Cognitive reward shapes in sports and career
Sports are amazing environments to learn. When you play a sport for thousands of hours, you start to see the world through that sport. It is a simple fact—your biological neural network is being conditioned to respond to the behavior incentivized by the rules of the sport.
The funny thing is that most people choose their sports for accidental reasons such as parents, geography, or school programs. People rarely think about how the particular sport you play influences how your brain thinks more generally. Going a step further, playing the right sport may even benefit your career.
My two favorite sports are tennis and soccer. Tennis is one of the best sports for teaching consistency. In tennis, there are hundreds of points in a match, and each point is worth exactly one unit, regardless of whether your opponent made an unforced error or if you constructed the most beautiful point ending with a winner. Tennis is low-variance optimization—you win by reducing unforced errors, playing percentages, and grinding out small advantages. Tennis is also an individual sport, which teaches you to rely on yourself consistently.
Tennis has a similar cognitive reward shape to professions like being a surgeon or a pilot. Surgery and aviation require consistency, self-accountability, and deep focus. And similar to how you can only win one point at a time in tennis no matter how spectacular it was, there is no extra credit for the best appendectomy or the smoothest SFO-JFK flight. Your craft is to provide consistency with very low tolerance for error.
On the other hand, the tennis mindset transfers relatively little to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a high-variance, team game where failure is tolerated and occasional creativity gets rewarded exponentially. Minimizing unforced errors in tennis is a totally different mindset from deciding whether to make a moonshot business move that will likely fail but could potentially net a billion dollars. Obviously I am not saying that tennis players cannot be great entrepreneurs, but I do think it is a totally different cognitive reward shape.
Being a forward in soccer has a much closer reward shape for entrepreneurship. What a forward in soccer learns is to create many small chances. It is a fact that most of the game, you are not scoring—even if you look at all the times that Mbappe got on the ball in one of his best games, most of those led to nothing! But all that matters is creating enough chances to score once (or a few times) and win the game. If you break down a 90-minute game for a forward, almost all the time is failure or noise, a few minutes will be leverage, and a few seconds will determine the fate of the game. I have not played soccer for thousands of hours, but I can imagine that being a lifetime forward in soccer would teach you to be comfortable with failure and asymmetric returns.
In summary, I am claiming that there can be substantial value when the cognitive reward shape of your sport mirrors that of your career. I’ll admit that I’ve done some cherry-picking for illustration purposes—entrepreneurship also requires consistency and error avoidance; and goalies in soccer have reward shapes that are very different from strikers. But I think the point stands. If sports shape how we perceive risk, effort, and reward, then we should choose them wisely.
