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Kindle Notes & Highlights
In between my Hughes fights, my fear delivered one of the great lessons of my life: that someone without fear can’t push himself. He can’t get better. He can’t transform negatives into positives. He can’t open his world to creativity and invention, or progress.
Instead of seeing fear as an opportunity, they use words like problem or crisis. They’re always talking about bad stuff they’re “going through” and how hard it is to just get by. I don’t see the use in this kind of mental discouragement. There are so many people out there who want to bring others down, that I don’t need “friends” to make it worse. I want my friends to help me look at possibility.
His greatest ability is his perseverance. There’s an understanding we have between us that results and success come from one place: hard work. We agree with Holmes. We think it’s fair: you get back what you put in. People can cheat or rob you of almost any possession, but hard work belongs to you, and you alone. Georges knows that better than anyone I’ve ever known or heard of. So Georges’s work ethic is his greatest gift.
Just remember this: you’re only as strong as your weakest link.
The key to effective visualization is to create the most detailed, clear and vivid a picture to focus on as possible. The more vivid the visualization, the more likely, and quickly, you are to begin attracting the things that help you achieve what you want to get done.
It’s really not easy. On top of doing all these things, you have to stay positive and ignore the negative things that can happen. You have to let go of the obstacles that can bring you down, because you have no control over them. A lot of people waste energy worrying about the things they can’t control—that energy can be better used! I read somewhere that sometimes it’s easier to start at the end and play the story backward—it helps you get rid of the obstacles because the whole story starts with your goal being achieved.
The key was the Firas rule of capacity. I find this is a really important lesson for young athletes, and it has to do with learning how to lose. Just because someone beat you badly the first time doesn’t mean history will repeat itself. Any piece of history is made up from a collection of actions, of factors that play a role in the final verdict. After a great defeat, we ask ourselves: What could I have done better? We don’t ask ourselves: How could I have been stronger? We do this because the reason we lose is rarely ever physical.
On a certain day, we shifted the focus from half-full and half-empty to something totally different. We started talking about capacity. We simplified the statement and took the interpretation out of it. We realized that the glass is at half its capacity, neither full nor empty. And what happened is that we started to manage risk practically, by looking at the facts instead of listening to people’s fears and emotions. We looked at Serra’s real strengths and real weaknesses, and we were honest about them.
The only way to ever truly get your confidence and swagger back, I’ve learned, is to fight for them.
Fear likes to become one of your habits. Like being scared of dogs. Let’s say you were bitten by a dog when you were a kid, so as a result it’s normal to be afraid of dogs. That’s what the brain tells your body every time you see a dog. Do most dogs bite people? No. But you can’t expect your brain to see things that way, because the fear is telling it that dogs bite, which is based on a fact. The problem is that it’s just one fact from one single occasion a long time ago. Fear doesn’t study history or frequency. It cares only for itself. Over time, you’ll get better at two things:
Luckily, although the wrestlers are the kings of mixed martial arts, there is one advantage for the generalist: all fights start standing up. The wrestler needs to get close enough to you to bring you down to his strength, and that’s not always easy.
The big lesson here is this one: fight his weaknesses and avoid his strengths.
I have to make my training harder and more challenging than my next fight. The reason, quite simply, is to create extreme conditions to ensure that I’m ready for anything.
I have a friend who has a great idea about training. He says, “You don’t get better on the days when you feel like going. You get better on the days when you don’t want to go, but you go anyway.” This makes a lot of sense. It’s easy to go and train when you feel like it. Your body and your mind are in sync and they deliver because it feels so natural. But when your body is telling you it doesn’t want to go because it’s in pain or it’s tired, or when your mind is trying to convince you to go out drinking with friends or stay home and watch TV, this means trouble. But—and it’s a big but—if you
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The next logical step of the process is confidence. When you understand how to piece the key elements of your training together, you become all-powerful in your mind. This kind of belief is inestimable and immeasurable. People who believe in themselves can accomplish almost anything. And one thing is for sure, they can become even more powerful—but it all begins with the attitude.
you’ll see it ties to the Socratic method: give me a premise that you believe in, and I will cross-examine you. You’ll say you know something, and I’ll cross-examine your conclusion. In the end, if there’s any contradiction, your premise becomes invalid. It means that if my line of thinking is wrong, my conclusion can’t be true.
The conclusion is that one thing never changes: my mindset must be open to improvements at all times, from all sources. This kind of cruelty, the worm and the eagle, is actually kindness. It represents short-term pain for long-term benefit.
As we’ve discussed previously, the myelin sheath is connected to the nervous system and it works like this: the more you perform a specific gesture, the better you become at memorizing and “firing up” the perfect movement without hesitation. It’s the self-invention of the human instinct.
Again, like so many things I’ve learned in my life and have tried to share in this book, the key is finding balance. The thing about balance, though, is that it’s never stagnant.
And so, what balance also taught me are the following two incredibly important lessons: 1) resting is growing and 2) waiting is training.
If I or anyone else wants to become the best at something in this millennium, none of us will get there alone.
It’s why they say that true pleasure does not exist; it’s just the temporary release from suffering. Socrates again . . .
To become champion and do what Georges does, a great part of his life is egocentric. It has to be. When to train, when and what to eat, what to do and why: these are the priorities, and they can’t ever come second. He must come first, before anything or anybody else. It’s the only way he can have any hope of reaching his goals. Georges will never tolerate someone who tries to carve out a place in his life while bringing about change that is unrelated to his greater goal. He can’t. He won’t. His goal is to become the greatest martial artist of all time. Nothing can take away from his focus.
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