Nine business and life lessons from mountain biking

Executive overview

Most business advice comes from boardrooms. These nine lessons come from trails in Crested Butte, Colorado. Physical challenges on a mountain bike map directly onto the mental challenges of building a business.

The same habits that make you a better rider — celebrating wins, practising deliberately, embracing suffering — make you a better founder.

Nine lessons for business and life

1. Have a cheerleader. Someone in your corner saying "you can do it" makes hard climbs easier. Build this into team rituals — weekly wins meetings, a Slack #props channel.
2. Recognise success as much as failure. It's easy to dwell on what went wrong. Give yourself credit for what went right — publicly, not just privately.
3. Positivity is infectious. The people around you set your baseline mood. Hire and befriend people who default to positive; their outlook will pull yours up.
4. Have fun. If you're grinding through something that's supposed to be enjoyable, stop, look around, and reset. Stress kills the work as much as the enjoyment.
5. Practising vs playing. Playing the game (sending emails, riding trails) doesn't make you better. Deliberate practice — isolated repetition of hard things — does. Build practice time into every skill you want to develop.
6. First time hard, second time easy. Fear of the first cold call, the first video, the first ask shrinks the moment you do it. Treat firsts as muscle-building, not high-stakes events.
7. Next is not better — now is. Constantly chasing the next goal means missing the current ride. Being present isn't woo-woo advice; on a bike, distraction causes crashes. The same is true in business.
8. Smile at the suffering. Hard analytical work, a tough spreadsheet, a long writing session — reframe the discomfort as something to lean into rather than avoid. Change the script in your head.
9. Visualise your success. On a technical trail, you look where you want to go or you fall. In business, knowing the destination shapes every decision on the path toward it.