1154 – It Really Is A Business: Tom talks What I Learned From Sports

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom Antion argues that sports provide valuable life lessons at lower levels, but at the collegiate and professional levels they become businesses first, with incentives that often conflict with the public image they project. He draws parallels between sports organizations and large corporations, emphasizing the importance of building your own business rather than depending on institutions.
Key Points
• Sports become a business at higher levels
o Youth sports can build character, discipline, and fitness.
o College and professional sports are driven primarily by revenue, winning, and financial interests—not just competition.
• Be skeptical of appearances
o Tom shares personal observations of donor influence, injured athletes being kept on the field, and academic standards being relaxed for star players.
o His broader lesson: understand the real incentives behind organizations rather than accepting their public messaging.
• Charitable giving requires due diligence
o Businesses should research charities before donating.
o He recommends checking organizations through watchdogs such as CharityWatch, Charity Navigator, GiveWell, BBB Wise Giving Alliance, and ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer.
o He cautions that financial ratios alone don't guarantee a charity is effective.
• Large organizations prioritize their own interests
o Just as sports programs focus on winning and revenue, large corporations primarily answer to shareholders.
o Employees should not assume long-term loyalty or job security.
• Build your own assets
o Use your salary to develop a side business, intellectual property, or another independent income source.
o Relying entirely on a single employer is risky because layoffs can happen suddenly.
• Don't let entertainment replace progress
o Tom believes excessive time spent watching sports could be invested in growing a business or learning new skills.
o His point isn't to eliminate hobbies, but to be intentional about where your time goes.
Key Takeaway
Tom's central message is that institutions—whether sports organizations, charities, or corporations—ultimately operate as businesses. Entrepreneurs should understand those incentives, avoid blind loyalty, carefully evaluate where they invest their money, and devote more time to building assets and income streams they control rather than depending on others.

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Episode 1154 – What I Learned From Sports
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1154 of Screw the Commute podcast today. I don't know, some of you might not be happy with my today's topic. It's about sports. I had such good response from my what I learned from flying. I'm going to do one on what I learned from sports, and some of it is kind of negative, so I'll be covering that today, but there's still some good business lessons there. And let's see. I hope you didn't miss episode 1153. That was like I just said, what I learned from being a pilot or flying. A lot of good lessons on that one. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com/then the episode number. That was 1153. And we're so, so close on releasing the, the latest automate how to automate your business book version 3.0 is up there now. You can still go ahead and download this because version 4.0 just adds to it makes minor changes. So you can get started immediately. But hopefully within a week we'll have the new one out. It's in proofreading stage. And so to get that you go to screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And of course, I want you to check out my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org. And you've got a great publicity session. You can watch on YouTube at screwthecommute.com/publicity. And it's the fantabulous. Listen to this Stanley Murray. No, no, it's Starley Murray. I just put out an email today, and autocorrect put Stanley Murray instead of Starlee. She's going to kill me when she sees it. Stanley Murray, it's Starley. Murray. Starley.
[00:02:21] All right, so let's get into today's topic. What I learned from sports, how it applies to the business here. And and first of all, before I get into some of the negative stuff, I am totally not against sports. Sports can be great. Well, unless the parents screw it up by giving trophies to everybody just for participation. Now that's just about as stupid as you can get it. That'll that'll be highlighted in my new program. Coming up. Highly educated idiots came up with that idea. But yeah, there's so many good things that can be learned from sports, character building and exercise and all that good stuff. See? But there are some significant downsides to it that I'll get into today. But anyway, there's good business lessons in it. And the first lesson that it is not a sport. It is not sports, it's a business. And the sooner you realize that, the better off you will be. Now, maybe T-ball and Little League are sports. Yep. All for it. Midget football. All right. All those things. Great. Love it. But as soon as you get up into the higher levels, it immediately becomes a business. And football and basketball are absolutely businesses. Now football and Basketball when I was in college, supported all the other sports. The income from those sports created all the other sports, including tennis, lacrosse, baseball, volleyball, wrestling, I don't know whatever else they had there, but football and basketball supported all of them.
[00:04:17] Now, I saw some negativity in there quite a bit in that I was one of the people that I will lovingly say had half a brain, and that's including the coaches I had. I know I'm going to get in trouble for this stuff, but I'm just telling it like it is and hopefully it'll help you out not getting sucked into some of these things. But but I have seen big donors to the university getting their kids to play. And that was a balancing act because if the coach lost, then they're going to get fired. But if they didn't play these kids that had big, big financial donor parents, then they'd get in trouble too. So they were kind of in a balancing act there. I've personally witnessed star players getting shots, you know? I guess it was cortisone or whatever to keep them on the field and their knees and ankles to keep them playing, whether they were hurt or not. I've seen all this stuff. And the the big lesson here is that sports are a business. So that's, uh, and even, uh, from your, your business perspective, a lot of businesses want to donate to charities, right? Mine included. But here's the problem, especially coming from when I had the practical joke business, I knew I could hoodwink 99% of people on earth.
[00:05:54] Okay. Now, luckily, I was doing it for fun purposes for their birthdays and anniversaries. Right? But you got to be careful in your business of your charitable contributions, and it might make you feel good contributing to charities. But the problem is, and the reason I resist that totally is because of the amount of money that actually gets to the people that need it. And there's so many tricks that the charities play. Now, I'm going to give you a couple of the places that kind of watch over this. One is called Charity watch. Another is called Charity navigator. There's one called GiveWell. There's one called Baby Wise Giving Alliance. There's one called ProPublica, Nonprofit explorer. And these are these are companies, right? These are businesses that are supposed to watch over and rate charities. But again, you got to look past the surface of these things, especially when you're it's your charitable dollars from your company going. You don't want them going down the drain. So a lot of these companies have the CEOs. These charities are making millions and millions of dollars. The program expenses is, is like a line item that tells, you know, where they spent their money. But a lot of them, any questionable expenses just get lumped in with the overall program expense. So another thing is that the charities are really good at making it look like the highest percentage of money Is going where it's supposed to go.
[00:07:57] But again, they hide things in those in their filings to make it look like they are getting a lot of money to the people that need it. And the other parameter of this, some of them have really good numbers. When it looks like the highest percentage of money is going to their where it's supposed to go. But the other side of the coin that some of these watchdogs don't look at is, is the program effective to do what it's set out to do? Or is it just like a hamster wheel of salaries and money going and running the thing and collecting donations? But no, nothing gets nothing happens good out of it, say. And a lot of the the watchdogs don't cover that end of it. So you got to be careful as a business. You know, I would be much more apt to unless it was something that really got me a lot of publicity. Again, I'd feel bad about it if I knew that the money wasn't going to where it's supposed to go. So you got to be careful with these charities because, uh, it's your business money that's supposed to do good. And then if there's some scandal in the charity because people find out that the money's not going where it is supposed to go, then it reflects on you. All right. So bottom line on this first one, it's not sports. It's a business. All right. And it could be it's not charity.
[00:09:37] It's a business. And you have to recognize that in your business on where you put your funds. Okay. Now, the next thing I learned from sports is many athletes have no business being Where they're at and the lip service. And I emphasize that heavily. It's lip service to all these student athletes are getting a great opportunity and getting a great education. Well, first of all, they're getting a education because all the other students are too. Secondly, if they don't go to class, nobody cares. The the instructors and the P.E. department don't care. And again, there might be some that do. But, you know, they get pushed aside if they if they hard line it and make some idiot or moron or low IQ great athlete not show up or pass them when they didn't do any of the work. You know, that was just commonplace. And it still is. It's just there's more PR about how great this stuff is. And I'll give you an example. I had a roommate that was six foot five, £265, could bench press £365 if he just drank all summer and didn't lift a finger. Okay was just a great natural athlete, but he could barely read and write. I got him through the first couple semesters, helping him with his homework and stuff and putting papers in for him, but he eventually flunked out. It was just a total waste of effort and time, and it turned out he was a great woodworker.
[00:11:23] He could walk by a store and look at a piece of furniture and go recreate it at home. Way better than the original. So. So he was just recruited and it was all lip service to the education crap. That's if you hear somebody saying that, just laugh in their face because most of them don't care. But again, they take guys like me who was I was valedictorian, I was a starting guard. So but I worked my ass off because I wasn't a natural athlete and but I could I did a lot of the media interviews because I could talk. All right. I'm still talking. Right. So, uh, let's see. So what I'm saying is, is that the people in, in those athletic situations, they don't care about those kids. They could care less. They want their multi-million dollar salaries. They want to win. They want to bring in enormous amounts of money into the university, which they probably get a cut of the biggest ones. They don't care about the kids. And the reason this relates to business is that if you're working for a big company now, this if you happen to work for a mom and pop place that's close and knows you and your kids and just is great to you all the time, that's one thing. But most people are working for big companies, which the. The only God that they pray to and kneel to is the. The investors, the stock market.
[00:13:00] They could care less about you and your mortgage and your car payment and your family. You got to get out of that situation. I say use that. If you are in these companies and making a good salary, use that to start something on the side to create intellectual property for yourself, to get a side hustle that can go very big for you because one stroke of the pen and you are gone. And here's the thing on severance packages, that's going to be the the smallest they can get away from or get away with to keep the, the bad PR down as low as possible. In most cases, they could give you way bigger severance package. But that's just making the stockholders mad. That's all there. They're on their knees, praying and and kissing the feet of the stockholders. You have to understand that if you're in business now, they just don't care about you or your family or your bills or whatever. All right. So that's the second lesson from sports I've seen. They don't care about those kids. They just run through them if they flunk out or, you know, there was 31 people in my freshman picture, uh, picture of scholarship athletes. Only six of us graduated. The rest of them thrown out, flunked out in jail or dead. Okay. What do you think about that? Six out of 31 actually graduated. That's not a real good percentage. All right. Now, this other one, this next one is.
[00:14:45] Well, let me preface this with I was a fanatic from midget football till the end of senior year. College for football and wrestling. You know, his wrestling wrestler to. I was a pretty high level wrestler, but from the day I graduated, I have never watched a football game. That's 50 some years. Okay, one part. Partly because now, not that I won't look at a couple, you know, fantastic plays and things like that because it's interesting, but I will not sit down and waste my time watching all these multi-million dollar athletes get rich and going crazy and buying $60 shirts with their name on it. Now, I took advantage of that when I was coming up. I was very well known in the town I was in, which led to my beginning real estate career. I owned five apartment buildings and a hotel before I graduated, in part because I was well known. So I took advantage of it. And that's one thing. That's one of the benefits of sports. You can take advantage of other things. You know, people are happy to give you breaks that you wouldn't normally get because you're well known in sports. But but if you personally go gaga over sports, I got to tell you, not one of those super people that you love is ever going to give you a nickel. All right. And if you waste your time watching these things, you're probably neglecting something that could be done in your business to really help your business.
[00:16:23] And I know a lot of people don't even want to hear this crap. Like, who in the hell do you tell me that? Well, I'm just telling you where I'm at because I don't waste my time doing that stuff, and it doesn't mean I don't have any hobbies. And. And you would consider me wasting my time on some of them, right? But I just don't waste four hours on a Saturday watching one game and and I don't waste the same amount of time on a Sunday or maybe eight hours watching two games. Okay. And then wonder, well, my business isn't doing that well. Well, you just pissed away eight hours on Sunday and four hours on Saturday watching college, and there's 12 hours that you just didn't do anything on your business. So screw you. You deserve to not do well in your business. All right, I said, I told you this episode is a little bit a little bit rough. Tell it like it is. So anyway, those are a couple things I learned from sports is that it is a business. It's not a sport. And the people in sports don't care about the people that are making the happy. In fact, nowadays they're trying to pay the college athletes, which, you know, I kind of like the idea on one hand, but it's going to be a big debacle, uh, on, you know, poor schlub linemen that bust their butt are not going to get anything compared to the quarterback that they they kept from getting tackled all the time.
[00:17:51] So that's going to be quite a mess there. But, uh, you got to understand that your company, if you work for a big company, does not care about you. Not a bit. And you better do something about it instead of, like I said, uh, taking your salary and then watching sports all weekend and then wondering what hit you when you can't make your house payment and they lay you off and your cars get repossessed and all the bad things that happen, uh, if you just depend on a big company, um, for a long time, especially now, the old days, you could work 30 years and get your gold watch and a good retirement and all that, but a lot of that's by the wayside when another company buys something out. It happened to me recently on something where I was supposed to get something, not as an employee, but some benefit from the company, and then some other big company bought it out and said, no, we're not going to. We're not going to agree with that, you know. Go ahead. Sue us. You know, I forget what it was about. It wasn't worth my trouble to sue him. But I could see what what had happened there. They just said, we're so big. You're little. We'll squash you like a bug.
[00:19:02] And and too bad. So so, um, and then the, you know, waste and time going crazy over sports, spending a fortune by a name jerseys and shoes that are just, just throwing money down the drain. So, so there's my little rant about sports and what I learned from sports. Again, would I go through it again? Absolutely. I would, because it got me all those breaks. It helped me physically for, you know, I was a fat little punk kid. I wasn't a punk, but I was a fat little kid. And all that exercise over those 15 years, I still, even though I'm overweight now, I'm still can run circles around young kids because I built up that toughness when I was younger. So I'm all for sports, but when it gets to a certain level, it ain't sports anymore. It's a business. Uh, they don't care. They don't care about the athletes. And then businesses don't care about you. And you shouldn't waste your time going gaga and wasting enormous amounts of time unless your business is flourishing. And it's just a hobby. And that's fine. Great. But, uh, there you go. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. I can't wait to see the the comments on this thing. So, check out my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org. And if you'd like, I have a $95 shirt with my name on it you can buy. I'm kidding. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.