot of things, but passion is absolutely one of the ingredients.

You cannot execute a marathon plan in a sprinter race speed, but it takes time. The confidence you get will be tremendous. When lining up for the first marathon race ever, you’ll know that you have trained according to your plan. Everything is properly prepared for success.

To train and run a marathon race you need to have: A Passion, a Challenge, a Decision and a Plan.

Entrepreneurs are like Marathon Runners

Think about any successful entrepreneur you know and for sure there is a real passion for their mission. Indeed, a serious decision was taken before the launch of the whole business project, with a detailed plan on how to reach the goal. And here we go! Challenge every single hurdle during the race towards the final goal.

It is more likely to be a rule than an exception that some barriers turn into severe obstacles. For a marathon runner, this can be represented by the famous “Wall.” Somewhere around kilometer 30 (18.5 miles) when the body is completely empty of all energy. The immediate feeling is that here it all ends. Often you associate the “wall” with a whole range of symptoms, such as dehydration, nausea, dizziness, headache, a lack of coordination and muscle spasms, poor thinking, poor decision taking and so on….

Leverage your passions while hitting the wall

For all fighters out there, even if we are suffering hitting the wall, it is also a trigger, a trigger to manage the challenge. After a few races, you know exactly what happens when it is time to hit the wall. The good thing is that you can train for it and take measures to prevent and minimize all adverse effects of it.

The professional runners, the best regularly coming from African countries, they also have to pass through this more challenging part of the race. However, they keep a tremendously even pace throughout the whole race. When the world record was sat in Berlin in September 2014 by Dennis Kipruto Kimetto from Kenya, at the fantastic finish time of 2:02:57, he had only a few seconds pace difference between the slowest and fastest kilometer. How did he deal with the wall? Training, experience and more training…..

The “Wall” for Entrepreneurs

You cannot find a single biography about great entrepreneurs without talking about the failures towards their final goal. Talking about real “hitting the wall” events, the first one popping up is when they fire Steve Jobs from Apple 1985, the company where he was the co-founder. How did he act when he hit the “wall”? He continued his “race” as planned, started new companies and acquired other companies to continue his mission. At that time, he had enough money to retire and live a peaceful family life the rest of his life. However, his agenda was different. When back again to Apple he reinvented the image of the company to a new level and the rest of the success is a well-known story.

A true entrepreneur with a burning passion is unstoppable!

The same goes for marathon runners, especially when hitting the wall. What do entrepreneurs and marathon runners then have in common? Trying to find the key attributes, the first one coming up as the most obvious is that the approach towards the “wall” in both cases never includes complaints. It relates to a negative approach, and both entrepreneurs and runner are searching for solutions.

Research even shows that exposure to as little as 30 minutes of negatively material peels away neurons in the brain’s hippocampus, an important part of your brain for problem-solving. With a true passion and a serious plan how to reach the goal, you can more easily overcome the “wall.” The same goes for real entrepreneurs as for serious marathon runners. It’s a combination of activities where you continuously leverage your passions.

Calculated Risks Outside Your Comfort Zone

The freedom and the privilege to practice this amazing sport of marathon running requires a lot of coordination to materialize. One part of the coordination is the other activities in life and an activity that is compatible with the marathon training.

Entrepreneurship in any form fits well into a passionate runner’s agenda. Adding on Internet-based entrepreneurship, makes it even more compatible, as you easily can leverage your passions. Time is always a limited resource, but in this case, you need a maximum flexibility. Both entrepreneurship and marathon training are time-consuming activities.

There are tons of similarities in the characters of entrepreneurs and marathon runners, which makes this analysis interesting. Natalie Nathanson at Magnetude Consulting delivered an important reflection over the topic in one of her blog posts.

The willingness to take risks and the ability to live outside or on the edge of your comfort zone, are important characteristics to have.

You don’t need to be crazy!

Among us enthusiastic and passionate marathon runners, there is an expression going like this:

“You don’t need to be crazy, but it helps.”

What people outside our group view as craziness are “mandatory” activities based on our total focus on the plan. For example, during summer time you need to start your long run training sessions very early in the morning (5 AM or earlier), to avoid the heat after the sunrise.

When Bill Gates and his little team were at the peak to get ready the first embryo to what later should be the first version of Microsoft Windows, and literally were working around the clock feeding themselves on pizzas and Pepsis, was it craziness or passion?

The nuance between craziness and passion is hard to see unless you are an entrepreneur ……or a marathon runner.

Thanks to the business with the Six Figure Mentors you can keep your freedom, the passion gets another dimension, and you can go on forever being “crazy.” Leverage your passions gives entrance to another lifestyle, the life of freedom.

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