"Life is a race" is one saying that is widely accepted in different cultures and professions, though the coinage may be differently done; the message remains the same.

Though in most cases the race is personal as against the competitive races we are all used to watching over the TV or at stadiums, the distinctiveness of the tracks is still maintained across most cultures. This is to reduce frictions and clashes among "the athletes".

In life, all of us are athletes running our races to different finishing lines. Yeah, I said "different finishing lines". That is the difference between life as a race and racing as a profession.

In the race of life, you don't measure your success by the speed and or the success of others. Here, everybody came with an inbuilt yardstick for measuring his/her success based on his/her peculiarities and purpose of creation. We will discuss this later.

We are going to be looking at three habits of successful professional athletes and see how we can apply the same in our lives as life athletes.In no particular order, here we go………

First, it has been observed that athletes eat healthy. Athletes are not the most regular hospital visitors yet they are among the healthiest people on earth. Their food is their drug and their drug is their food.

They understand that whatever enters their system has a huge impact on their output and so they are very selective when it comes to what to eat.

Bringing it to ourselves as life athletes. If anyone wants to succeed in life, he must be in charge of the information he consumes.

He must not eat because every other person ate because he is not going to the same place as every other person. He must consciously, deliberately and consistently go after information that are tailored to helping him reach his finishing line with less hitches. He must not be a mass media consumer.

He must develop the skill of sieving out what he wants from junk the media, be it traditional or social media, pushes to him every second of the day.

He must learn to use the media and resist its attempt to use him.

The second point is that successful athletes develop and maintain a consistent practice/training routine.

Enduring success doesn't come by accident, even if you accidentally stumble into success, you must be deliberate with your efforts to nurture and keep it, else, just as it came, it will accidentally fly away.


The life athlete must develop a daily healthy routine and strictly stick to it. This is so important because there are a thousand and one things out there competing for your "scarce" attention.


Identify those things that help you become better at what you do or those you want to do and configure your life to revolve around them and be strict with your time management. Know it that an extra minute at the gym means a minute less in the time allotted for the next schedule.

There is always the temptation of spending more than allotted time for the things you enjoy and less for the ones your body seems not to enjoy. This is where self-discipline comes in. You must tell yourself that the "bitter ones" are as important, if not more, as the "sweet" ones.

Lastly, for today, professional athletes prioritize recovery.

When the athletes get knocked out by injury or illness they pay a lot of sacrifice to come back to full fitness. Whatever their handlers prescribe, even when painful to their bodies they force themselves to do.

Life is full of ups and downs. Nothing is permanent hence the philosophical saying that "change is the only permanent phenomenon".

Talking about change, we know it could be positive or negative but for the purpose of this discussion, we shall be focusing on the negative side of the coin.

When life knocks you out or off balance or into the pit. Firstly you must understand that it is part of life and that it happens to every other person at one point or the other, so it is not peculiar to you.

The next thing is to begin finding your way out of the pit. It could be that you have to learn, relearn and or unlearn somethings. Even if you have to go to your juniors to achieve that.

It could also demand that you pay some sacrifices such as taking a pay cut, if you are an entrepreneur running your own business, going down below your present living standards, working harder and for more hours etc.

If life is a race and we all are athletes for life, we must live the life of athletes if we are to succeed in the harsh realities of this track called earth.