From Clubhouse to Conference Room: How Professional Baseball Prepared Me for a Business Career
Lessons on feedback, teamwork, and staying hyper-focused from former San Francisco Giants player Jeff Burke
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This month marks two years since I received the news that would change my life: The San Francisco Giants were releasing me as a player. Read: I was fired. This was the end of a dream I’d been pursuing my entire life.
In terms of my career, I was back at zero. Imagine going from the top 1% of your craft to a brand-new starting line with no direction. To illustrate just how lost I was, my first post-baseball venture was working on a cattle ranch in Montana. After shoveling manure and getting tossed off my horse for two weeks straight, it was pretty obvious that being a cowboy was not my next step.
Eventually, I returned to San Francisco to start a very different kind of career: I spent 11 months at Cisco, then pivoted to management consulting at the Boston Consulting Group.
As I look back at the past two years, I’ve come to realize that baseball prepared me far better for my new life than I ever could have anticipated. While the list of lessons I’ve taken from my time with the Giants is extensive, there are three core concepts that I will forever thank baseball for teaching me.
Focus on the process
Results aren’t guaranteed. In many instances, they’re simply out of your control. Long-term success requires consistent dedication to what you can control: the process.
This means being hyper-focused on menial daily tasks and staying positive in the midst of strenuous circumstances. In my baseball career, I endured everything from a monotonous, 12-month recovery from Tommy John surgery to being stuck on a Greyhound bus for 10-plus hours each week in blazing hot Georgia in August. These were external variables that I had no influence over, so I had to focus on what was within my realm of responsibility: my mindset, my interactions with my teammates, and my willingness…
