I am an active professional handball player and an entrepreneur. It was only after I started building a company in AI video production that I realized how similar professional sport and entrepreneurship actually are. Discipline, competition, analysis, teamwork and the constant need to prove yourself are part of my everyday life in both worlds. These are five rules I live by on the handball court and now apply to business as well.
1. If You Don’t Invest in Yourself, You Fall Behind
In professional sport, I quickly realized that training alone is nowhere near enough. If I want to be better than the competition, I have to constantly invest in myself. I invest in nutrition, recovery, quality sleep, sports psychology, match analysis and technology that helps me monitor my recovery. All of this costs money, and nobody can guarantee that it will lead to a better contract or a higher save percentage. But I know that without it, competing with the best in the long term becomes much harder. I approach AI video production in exactly the same way. Every month I invest in AI tools, new software, courses and new AI video models, and I dedicate a huge amount of time to learning. My latest major investment was a new computer. Again, there is no guarantee that every investment will pay off immediately. But AI video production is developing so quickly that if I stop learning, I will simply fall behind while others keep improving. In sport and in business, I follow the same rule. The best investment I can make is an investment in myself.
2. Routine Beats Motivation
In professional sport, you quickly learn that motivation is overrated. There are days when you do not feel like training. You are tired, your body hurts and you would rather stay at home. But that is not a reason to skip training. This is my job. Just as most people wake up and go to work, I go to training. I do not do it because I am motivated every single day. I do it because over the years I have built a system. Motivation comes and goes. The system stays. I think exactly the same way about business. Do I feel like creating new AI videos every day? No. Am I full of great ideas every day? Definitely not. Do I always feel like contacting potential clients? Honestly, no. But I have a system. If I contact around ten potential clients every day, that is roughly three hundred contacts in a month. If ten people respond and only two of them become clients, the system has done its job. That is not motivation. That is mathematics. And there is something else. I am a bad loser. I hate losing. When someone does not reply or rejects me, it does not destroy my motivation. It wakes up that Balkan stubbornness in me. Not because I need to prove something to someone else, but because I want to become better. A better video. A better approach. Better communication. A better version of myself. In the long run, the most motivated people do not necessarily win. The people who do the work even when they do not feel like doing it do.
3. I Study the Best, Not to Copy Them, but to Understand Them
Them When I watch a handball match, I do not watch it like a fan. As a goalkeeper, I watch other goalkeepers. How they position themselves, how they move, how they react to different shots, how they communicate with their defence and why they made a certain decision in a certain situation. I am not only interested in the save. I want to understand why the save happened. Today, I look at the best AI videos and AI video productions in the world in exactly the same way. I do not watch them because I want to copy them. I try to understand how a particular shot was created, how the story was structured, why a transition worked, which AI tools might have been used and how I could take a similar idea even further. AI video production is still an extremely young field, and every month brings new possibilities. The moment you believe you already know everything is the moment you stop improving. That is true in sport, and it is just as true in artificial intelligence.
4. Competition Is Not the Enemy
A goalkeeper never trains alone. You always work alongside another goalkeeper. I have been fortunate throughout most of my career to have goalkeeper partners who pushed me to become better. When you have a great goalkeeper next to you, you have to raise your level. Not because you hate your competition, but because their quality forces you to improve. That is why I have also connected with several Slovenian creators working in AI video production. Today, we have a group where we help each other, exchange ideas and share knowledge. Some people might say I am helping my competition. I see it completely differently. I know how many hours I have invested in learning AI video production, and I know how many more I will invest in the future. I am not afraid of competition. I am much more interested in what I can learn from someone who is better than me at something. In handball, the team wins in the end, not the individual. I see AI video production in the same way. One person can create an excellent AI video, but I believe large and serious projects require a team of people with different skills. That is why I do not want to build walls. I would rather build relationships. Connecting with others has already helped us on several projects, and I have much bigger plans for the future. Without the right team, I will not achieve them.
5. Sport Doesn’t Care About What You Did Yesterday, and Neither Does Business
Neither Does Business Professional sport taught me one thing very quickly. Past success does not mean much when the next game begins. What matters most is your latest performance. In sport, you cannot live off how well you played a year ago or how successful your previous season was. If you perform badly in your last few matches, then right now, you are performing badly. That is the harsh reality of professional sport. Most contracts in professional sport are one or two years long, sometimes three. That means you have to prove yourself again almost every season and earn your next contract. You cannot live on past achievements. Every training session, every match and every season is another opportunity to prove yourself. I think exactly the same way about AI video production. We can create three incredible AI videos, but if the fourth one is bad, there is a good chance we lose the client. Nobody will spend much time talking about how great the previous three were. They will remember the last one. That is why I never want to become satisfied with what we created yesterday. My goal is for every new project to be better than the one before it. AI video production is developing incredibly fast, which means we have to develop with it. Something that looked groundbreaking six months ago might already look average today. Professional sport works the
same way. Past results can open the door for you, but they cannot play the next match for you. In both worlds, you are ultimately only as good as your last performance.