Jan Veselý success story

Jan Veselý spent the majority of his hockey career playing for Sparta Prague. He tried out for the A-team for a few games, but ultimately did not make it into the squad. However, he transformed his work with discipline, pressure, nervousness, the defeat factor and teammates into business and he still uses what he learned in the locker room today. According to him, team sports cultivate great qualities that can be used in both personal and professional spheres. Today, Jan works for the electronics giant Samsung.

How do you remember your hockey career?

Hockey has been a part of my life since I was a child and in a way it still is. I have been playing for Sparta since the fifth grade. The highlight was seven games for the A-team in the 2011 season. After this season came the summer training under coach Jandač, when I believed that I would work my way into the squad steadily for the next season, but that didn't happen. A teammate broke my finger and after the injury I went to play in the lower league in Beroun. My head played a big role at that time and I admit that I couldn't handle it mentally.

What happened?

I played there with guys who were on the edge of the Extraliga, but they had worse discipline than I was used to in hockey. While after the summer training I felt in great shape and in the first games for Beroun I did whatever I wanted on the ice, with a bit of exaggeration, within a few months my performance went down sharply. I didn't feel the competitive environment as much and unfortunately I let myself get pulled down. Then my head followed, my mind started to sink and maybe that's why I never made it to the Extraliga again.

What happened next?

I played for Litoměřice, in Písek, and the joy of the game was getting less and less. For one season, I returned to the Spartan junior team, as their oldest player at the time. I returned there as if I were part of the family and I was excited again for a while, but there was no further way up. The next stint in Prostějov opened my eyes. I was played with much older teammates who did not have such comfortable lives as the extra league stars. At the age of twenty-three, we lived there in a dormitory, two of us, earning less than twenty thousand a month and eating sausages for dinner. I definitely did not want to live such a life as an adult. Thanks to my dad, who always supported me with hockey to the fullest, I managed to get to Kladno for a while, but when it didn't work out there either, I gave up on the idea of ​​a professional career.

What were the first career steps?

In Beroun, I washed cars for rich players on the golf course. It was my first job after hockey, and it also worked great as motivation. But at the time, I was going to college, at FTVS at Charles University.

‍

More teammates studies back then right?

We had a very specific class, a lot of smart guys who studied at that time and have now made it far in business. David Puna graduated from medicine, Jiří Chára is a lawyer, Robert Sovík studied at an American university and now heads an organization that helps Czech athletes get scholarships at American universities, and Štefan Kutlák, for example, works for Microsoft today. So I have to say that even those of us who didn't end up in professional hockey have achieved great things elsewhere.

Did you graduate?

Ultimately, no, that last year in Prostějov was logistically challenging. Then I flirted with going back to university a few times, because I still think that a degree has a certain weight before a name in our society, but now I'm moving on with my life. I'm doing well at work, I had a child, and I don't have enough time to study anymore.

‍

Were you tempted to try studying abroad, like your teammate Robert Sovík did?

We had a very similar story with Rob, he had eight starts for the A team, I had seven. But I actually admire him a lot. He was always focused on the West, sometimes he would bring a pointed ball to the gym instead of a round one and enthusiastically shout: “Let's try American football”. Even as a high school student, he knew English perfectly and it was obvious that he would probably go in that direction. I was actually worse with my English and I wanted to try for the A team at Sparta after that season.

What were the next steps after car washing?

A friend recommended a job at TNT. Of course, I knew nothing about logistics, but he told me to give it a try, mainly because of the great manager from whom I would learn a lot. So I sent my CV to three positions and in the end it worked out, I became a member of the sales team. I worked there for a year on the phone and another five years in the field. TNT merged with FedEx, it was great for me to be part of a multinational brand that everyone knows. Three years ago, a good friend was leaving his position at Samsung and recommended me as a replacement. So now I've been working for Samsung for three years.

What's your responsibility?

I lead a sales team, I come up with activities for operators to sell our brand and phones through them.

How can you compare preparing for a hockey game and preparing for a phone call with a potential client?

Well, I used to be quite nervous in hockey and would regularly throw up before important games. As was the case in several films, I simply had one helmet for playing and the other for throwing up (laughs). Today, when I have a meeting with a client, I look forward to it, I love my job. Of course, it wasn't like that at the beginning. I dialed the first number for about a minute before I nervously typed it into the phone and pressed the green button. But you learn everything and I can work with nervousness now, I give lectures to about fifty people several times a year. It's strange how a person changes over time. I never thought I would work with people and speak in front of them, I considered myself an introvert for a long time, but today I really enjoy this aspect of my job.

What from the hockey cabin helped you in your professional career and do you still use it today?

Certainly teamwork and authority. A person who has played any team sport will realize more quickly in the office that he is not alone here, but that he is part of the team he works for. In hockey, there was the figure of the coach who had authority and always somehow guided me, directed me and tried to put the pieces of the team together so that a collective goal could be achieved. And it is the same at work. I see that people who are not sportsmen today often have a problem accepting someone else's opinion or looking at things from a team perspective. A lot of individuals do not want to become team players. That is simply the way it is, but a good boss can work with such players in a way that ultimately has a positive impact on the entire team.

Losing is a common theme in sports, but also in your personal life. For you, it could have been rejection from your first potential customers. How did losing hockey games prepare you for losing in everyday life?

I always took losing as motivation. They say that the more you hear “no”, the more you want to hear “yes”. From the beginning I kept a table of who I called and why they hung up on me and after a while I tried again and again. One loss never made me give up and that is exactly what hockey taught me. Losses are part of sport and life, sometimes they just happen, they are part of the whole journey. But the important thing is to keep trying and most importantly not to give up.

You certainly have non-athletes on your team. Have you encountered situations where one of your colleagues acted in a similar way?

Non-athletes have to learn this “art of losing” through practice. It happened that we were sitting at a round table discussing strategy and the manager told a colleague that he didn’t like one of the proposed solutions. He got angry and offered to quit for an hour. We looked at him incomprehensibly and I told him why he didn’t delete the slide and put another one in its place, instead of theatrically claiming a position in a dream job like that. None of us likes losing. We were eliminated in the semifinals in our best junior season. Sure, we were sorry, we were madly angry, but we were determined to try again next year and we wouldn’t even think of quitting.

Another topic that crosses over from sports to business is pressure. They say that there is always a lot of pressure on Sparta specifically because it is the most famous club and is expected to win. It is probably similar at Samsung, isn't it?

Sure, at some points it was felt already in the junior team, it's the same at Samsung. Here, selling premium phones comes first. When things aren't going well, it's felt in the company. Samsung is a Korean company where people are mainly focused on results, so if we don't meet our goals, we can all meet here on Saturday and work on correction and a new strategy. At Sparta, I was in the first defensive pair, big results were expected of us, I was very visible. When I compare it now, I'm not so visible at Samsung, so the pressure is a little less now.