Episode 08: Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness

Hello and welcome to Episode 8 featuring the New York Times Bestseller Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness by Tim Grover.

Tim is the person who has seen “Winning in all its glorious generosity and all its excruciating cruelty.” As the trainer for Michael Jordan, late Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade, and numerous other athletes that rave about his rituals, techniques and mindset, his book shows an intense picture of what it takes to navigate the roadblocks and obstacles that threaten the path to Winning.

In more ways than one, his book cuts out hard work, commitment, teamwork, leadership, and other generic tenets of Winning (considered as prerequisites for achieving any progress). Instead, it offers 13 chapters in total, all numbered as #1, that deconstruct the winning mentality.

“Because winning is so much more… uncivilized, hard, nasty, unpolished, dirty, rough, unforgiving, unapologetic, uninhibited.”  

My first takeaway from the book is about learning How to think.
Since culturally, we are taught what to think. “In school, you’re tested after you learn. In life, the test comes before you learn.” Consequentially, with a traditional school of thought, one thinks like everyone else and starts to act like everyone else and follow the same protocols, traditions, and habits like everyone else and eventually becomes like everyone else.

Learning how to think, brazenly helps create a personal belief system, an unwavering curiosity that manufactures “ideas and thoughts to answer questions and create solutions when others don’t even understand the issues.”

An illustrious example of the same in the book is when he made Michael Jordan work out on game days!
As a graduate in Kinesiology, he says, “None of my college professors ever advised me to take the greatest athlete who played, have him train on game days, and give him a steak a few hours before tip-off.”

In a similar vein, no one teaches you to stop. Stopping allows you to learn. Adapt. Focus. Calculate. Strategize. It puts your mind back in control and gets your feelings in check. Everyone tells you to do more. But more isn’t always better. We often confuse movement with progress, since when did busy being busy lead to more wins?

“How did sleep deprivation become a symbol of ambition? When did “rest” become the equivalent of “lazy”? How did “so busy” become a symbol of importance?” which brings me to my second takeaway,

Create your nonnegotiables - the things you- and only you- can control. For example: the food you eat, the effort you commit, the words you speak and the results you deliver

“Why? Because Winning doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t care about how you worked or your extenuating circumstances. It wants you to get back in line and figure it out. Put the work in. And above all, stop listening to everyone who tells you what to think. If they knew, they’d all be winners.”

My final takeaway is to ensure that your mind remains stronger than your feelings.

Ideally, that enables one to create controlled rage, to be calm and aggressive at the same time.The greatest partners and allies are already inside you, Tim says, and they’re talking to you all the time. They’re your dark side/ greatest power. Like Kobe Bryant had a dark side, that was so big it required its own personality: the Black Mamba.

According to Tim, “Deep inside you, there’s an undeniable force driving your actions, the part of you that refuses to be ordinary, the piece that stays raw and untamed. Not just instinct, but killer instinct. And you don’t care how it comes across to others, because you know this is who you are, and you wouldn’t change if you could…”

This brings us to the end of this episode and like always ending with some words to live by,

“The way you talk about Winning has everything to do with whether you’ll achieve it… and keep it.”

Thank you for reading through this episode of Metamorphosis, catch you soon in the next!