JohnA Passaro's Blog, page 22
December 9, 2019
Goals Are Made in the Sunshine and Carried Out in the Rain
Goal setting is made in the sunshine and carried out in the rain.
Whether it is in setting a goal for wrestling or in life, a lot of times you will be given an option on whether you want to defer doing the work or plowing through adverse conditions.
When you plow through adverse conditions – it is a differentiator.
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December 8, 2019
Your Nights Must Be Friends With Your Days
No man, for any considerable period,
Can wear one face to himself
And another to the multitude,
Without finally getting bewildered
As to which may be the true.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
Harmony between one’s life on the mat and off the mat is a key determining factor for continued success.
The ironic part is the more successful one is on the mat, the greater the distance they put between themselves and their competition, the bigger the tendency it is for them to utilize their time in contrast to the way they did which created their success.
We all know the fairytale of “The Tortoise and the Hare.”
The Tortoise could never imagine the Hare ever catching up to him; he was faster, more talented, he worked harder.
Until he didn’t.
When the Tortoise stopped working and started utilizing his time in contrast to the way in which he did when he acquired his lead, he opened the door for the Hare’s victory.
****
“Nothing good happens after midnight.”
How many times have you heard that in your life?
Midnight is the hypothetical line in the sand that identifies where your focus is.
What you focus on will get amplified by the attention you pay it.
If your day ends with hard work and it is important for you to put in another hard-working day tomorrow, then your focus must be on the time before midnight.
Once your focus starts becoming on the time after midnight, you are now sharing the focus reserved to build greatness with all the things that go against you from obtaining greatness.
And you start to drift from living in harmony to living in conflict.
Once conflict occurs, chaos ensues.
It is much easier to stay disciplined than it is to get discipline back into your life again.
Imagine you are in a boat with nine other rowers.
You start with all ten rowers all rowing in the same direction.
There is harmony.
The speed is fast, the pace is quick, you are each motivating each other, and there is a feeling of synchronicity. You make each other better.
Now imagine if out of the blue one rower starts to row in the opposite direction.
Conflict occurs.
At first, the force and momentum of the nine rowers still rowing in the same direction is too much for the one rower rowing in the opposite direction to overcome.
But slowly but surely there will be resentment from the nine rowers who are doing all the work toward the one who is now going against what they want to accomplish.
Now imagine if that one rower starts talking some of the other nine rowers into joining him.
And after comparing the hard work they are doing to the perceived fun it would be to rebel, they join him.
And before you know it that once harmonious boat is now in chaos, five rowers are now rowing in opposite directions.
The boat has come to a halt and is not going anywhere.
Eventually, more rowers will join the other side, and the original direction will now be redirected and outweighed by rowers rowing in the wrong direction.
And the boat will start to give up ground.
****
In life, having discipline is good.
It maintains harmony.
It eliminates conflict.
Remember, “If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”
Your Nights Must Be Friends
With Your Days
is a chapter from
Which can be purchased at
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Don’t Let Defeat be Victorious
Sometimes losing the battle
Helps you find a way to win the war.
There is a difference between
Losing and being beaten.
Between resting and quitting.
Between having a setback and becoming discouraged.
Between having failed and being a failure.
The difference is the former is used to fuel future success,
and the latter drains the fuel and ends your dream.
In every loss, there is a learn.
In every rest, there is a restart.
In every setback, there is a comeback.
In every failed attempt, there is the winning adjustment.
Use temporary defeat to fuel your future success.
Don’t Let Defeat Be Victorious
is a chapter from
Which can be purchased at
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December 6, 2019
December 5, 2019
Thoughts From Opening Night
Thoughts from opening night.
The combination of football playoffs overlapping with the start of the wrestling season and December duals with wrestlers not at their postseason weights is a recipe for forfeits. Needs to be corrected. Football playoffs should be completed before the wrestling season starts. And there should only be 1 weight throughout the season. No need for December weights and +2 come the Holidays as the system was designed for a growth allowance and is and always has been used to allow a wrestler to wrestle at a lower weight class as the season goes on, thus being counterproductive to its intentions. While we are at it we probably should eliminate morning weigh-ins.
It’s great to sit in a high school gym and see new talent blossoming. There are some unranked guys who with slight adjustments can make a big impact this year.
So many points can be eliminated with a great stance. A great defense is the first step to winning championships. A great stance is a foundation for a great defense. You can see a wrestler make an adjustment to his stance mid-match and see how impactful it is to the outcome of the match.
You can tell a wrestler’s confidence level by watching their first step of the match. Almost every wrestler’s first step is slightly back. Subconsciously it’s a sign of a lack of confidence. Actually, that is the wrong wording as I believe confidence is acquired, thus it is a sign that confidence has not been acquired as of yet. A wrestler on a mission to a championship season almost always has a first step forward with an attack.
There is a different intensity when brothers cheer for each other Matside. Sayville has 3 Lopresti brothers in their lineup. Fun to watch them root for each other.
High school should incorporate college back points. Not only would it change the game but it would also make it consistent between levels and prepare HS wrestlers for the next level.
Getting out from the bottom within 10 seconds is an indicator of postseason success and is vital to being an elite wrestler.
Attacking and getting takedowns within 10 seconds of each whistle win matches going away.
80% of this sport is mental. The other 20% is loving to compete, and you can’t teach that. You can teach a competitor how to wrestle, it is much harder, if not impossible to teach a person how to compete. That’s inbred and when a wrestler has a competitive spirit their upside is far greater than a more fundamentally sound wrestler without a competitive spirit. When you have a guy who loves to fight, you have something that will be much greater in the future than he is today. I call these types of wrestlers dough wrestlers, given time, they continue to rise. The technique can be taught, a competitive spirit can not.
Great to have the season starting up again.
Do you have a wrestler in your life that you need to get a holiday gift for?
www.johnapassarostore.com
December 4, 2019
Hard Work Wins
It is the start of the wrestling season and the first rankings of the year have just been released.
And you are not ranked.
What do you do?
Are you really going to let someone else’s opinion of you matter more than your opinion of yourself?
Here is what you do.
Ignore the noise.
Hard work wins.
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December 3, 2019
My Philosophy is to Attack
I love listening to motivational talks after wrestling practice.
I want to start a new series on this page
Motivational Wrestling Talks
Send me a video clip from any motivational talk by your
club or high school coach and I will upload them to my Youtube channel and publish them on this page.
Send the videos to johnapassaro@icloud.com
They should be up to 4 minutes in length.
I will choose the most inspirational and motivational videos and post them here.
Here is one from my archives by Mike Patrovich in 2010.
I apologize for the video quality but this was before cell phone cameras. Lol
__________
Don’t forget to subscribe to JohnA Passaro’s
Wrestling with Life Youtube Channel and ring the bell to be notified on all Motivational Wrestling talks.
Please email me on all blog posts by JohnA Passaro
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November 30, 2019
Be Humble or Be Ready To Be Humbled
There ain’t been a horse that can’t be rode.
Nor a cowboy
Who can’t be throwed.
An old Texas saying
My favorite photo is one of two wrestlers embracing in the
center of the circle after a grueling match.
Both are sweaty and tired.
One is victorious; the other is not.
The victorious wrestler is cupping the head of the other
wrestler with his hand bringing it down to lay on his shoulder.
The other wrestler is in tears.
Not baby tears, but the tears one sheds when one is
physically exhausted after given everything they had and still have been cruelly
shown defeat instead of victory.
What makes this photo my favorite photo is the compassion
the victorious wrestler shows the other.
What I haven’t told you is that I know both wrestlers in the
photo.
I watched both develop and grow over the years.
I watched both push each other to their limits in club
practice, where they were workout partners.
Now they are meeting in the postseason.
And only one wrestler can advance to the postseason.
The compassion the victorious wrestler shows in the photo comes
from knowing how it feels to be on the other side of victory after dedicating
your life and fully expecting to be on the right side.
The compassion seethes from the photo as one can see the victorious
wrestler has a conflicted look.
A look of heartache that he was the one who ended the other
wrestlers’ dream combined with a conflicted look of “thank you.”
“Thank you for being my rival.”
“Thank you for pushing me to the point where I have realized
my dream.”
“Thank you for being a great competitor.”
“Thank you for bringing out the best in me.”
There is another look the victorious wrestler has in the
photo.
A look that says,
“I wish we both could experience victory, that we could both
advance, both go to states, but today is my turn. Keep the faith. I know you
will use this loss to one day have your day too, that I am certain of.”
There is a mutual respect that wrestlers have for each
other.
They understand the sacrifice.
They understand the lifestyle.
One of the greatest attributes a wrestler can have is humility to his opponent after victory over him.
****
In the long run, a loss that makes you humble will be more beneficial to you than a win that makes you arrogant.
This sport is the most humbling in the world.
You can do everything right; give everything you have and
still not achieve what you set out to achieve.
An injury, a bad call, one second on
either side of a takedown on the line, getting a cold at the wrong time of the
year can all affect the outcome of any match at any time.
And it only takes one bad match for
your dream to evaporate.
Knowing you have no control over at
least 10% of the stuff that happens creates an understanding of the vulnerability
that every wrestler must live and come to terms with.
Even elite wrestlers.
Humble wrestlers understand that the
difference between victory and an off-season of mental torture is so small.
They too may have experienced being
so close to victory in this sport only to have their heart ripped from their
chest.
And they remember that feeling.
And they wouldn’t want anyone they
respect ever to have to experience that feeling.
That is compassion.
Compassion is the greatest part of
humility.
There have been times where I have
seen wrestlers take the opposite approach.
Being brash, trash-talking to their
opponents after victory, degrading them after beating them.
Only to have their opponents use
that disrespected feeling as fuel to train to come back and beat them in a more
important spot.
Life is the same way.
Just exchange being humble with
being grateful.
When one is grateful for their life,
the people in it, their surroundings they give off an aura of blessing and attraction.
When one compares their life to
others, they give off a sense of dissatisfaction.
And the Universe senses that.
Always be humble.
It exudes gratitude.
And gratitude is the path to love.
And love is the greatest victory of
all.
Be Humble or Be Ready to be Humbled is a chapter from
November 23, 2019
Natural Talent Without Work, Time and Grit, Will Go Unfulfilled
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Without effort
Your talent is nothing more than
Unmet potential.
Without effort
Your skill is nothing more than
What you could have done
But didn’t.
Angela Duckworth
Grit
Natural Talent + Work + Time + Grit = Success
Natural talent is only one part of the formula for success.
Natural talent needs to be teamed up with work, time, and grit to be successful.
Natural Talent – Work – Time – Grit = Regret
Natural talent alone is inadequate for continued success.
As Herb Brooks said, “You do not have enough talent to win with talent alone.”
By itself, natural talent will do more harm than good as one will tend to over-rely on such talent,
which will make one extremely vulnerable.
When natural talent is teamed up with passion,
a tenacious work effort, and mental toughness,
it becomes part of an unbeatable winning formula.
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There are no shortcuts to excellence.
Talent is only one part of the equation.
It is the most mishandled, dangerous part.
Reliance on natural talent alone is an attempt not to do the work necessary, not to put in the time required, and not to experience the pain that turns natural talent into skill.
The more naturally talented one is, the less one believes hard work has had as much to do with honing their craft as it has.
Talent needs grit to thrive long term.
Talent without grit will prove fruitless and go unfulfilled.
Grit is a combination of passion and perseverance.
It is toughness and tenacity tied together.
It is a high-level effort exerted over long periods.
The reverse is also true.
The less naturally talented you are, the more you rely on hard work to hone your craft.
In actuality, the real talent is the ability to put the hard work in over time and to grit it out during the hard times.
There will reach a point where the hard work, time, and grit can turn negligible natural talent into skill.
Skill soon surpasses natural talent because skill continues to get better while natural talent without hard work, time, and grit, withers.
Work ethic is often the naturally talented athlete’s Achilles Heel.
In Greek Mythology it was forecasted that Achilles would die young.
So, his mother took him down to the river Styx, which was thought to have magical powers of invulnerability.
She dipped him in the river holding him by his heel.
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Achilles went on to become a warrior and survived many battles.
Achilles’ life seemed invulnerable.
Until he died when a poisonous arrow hit him in his only vulnerable place.
His heel.
There is not an athlete alive that has been completely dipped in the river of invincibility.
Every athlete has a vulnerability.
Never over-rely solely on your natural talent,
or you will take a potential asset and make it your vulnerability; your Achilles Heel.
Remember behind every champion is a combination of natural talent, acquired skill, passion, hard work, and perseverance.
Success is never easy.
Even when it seems like it comes naturally for some, don’t be fooled.
If you peeled back the layers to their success, you would find a whole lot of grit there as well.
As Angela Duckworth said,
“Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they become.”
Without hard work, time, and grit natural talent will go unfulfilled.
Natural Talent Without Work, Time and Grit, Will Go Unfulfilled
Is an excerpt from:
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November 20, 2019
Walt Whitman Speech 2019
In 2018 the Walt Whitman High School wrestling team lost their coach Vin Altebrando to a rare auto-immune disease.
He was 51.
Here is a speech I gave at Walt Whitman HS this spring communicating that Wrestling is More Than a Sport It is a Lifestyle.
A Lifestyle that will provide you with the tools to beat your greatest opponent – LIFE.
