Being Ghana’s first skeleton Olympian, there are many lessons I’ve learned thanks to my years of training. I firmly believe that sports can make us better humans and teach us the essential values we need in our life.

I’ll discuss some of those values here:

Respect

Having respect for other people is key to peaceful coexistence. Your views may be completely different from someone else’s, but you can still give them the respect they’re entitled to. At its core, sportsmanship is all about respect.

As athletes, we learn to respect our competitors even if we desperately want to defeat them.

Resilience

Life is full of ups and downs, and this is something accurately reflected in sports. You can train non-stop, prepare all you want, and yet something might stop you from giving your 100% when it matters. When this happens, resilience is the key to moving forward.

When an athlete faces a setback, they pick themselves up and come back stronger.

Discipline

No one can achieve anything without discipline, and no one knows that better than an athlete. This is why we commit to rigorous training programs, strict diet plans, and workout routines optimized for our chosen sport.

Life cannot be lived with no rules. No matter what happens, there are rules that you need to follow, which is why having discipline is necessary.

Goal-Setting

If you want to move forward in life, you need to consistently set goals for yourself and then develop a plan to meet them. Of course, some sports—such as football—involve literal goals, but every sport needs its participants to meet certain objectives.

Cultivate the habit of setting and reaching goals in your life, and you’ll ensure that you’re always growing as a person.

Decisiveness

Indecisive people tend to be unsure about the direction of their life. They second-guess themselves constantly and ultimately waste a lot of their time that could’ve been spent living a good life.

An athlete, especially one participating in fast-paced sports like skeleton or bobsled, must learn to be decisive. Knowing how to instantly make good decisions helps us perform better. That same decisiveness can be applied to life for great results.

An Important Consideration

Something I feel I must clarify is that playing a sport doesn’t automatically build character. Instead, the positive values and potential of a sport have to be encouraged to develop.

Athletes must actively work to develop these traits in themselves, and their trainers and coaches should ensure that they’re doing so.

As an athlete and entrepreneur, I’ve founded the Hope of a Billion movement, which represents the dreams and aspirations of a billion people. Join my movement by buying Frimpong activewear and Frimpong casualwear from my Frimpong store. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel, and follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.