Career Lessons From Connor McGregor

“My name is Connor McGregor, and I live in Lucan. I’m a professional MMA fighter with a record of four and one. I’m an up and coming fighter, and without a doubt, you will see me in UFC in the near future.”
– Connor McGregor in 2010

Six years ago, Connor Mcgregor was fighting in a small promotion in Ireland. He went to battle in front of small town audiences that didn’t know who he was and didn’t care who he would become. No one expected him to become the greatest fighter of his generation. No one except him.

Six years later he is the first two-division champion in UFC history and according to many the greatest ever.

Connor is an extremely skilled fighter, but it his marketing skill that makes him a great inspiration for your career. Connor separates himself from other fighters and from great athletes in other sports with his ability to tell his own story and to create a compelling narrative about himself. He exercises a power that all of us could have, but only a few choose to use. He turns his life into a compelling narrative and makes us believers.

You can apply the tactics Connor uses in whatever domain you’re in. Because your career has a lot more in common with a UFC fighter than you think.

What separates Connor McGregor from Steph Curry?

Like McGregor, Stephen Curry is an inspiring example of greatness. He is performing on a level above from his peers. He was an underdog who worked relentlessly to become the greatest in the game. Overcoming his lack of physical gifts to become great is a message that should inspire all of us. 

But there is a important difference between McGregor and Curry. The media tells Steph’s story; Connor tells his own story.

Steph is an employee for a team in the NBA. He has followed the conventional path to success in basketball. Do well in high school and get noticed by recruiters. Do well in college and get noticed by scouts. Get drafted. Practice, practice, practice and demonstrate your skill in games.

It is an incredibly difficult path to follow, but it is well defined and fairly straightforward.

School and college lead us into the false belief that there is a similar conventional path to success in your career. Get good grades, go to a good school, get noticed by a good company.

There is an attractive simplicity to the success we see in most sports. Dedicate yourself to improving and everything else will be taken care of. We long for a world where we can hide from the discomfort of marketing ourselves.

But that is not the way a career happens. Your career will not be scouted. Your career won’t be in a league with a fixed set of rules and teams, and there won’t be stats geeks on the internet yelling about how you are undervalued. Your career will be very hard to quantify from the outside. You will need to communicate your own narrative, you will need to tell a story. You will need to market your career, like Connor McGregor.

Getting into the top in the UFC is complicated. The UFC doesn’t have a fixed schedule. There are no playoffs; there are not 82 games a year to prove your worth. There’s aren’t analytics and there isn’t a limit on the quantity of your competition.

Kicking ass is important, but so is selling tickets.

That is why CM Punk can fight in the UFC.

A lot of fighters resist this reality. They take to the internet to complain about the matchmaking. They say that the sport is dying because fighters who sell tickets move up faster. They deny the reality that you need fighting and marketing skill to succeed in the UFC. You can’t rely on your ability to win.

Connor McGregor did not hide from this reality. He embraced it and used it to his advantage.

When he was early in his career, he would tell his story to anyone who would listen.

Connor told his story to everyone who would listen. He was going to be the greatest of all time. He was going to be the lightweight champion. He even told you how he would win his fights. He created his narrative and made you interested in him. He made you pay attention to him. He made you tune in to see if he could do it.

Many ambitious young people draw career inspiration from basketball, football, or baseball players. They inspire us to work hard, but they reinforce a story that underestimates the importance of marketing for personal success. The NBA is much more of a meritocracy than the UFC. You have a fixed 82 games a year to prove your worth. In the UFC you have three fights a year of your healthy. With three bad match-ups, your career will be over before it starts.

You can reach your prime years seven fights into your career. You don’t have hundreds of games to slowly catch the attention of the masses.

In your career, your employer’s completion does not get to watch you on tv. They don’t have advanced stats need to tell them how much value you are creating. You have to get their attention and tell them yourself.

You are responsible for telling your story. You are responsible for proving it.

Telling your story creates an expectation in people’s minds. It creates a framework that observers fill with evidence. It allows confirmation bias to work in your favor. It allows you to rise much more quickly.

But most of us grow up with a fear of not being modest. We are afraid of what other people will think if we are brash or overconfident. We censor ourselves and kill our potential for greatness in order to fit in.

We imagine that we need divine intervention, a message from God, or a spiritual or psychedelic vision to tell us our purpose. But the reality is you just need to pick something.

A good way to think about choosing your story’s objective is to think about how you choose what you want to eat for dinner. How do you choose what to eat for dinner? You eat what you feel like eating, that isn’t too hard to get. You recognize that there are many options, but also many things that will serve your needs. You don’t spend days mulling over the options. You pick something because you realize that if you don’t you’ll starve.

You end up on HR, or accounting, or law because you’re afraid to pick one of the many things you would rather be doing.

Telling your story does not confine you to one narrative.

You can be Frodo today and Neo next year. Your story will change. And that’s okay because the fear of being humiliated by changing your story is not in line with reality.

We imagine everyone judging us whenever our ambitions switch but, in reality, spectators aren’t paying that much attention.

As spectators, we easily accept narrative changes. We have no problem watching as the Rock becomes Hollywoods highest paid actor, or as Ronald Regan turned himself into the politician and eventual president.

You just need to pick something. Try out a story. See how it fits. See how it works for you.

Different stories will provoke different responses and serve different audiences. Once you decide what you want, you can pick a story that will help you get it. You can pick a story that makes others interested in you and what you’re doing.

That’s why I can be a professional podcaster at a travel industry conference. And a professional traveler at a podcast meetup.