Alistair Brownlee, two-time Olympic gold medalist, four-time triathlon world champion, three-time Ironman winner, and bestselling author, isn’t one to shy away from making a mantra his own: “If you want to achieve something no one has achieved before, you have to approach the challenge in a way no one has before.”
In a keynote fireside chat at the Unleashing Disruptive Growth event in Barcelona, Alistair sat down with McKinsey’s Philipp Hillenbrand to discuss invaluable lessons business leaders and entrepreneurs can learn from elite athletes.
Philipp Hillenbrand: Alistair, you were studying medicine when you made the decision to become a professional athlete. You told me that people tried to discourage you by saying you would regret your decision. How do you deal with these voices?
Alistair Brownlee: The truth is that deciding to become a professional athlete was a very difficult decision. Fortunately, I had a great support system of family and friends, but I also dealt with the negativity by having a strategy. I always remember that success happens over many years. It’s one of the greatest sporting clichés—but for good reason. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I gradually got better at sport. I went from being the worst in my school to being the best in the city, and then I became World Junior Champion at 18, weeks before I started university at Cambridge for medicine. I decided to start studying despite my dream of becoming a professional athlete because winning World Junior Champion proved to me that I could do both.
Philipp Hillenbrand: Can you tell us more about how you decided to become a triathlete?
Alistair Brownlee: Going to the Olympic Games was always something that had inspired me. I didn’t know if that was economically possible for me, but it was something I wanted to do. In 1996, when I was eight years old, I was already staying up very late to watch my first Olympic Games. Then in 2000, I saw triathlon debuting in Sydney and was immediately fascinated. It became “my sport.” The next morning, I was inspired to get up early and start training to become a triathlete.
In 2007, I started university. My parents, teachers, and friends were always telling me what an amazing opportunity it was to be studying medicine. Switching careers to become a professional athlete was a crazy idea, especially when you have two parents who are doctors. Stepping away from a medical degree just to go run around in a Lycra swimsuit for a living seems ludicrous. I was hesitant and took some convincing. I remember having a meeting with my tutor at Cambridge and telling him I wanted to go away and become an athlete. He told me about someone who went away to be a professional tennis player, but it didn’t work out, so he came back to Cambridge a few years later to keep pursuing his degree. My tutor obviously shared the story to discourage me from leaving, but what I heard was, “You can always go away, do your sport, and do academics later.”
Another thing that convinced me was having a chat with my dad. It was on a winter’s day in Northern England, so it was dark and raining. I was outside riding my bike up a hill. My dad was worried, so he took the car out and followed me up the hill. There I am, riding with his headlights behind me; it was a Rocky-esque scenario. At the top of the hill, I said to him, “This is what I want to do.” I remember trying to make the point that hundreds of people can study medicine, but few can be the best in the world at their sport and fulfill their passion. Maybe it was the cycling in the rain and the dark, but, somehow, I convinced him. He told me to always remember that I’ve been able to follow my dreams. Handling the voices that tell you that you can’t or shouldn’t pursue your passion is a combination of stubbornness and having support from the great people around you.
Philipp Hillenbrand: How did you train your personal mental resilience muscle? What keeps you going when you get up at 5:00 in the morning?
Alistair Brownlee: In its simplest form, all sport—especially endurance sport—is a dose-response relationship, meaning the more of it you do in small doses over a long period of time, the more your body responds by getting better, faster, stronger, and more consistent.
I had three strategies for achieving this. The first was making sure that what I was doing became a habit. Funnily enough, I never started anything at 5:00 a.m., which was an intentional part of building the habit, since starting that early is tough to maintain. Second, I was obsessive about removing the barriers to do what I needed to do. That would include things like getting up at 7:00 a.m. instead of 5:00 a.m. That was important because sleep is the second-most-important facet in training, after the training itself. I also made sure my equipment worked, my kit was dry, and my running and cycling shoes were warm and dry next to the door. I even bought my first house because it was close to the largest number of trails. I didn’t give myself a choice of whether I should train or not. It was like going to work. It was who I was. Establishing those habits and removing those barriers made me more resilient.
Third, as cliché as it sounds, you have to find motivation and enjoyment in the process. I truly believe that you can’t motivate yourself to do hard things every day to achieve a goal that might happen in two, four, or eight years unless you celebrate small achievements along the way. And you have to find what motivates you. For me, it was competing against my brother. He was always there to motivate me. When I spoke to 30 or so high performers from different sports for my book, I found that the people who perform well over decades are good at finding what motivates them.
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Philipp Hillenbrand: You once told me that every race is a little bit tougher than the prior one. In such a competitive environment, how do you manage to outpace your contenders?
Alistair Brownlee: I believe a sporting career is innovation that happens in many ways. I tried to be innovative first in my training. My body was changing, and the training that worked last year didn’t work the following year. Training is a process of consistent iteration. Each week was a chance to experiment. Could I do a few more minutes? Could I run a bit faster? I challenged myself to find different modalities of training that would give me a better result without risking injury. I think constant but simple innovation by iteration is an undervalued approach. We often think of innovation as something fancy and technical. In triathlon, for example, it might be buying the most expensive bike. But things like that bring only a tiny increase in value. Maximizing the yield from everyday training by optimizing the routine impacts your body’s adaptation and compounds improvement; this is what leads to outliers in performance, in my experience.
As a person new to the sport, the second way was figuring out how I could innovate differently than the competition in terms of the dynamics and tactics of the race. The third way was being analytical and scientific about my approach. I enjoyed reading about the latest scientific approaches to things like altitude training or certain nutritional supplements, just to stay on top of the game.
Philipp Hillenbrand: We could think of you as a one-man start-up. What do you think of the typical start-up mantra, “Go fast and then break things”? Does it apply to your approach to sport?
Alistair Brownlee: I think that’s a fantastic analogy. In lots of ways, being an athlete is like being a start-up. You’re doing a lot on your own and have to innovate. You’re only as good as your last race.
But the analogy stops when you say, “Go fast and break things.” Because if you go too fast, you just break yourself. I think one of the keys to sport is finding how to increase the bar as much as possible without increasing it too much. Because if you break something four weeks before the Olympic Games, you don’t have another chance. You have to find a balance.
Philipp Hillenbrand: Let’s stay with start-up clichés. Silicon Valley promotes getting 1 percent better every day, but you say to focus on a few areas that result in 70 to 90 percent progress leaps while still improving daily habits. How do you identify and prioritize these high-impact areas? How do you balance these transformative opportunities with small improvements?
Alistair Brownlee: I think it’s a question about where you focus your resources. Ten years ago, there was a popular sports mantra: “Leave no stone unturned.” While I thought that was fine, you can’t look under every tiny pebble and forget about the big rocks, because that’s ultimately where your biggest gains are.
Philipp Hillenbrand: Is there anything that business leaders, investors, and start-up founders can learn from you as a top athlete in terms of leadership?
Alistair Brownlee: You wouldn’t think there is much leadership in an endurance sport—you stand on the starting line by yourself, you race by yourself, you cross the finish line by yourself. In reality, you have a team of coaches, physiotherapists, doctors, masseurs, mechanics, and more. You have to take these people with you on what is ultimately a very selfish, self-indulgent goal of winning races. I was forced into a leadership position as a 21-year-old world champion, and my strategy was to find people who were just as committed as I was. But I realized that I was never going to find people like that. Like I said earlier, this had been a passion of mine since I was eight years old. Readjusting my expectations was important, as was finding people who were passionate, just at a different level than my own.
Because I was doing the training and racing, I made sure that I was making the final decisions. I could seek out the opinions of world experts for something specific, like an injury, but I was the one who closed the feedback loop when it was time to move on. Finding people who supported that approach and having my own convictions in making those types of decisions made me a more effective leader.
