Why The Right Mindset Is A Catalyst For Success
I had the pleasure of speaking to Bex Smith, Founder of Crux Sports, about her career to date. We spoke about the importance of leaving your comfort zone, being an outlier and enjoying 'the process'.
Bex Smith is an internationally successful footballer who's transitioned to a global executive in sports and business. She founded Crux Sports which consults with some of the world’s leading stakeholders in football including global brands, federations & confederations, international media platforms, AI technology, esports, agencies and some of the world’s top players.
📖 Read the full interview on danielgeey.com
📺 Watch our full interview here:
🎧 Listen to the interview here:
🧠 Comfort Zones
If I had to sum up Bex’s philosophy with one line from our interview, it would be this:
… my dad always told me when I was growing up … ‘if you're the smartest one in the room, you're in the wrong room …
In other words, adopt a growth mindset.
In one of my favourite books, Mindset, Carol Dweck outlines fixed and growth mindsets, and shows why insatiable curiosity coupled with humility create a recipe for success.
So, as Bex’s dad suggested, get yourself into the right room and once you get there make the most of it.
… if I walk into a room, I want to actually get something from that room. I don't want to impose how great I think I am, that doesn't actually bring me anything, but … to sort of pick everyone's brain and get a little bit of knowledge from everyone else, I think, is sort of always how I've approached interactions with other people.
Bex went on to explain how being an elite athlete fosters this mentality:
I think that if you're not moving forwards, you're moving backwards; that if you're not constantly learning and not constantly growing, then you're already behind, so that is my mentality; it’s constantly trying to talk to people, learn from people, read, watch content, whatever it is, but constantly trying to evolve and grow myself … so when I was playing, it was always ‘what's the next thing?’.
I talk more about this in Chapter 2 of Build The Invisible, How soon is now?
💡 Being an Outlier
For a lot of people fitting in is essential.
For Bex, it’s the opposite:
… normal is boring … different for me is probably one of the best words you can use. If you were to describe me as someone that's different; that's unique; that's special; great, bring it on.
This is the mindset of an outlier.
We're constantly forced and funnelled down to try to be normal and normal and normal and normal but at the end of the day, it's boring. It's just boring if everyone's the same, so I think curiosity is a really important characteristic, but you constantly have to work at it.
In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell flips our assumptions about success on their head.
Gladwell suggests that success is not a direct consequence of being exceptionally talented, but is rather the result of individuals, outliers, seizing the opportunities and advantages afforded to them.
There are plenty of truisms about sport being like life, and vice versa, and there is a reason why.
I think there's a lot of talented people out there but hard work trumps that any day and I learned that on the pitch but also off the pitch…
Talent helps, obviously, but success is no accident.
For my insights on this topic read Chapter 3 of my new book, Build The Invisible, Luck and opportunity.
⚽ Happy is Hard
I never wanted to be a professional footballer; I just enjoyed it.
You will have heard the phrase ‘a means to an end’.
The end may be ‘I want to be a professional footballer’, while the means are the small steps you take toward that end such as diet, training etc.
Often, the means are dismissed as peripheral.
For Bex, however, the means have always been critical.
We always look at outcomes, we're taught, ‘I want to be a teacher’, ‘I want to be a lawyer’, ‘I want his job’, ‘I want that’, ‘I want that’, when actually we need to start from, and this is going to sound corny but it is so true, we need to start inside first. We need to start with: who am I? what are my values? what is the type of person I want to be? who are the type of people that I value? who are they, not what do they do.
In Build The Invisible I mention James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, and reflect on his notions about identity:
He proposes that we actually focus on identity outcomes or who we want to be.
It’s who you want to become, not what you want to do, because what you want to do is more likely to happen once you understand who you want to be.
In other words, the means matter.
I talk about this in Chapter 5 of Build The Invisible, Protect the Process.
🎧 Content from Bex:
📺 More content from me:
Look out for the next edition of the Build The Invisible Substack, where I will be sharing lessons from Ehsen Shah, founder of B-Engaged.
B-Engaged specialises in sports & gaming marketing activations. With over 21 athletes, and 15 brands as clients working with B-Engaged with the objective to maximise ROI through the sporting audience.
Aside from B-Engaged, he has founded and invested and is on the board of advisors for a number of other businesses. Ehsen is passionate about growing businesses within the sports industry and the green / sustainable industries through an eco VC fund vehicle created to bring like minded people and organisations together.
📣 In case you missed last week’s BTI Substack:
