The Gift Of Competition: A Lesson From TopGolf CEO Dolf Berle
My favorite word is Compete. I often say that the opportunity to compete is the greatest gift we can experience on any given day.
That’s why I’ve spent nearly three decades fascinated by how lessons from the way we learned to compete in sports can help us develop ourselves in the ever-competitive world of business. I do believe each of us has a place where success takes up residence in our lives. Human nature often puts our focus on the penthouse but I’d argue the luxuries of success for many who I’ve interviewed began closer to the ground floor and ultimately elevated them to new heights. Located at the intersection of sports and business are thousands of leading executives with amazing stories, but it’s hard to have a better story about the power of competition than the CEO of Top Golf, Dolf Berle.
He recently sat down with me for an episode of a podcast where I ask Fortune 500 executives how sports shaped their path—that conversation tee’d up an overwhelmingly transparent discussion about competition. You see, Dolf is more than just another CEO in corporate America. When you ask what fueled his drive to take Top Golf to 25 countries and grow to over 20,000 employees, you realize that his clarity comes when he’s looking to his left and right to see world-class challengers.
“I would say that being a competitor and competing is itself, a skill,” said Berle, who ran track at Harvard before moving into the corporate world. “So when I was not competing—which was essentially between age 26 and 38 — something was missing.”
But then life’s circumstances pushed Berle to look back towards the track.
“The primary (thing that was happening) was that my first son, Bax, was diagnosed with autism. At that time the prognosis for someone diagnosed with autism was very grim. We were told he would likely never talk and never be potty trained,” Berle said as his voice weakened. Full transparency—I, too, am a father of an autistic son so tears began to fill my own eyes as I listened to Dolf’s emotional recount.
“I realized that I would have to be strong for the fight that would last likely my whole lifetime… And what I found was that my dreams and identity and the times that I had felt strongest was when I was competing.”
Berle went on to describe how at age 38, he decided to train for the decathlon as if he were competing for a World title. Becoming more disciplined in a sport, heightened his bar for the other commitments in his life. He said it became a way of life and a source of strength and joy that allowed him to better embrace the other things in his life that required time and effort.
“I should say that I’m very happy to report that my son is doing much better than any expectations we had,” Berle added as a smile stretched from ear to ear. “He’s actually a basketball coach and he’s coaching Special Olympics teams and doing it with remarkable passion and great skill.”
While vying for high levels of success can be traced back to his days as a young athlete with a passion for track and field. It continued with his appearances as a competitor on the hit network tv show, “American Ninja Warrior”, and was reinforced, just last year, when Berle was ranked as the number 1 decathlete in the United States for his age. Competition has taken the now 55-year-old from his college track days at Harvard and the University of Zimbabwe to now leading a major company and competing in both the pole vault and the decathlon.
“It’s been a remarkable journey, I had the chance to—at age 40—come in 2nd in the world in the pole vault, and then I was fourth in the decathlon,” Berle recounted excitedly. “Then at 50, I won the world championship in the pole vault and was third in the decathlon. And then at 55, I won again.
“If you’re actively competing, and you’re pointing towards your next competition in life, there’s an edge that you have and a clarity and a state of mind that actually carries over into everything else that you do.”
His story wins at all levels, especially when most of the nation is hoping that the reboot of professional sports leagues like the NBA, WNBA, PGA, and NHL can help us through the tough circumstances of the past 5 months. For Berle, the feeling of getting back to competition saved his family, career, and peace of mind.
Embracing competition elevates our capacity to overcome adversity. It helps us connect. It helps us dedicate ourselves to a passion. At the very least, it gives us a thrilling escape from reality where our best efforts intersect with immediate feedback. During uncertain times, there’s comfort in the certainty of winning or losing—and for Dolf, the chance to compete.