What makes championship effort? David Epstein in this book The Sports Gene wrote that success depended on chromosomes. In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell wrote that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. Now Bob Rotella in his book, How Champions Think, writes that mental habits and attitudes are central to success.
The preeminent sports psychologist has impressive pupils: LeBron James, Tom Kite, Richard Petty, Greg Maddux, Jimmie Johnson, Jim Furyk; Olympic gold medalists and NCAA champions; successful basketball and baseball teams; and non-sport individuals and companies.
Rotella credits Jordan Speith’s mental game as the force behind his runaway 2015 Masters victory. Speith focuses on what he can do not what his competitors are doing; considers his performance more important than his score or his standing; and doesn’t force things.
He praises John Wooden, Vince Lombardi and John Calipari for insisting that maximum effort trumps outcome, debunking the “winning is everything” myth. During the 2014-15 Kentucky basketball team’s 38-1 season Calipari focused on day-by-day preeminent performance, never mentioned winning or losing. Vince Lombardi taught his players, “that sustaining a commitment to personal excellence over a lifetime would separate them from other people and make them exceptional.”
Rotella’s advice is good for anyone who wants to cultivate championship effort:
- Believe in your talent. (I like that phrase. It’s better than be optimistic and confident.)
- Do visualization exercises in the same way as you practice your bunker shot or your sales presentation.
- Forget failures. Don’t allow yourself to ruminate over defeats and mistakes. Shrug them off. Move on.
- Commit to hard work. Practice sweat prevents showtime blood.
- Love the great days more than you hate the good days. Love winning more than you hate losing. Focusing on winning produces endorphins; concentrating on losing produces cortisol, a stress hormone.
- Immerse yourself in the process, not the final goal. Enjoy the journey and you’ll have a blessed arrival.
- Underreact to everything. Anger, frustration, worry and doubt saps energy.
- Be patient with yourself. Excellence takes time.
- Be impatient with those who set limits on you. Each of us can do more than any of those who doubt us. Double effort drowns doubt.
- Surround yourself with positive people.
- Luck effects outcome but not effort. Prepare yourself to be lucky.
- Love what you do and do what you love. Love is forever victorious.
- Know the why. Don’t do something unless you know why you are doing it. Genetics and 10,000 hours of practice are mere ciphers. Why is everything.