Exclusive Insight: Join us in this nine.com.au series as we engage with some of Australia’s most brilliant entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs to uncover what drives them and the invaluable advice they offer to newcomers in the business world.

At just 20 years old, Grant Hackett clinched his first gold medal at the Sydney Olympics.

Over his Olympic tenure, he amassed another gold, along with three silver and two bronze medals, before swapping his swimwear for a career in finance following his retirement from swimming in 2008.

Currently, he leads as the chief executive of Generation Development Group, with accomplishments that now extend well beyond his youthful aquatic successes.

Here are the keys to his remarkable success.

How do you start the day to set yourself up for success?

I always wake up at the same time, normally 5.15am every morning. The only time I don’t do that is on the weekends, that’s where I get my extra bit of recovery. I noticed that in my swimming career, when my sleep periods were different it just made me flat, so consistency of wake-up time is really important.

I have a series of drinks that I have, probably just because of my previous career. I’ve got a longevity mix, creatine, glutamine, amino acids … and I have that pre-made the night before so I don’t have to think about it in the morning, because I’m not a morning person.

Even though everyone thinks I should be because my former career, I hate early mornings, so I have to make it as easy as possible. I’ve also got a protein shake that’s already set up, I have a water bottle, I’m really quite strict on all of that stuff.

I’ll usually do a 45-minute workout in the morning and then the last thing I do after getting ready is always have breakfast with the kids. I’m not the person who tries to get to the office at 7am and get everything done, because I have really young kids and I always try to have breakfast with them.

That’s my time at the table with them on weekdays and I feel quite sad when I don’t get that time before I leave for work.

What are three daily habits you always stick to?

What I always do when I finish my work day is write a ‘to do’ list before I leave, which will be my first things to tick off the next day. I find that, for me, is an important way to disconnect from the office when I leave. If I don’t do that, I’ll leave being too analytical about everything else I’ve got to do and I won’t slow down. That, for what I call the corporate athlete, is really important because if you don’t get all those little things right like winding down, sleeping well, your cognitive capacity is just not as good.

I also always leave 15 minutes between meetings, because a lot of the time meetings go over and I want to give myself enough time to prepare mentally for the objectives of the next meeting. I don’t like meetings for meetings’ sake. I like to be really clear on what we’re doing there, what we’re trying to achieve, and what the actions are. So I always give myself 15 minutes in between each of those, and I always want an agenda for every meeting that I have too.

The other thing that I’m really, really conscious of as chief executive of a pretty large business is that your energy matters. Even if I’m having a rough day, like all of us do every now and again, I’m always very, very self-aware that the energy I bring in can really set the tone for a lot of other people. So I say good morning and make eye contact and ask how people’s weekends were, because that stuff actually matters. It sounds like small talk but it’s not, it’s setting the energy and tone in the business.

Lots of Aussies are looking for a career change — what small action can help them get ahead of other candidates?

Develop relationships with people in a field that you’re interested in, or at the very least people who are successful like serial entrepreneurs, because they will give you ideas and insights. I love it when someone comes to me and says, ‘this is what I’m thinking about doing, I’d love your advice’, or ‘I’d love some help’.

And be willing to start at the bottom rung of the ladder. Be really, really willing to eat humble pie and start again.

I got day two into finance, this is going back nearly 20 years, and I could win World Championships and Olympics and break world records but I wasn’t even the best at the table [in finance]. As soon as I realised that I was like, ‘what do I need to do to get to the next level?’. I could have given up. I could have just gone and done talking gigs or other bits and pieces to generate income. I didn’t need to be in a completely new field. But I was at the bottom rung of the ladder and recognised what I needed to do to get up that ladder, to get to a position that I feel really proud of. And as soon as you recognise that, you move up surprisingly quick.

What financial myth do you wish you never bought into?

In my teenage mind, when I started trading [stocks], I thought there was going to be two or three stocks that would be huge. I just thought, surely you pick a few winners and all of a sudden it’s going to be worth millions of dollars.

That was probably the myth that was broken very, very quickly for me when I burned some cash on the dot com boom/bust. I realised pretty quick that there’s no one stock that is a get rich quick scheme.

There are no shortcuts in anything I’ve done that’s had some sort of success attributed to it, whether it’s financial success, or in sport, or in business. You’ve got to be willing to do the hard work and maybe look like an overnight success eventually. But even the things that look like they grow quick, they’re still really, really hard.

What do you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?

There’s a few things that I probably couldn’t put in this!

I would tell myself that when things are going really well, and you feel like you’re winning, and life’s good, it never lasts. So enjoy it, but recognise that nothing ever stays there.

And it’s true for the opposite; when it hits the fan and things go really, really bad, and you feel like you’re getting nowhere in life, and you’ve hit rock bottom … it’s never that bad. There’s always an opportunity, and you can always get back to where you want to be if you’re willing to do the work.

I think if I could tell 20-year-old self that I would have saved myself years of anxiety and ups and downs. But my 20 year-old-self thought he knew everything.

It’s so funny, I remember I said my 20s that nothing could go wrong. Everything went right, I felt like life was easy. My 30s were the exact opposite – divorce, missing my kids, bad publicity. And then my 40s are when you actually start to get life … it’s a really nice stage of life.