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Characteristics of successful athletes and entrepreneurs

Written by Mo
Nov 18
Tags: Characteristics, successful, athletes, entrepreneurs, Technology, Cycling, Sports, Blog, Binando, #mo, #moritzpfeiffer
3 min read


In the following I will shortly list some characteristics I’ve noticed in the recent combined 15 years of my athlete and entrepreneurial way among people who seemed to be successful in a way. I think there is no difference in which field you are active, whether it is sports, business or voluntary. You will probably discover at least some of the characteristics below with people who seem to be successful.


One rule I discovered is that lots of athletes would start an own business after their athlete career, they normally don’t go to big corporations like Daimler, VW or IBM. They want to discover new things and are interested in a wide area of different fields, that is always good to grow yourself.

Lifelong learning

I heard that a lot at school and at university and always thought: “yeah, just go ahead”. But it is like it is and you should be always willing to learn new things. In the retrospective I recognize that most of things I can call my skills I learned by myself in an autodidactic and try-and-error way. Always stay hungry!


Besides staying curious and learning new things, you also need to focus on the important things and don’t involve yourself in way too much different things. So to give you an example: when I was in school my whole life rotated around cycling and sports and today around growing my own business Binando. That means not that you should not go out with friends or doing some holidays and so on. It should only be in the correct balance.

Learn from “the older ones”

It is always good to talk to people who have experienced that where you are currently going through to learn from their experience. When I came to the Elite in Cycling I had a guy in my team who rode two times Le Tour de France and lots of Classics like Paris-Roubaix and it was great to learn from his experiences how to read a race competition for example. The same for example if you need to raise 10m € for your company or need to develop your sales team, than best is to talk with people who were going through that and learn from their experience, that you don’t do the same failures they did.

Passion for business

This is a very often heard sentence but it is just true: “do what you love”. I think there is nothing explanation needed. Period.


There are a lot people out there who are looking for the fast success and will hop on every hype which arises. Those are most often the people who are doing everything for their success and lack of honesty or integrity. Maybe that is sometimes good for be successful in the short-term but for me a 10- or 20-years plan is much more important than being successful in 3 months and after that the story implodes because it was just a nice facade. A very well-known sentence from Warren Buffet is: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.” So, think about that!

That is just my opinion what I have experienced but I guess if you look around a bit in your circle of acquaintances that often applies. But of course, as always, people are different and there are a lot of different ways which are leading to success. If you have very important other characteristics in mind which you have experienced and are not listed above, I would be happy to hear about them!


All the best – Mo ❤


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