What Wrestling Taught Me About Accountability

by Chef Stefano, CEO & Co-Founder of MightyMeals

When people ask what shaped me as a leader, they usually expect me to talk about the restaurant business.

That's a big part of it.

But one of the most important influences came from somewhere else entirely: wrestling.

I wrestled growing up in Burke, Virginia, at Lake Braddock. At the time, I didn't think of it as leadership training.

I do now.

There's Nobody to Hide Behind

In a lot of team sports, responsibility gets spread around. If you have a bad game, someone else can make up for it.

Wrestling doesn't work that way.

When you step on the mat, it's you and one other person. If you didn't prepare, everyone can see it. If you get tired in the third period, there's no one to sub in.

The result is yours.

That kind of ownership is uncomfortable. It's also one of the most valuable things you can learn early.

It also takes away a lot of the noise. When you know the result is on you, you stop spending energy on things you can't control. You focus on what you can: how hard you train, how well you prepare and how you respond when things go wrong.

Years later, as a CEO, I've found the same thing to be true. The decisions stop with you. You can share credit, and you should. But you don't get to hand off the responsibility.

The Match Is Won Before It Starts

Wrestling taught me that most of the work happens where nobody is watching.

The conditioning. The drilling. The discipline around food and training. By the time you're on the mat, the outcome has mostly been decided by everything you did beforehand.

That idea has followed me everywhere.

In a kitchen, it's prep before service. In a company, it's the systems and planning that make a hard week manageable instead of chaotic.

People see the results. They rarely see the preparation.

But the preparation is where the results come from.

Food Was Part of the Training

This might sound funny coming from someone who runs a meal company, but wrestling was the first time I really understood how much food affects performance.

What you ate, when you ate and how consistent you were showed up directly in how you felt and how you competed.

That interest in the connection between food and performance stayed with me. It led me to fitness, then to cooking meals for people at the gym, and eventually to starting MightyMeals.

I didn't know it at the time, but that was the beginning of the business.

Losing Teaches More Than Winning

Every wrestler loses. That's part of the sport.

What matters is what you do next. You can blame the ref, or you can go back and figure out what you need to fix.

I've made my share of mistakes building a company. The ones that hurt the most were also the ones I learned the most from.

Wrestling gave me a way to think about that early: a loss is information. It's only wasted if you don't use it.

The same goes for a team. When a project misses or a launch doesn't land, the worst thing a company can do is move on as quickly as possible. The best thing is to sit down, look honestly at what happened and make the adjustment before the next match.

Accountability Builds Trust

The thing I value most from those years is a simple belief: own the outcome.

When leaders take responsibility, teams relax. They know nobody is going to get thrown under the bus. They're more willing to speak up, take smart risks and admit when something isn't working.

That's the kind of culture I want at MightyMeals.

It starts with leaders who are willing to step on the mat themselves.

What's a sport or activity from your younger years that still shapes how you lead today?