Towards a sporty, entrepreneurial and resilient 2022
I became hooked on baseball as a four-year-old boy. Since then, the sport has been a deeply rooted part of my life for forty years and I have learned a lot from it, also as an entrepreneur. I therefore wish all our customers, employees and other relations a new year full of sporting resilience.
Instantly in love
Baseball, still a "special" or "incomprehensible" sport to some, has been a deeply ingrained part of my life for 40 years. As a four-year-old boy, my mother took me to a demonstration of "peanutball" - the children's version of baseball, now known as beeball - at the local gymnasium. All I needed was an orange pawn with a soccer ball on it and a stick to knock that ball off. I instantly fell in love. Until last October, baseball was an active part of my life; now it's time to literally pass the ball to my son. Hopefully baseball will have a beautiful place in his life as well.
Points of contact with entrepreneurship
What does this have to do with Comrads, you may ask? More than you might think at first glance, because sports in general, and baseball in particular, has tremendous common ground with entrepreneurship. Baseball teaches you like no other sport that team effort takes precedence over the individual, it also teaches you how to deal with failure and perseverance (30 percent is already very good in baseball!), with endurance and it teaches you that both brute force and smart tactics are both very important. Lessons that still help me a lot every day as a person, but also as an entrepreneur. Not only my experiences as a player, but also the experience I gained as a coach I take with me in my role at Comrads. I love getting the best out of people. Because everyone has a role to play, whether you are a powerful power player or a slower, tactical player, you can contribute equally. Thus, even in the Comrads team, I try to bring each individual to his or her strengths.
Never give up
I sometimes feel that children today do not learn to lose. And no, I don't claim that life is all about winning and losing, but I do believe that learning to deal with loss makes you stronger. It teaches you to pick yourself up and move on again, because without loss, no progress. And moving on, that's how you can make a difference. More than in any other sport, the outcome can be decided in the final seconds. Unlike most other sports, a baseball game has no end time. A game consists of nine innings and how long they last in total remains to be seen. The longest game ever lasted a whopping eight hours... That is long, but the advantage is that there is no clock figuratively breathing down your neck. Yet even in other sports, the outcome can be decided in the final seconds. Take a look at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix recently, where Max Verstappen seemed lost, but in the very last corners of the race still made up the difference and became world champion.
No business on the clock
As a result, I never do business on the clock. No matter how the nine collections go, everything you do is a long-term investment. It's not for nothing that a lot of our clients have been with us for five, six, sometimes even ten years. You can only establish that kind of long relationship if you are "on top of your game" and keep investing in your relationship, despite the inevitable setbacks. So that relationship is more important than the technology. It's not just about the best racing bike, the newest clap skate or the fastest Formula 1 car, it's about the total performance that you achieve as a team, with your employees, your customers and other relations.
Here's to a year full of athletic resilience
So I wish everyone a year full of sporting resilience. Even when the going gets tough, stay confident of a good outcome, because you know: the tide can always turn. Let's play ball!