8 Lessons For Entrepreneurs Learned Rally Car Racing That You Can Apply To Your Business Today

Dan Martell
2 min readMay 20, 2019

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I remember a couple of years ago I watched “Cars” the movie with my two boys.

What struck me most about the story was that the main character, Lightning McQueen, didn’t learn to be the best on the race track; he learned it on the training dirt track.

So today’s update comes from the DirtFish Rally School just outside of Seattle. The more time I spent here hucking, hoping and trying to keep my momentum… the more I saw there are so many lessons from racing that apply to entrepreneurship as well.

In this week’s video, I share with you the 8 racing lessons that can help your business grow.

Here’s a summary of the key lessons to help you ramp up your growth and keep your eyes on the prize

  1. In like a lamb, out like a lion
  2. Sacrifice speed for stability
  3. Model then modify
  4. Don’t commit to chaos, lift to vision
  5. Adapt for success
  6. Be patient, set it and wait
  7. You can’t look ahead if you’re patting yourself on the back
  8. You gotta be chill to kill

Something I learned on the dirt track is, when you’re attacking a turn it’s better to get rid of some speed and come in slower. Then, once you get lined up for your exit, you can POWER ON like a rocket.

Same thing goes in business. When a big opportunity comes up, you should start slow… prepare… assess… align… and when you know it’s going to be a big win then you can go all in.

I learned this from Jim Collins (author of Good to Great). In his book he talks about firing bullets, then cannonballs.

Before investing resources and effort in an opportunity, make sure you test it on a smaller scale… once you prepare and align, ATTACK LIKE A LION.

Check out the full ep here , and then drop me a comment letting me know any other similarities you can find between racing and entrepreneurship.

It’s AMAZING how universal and cross-function strategies are, don’t you think?

Dan Martell has advised more startups than his hometown has people and teaches startup founders like you how to scale. (Get the free 3 videos to grow your business here.) He previously created, raised venture funding for and successfully exited two tech startups: Flowtown and Clarity.fm. You should follow him on twitter @danmartell for tweets that are actually awesome.

Originally published at https://www.danmartell.com on May 20, 2019.

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Dan Martell
Dan Martell

Written by Dan Martell

I coach ambitious software founders | Award-winning angel investor / 5x founder with 3x exits | Speaker | Proud Father.

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