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while most of the examples in this book are about elite athletes, it’s the mind-sets of those athletes that allow them to dominate, not their physical skills.
you can’t keep improving if you fear others will disapprove of what you’re doing.
in order to be successful, to truly have what you want in your life, you must stop waiting be told what to do and how to do it.
Everything you need to be great is already inside you. All your ambitions and secrets, your darkest dreams . . . they’re waiting for you to just let go.
It’s time to stop listening to what everyone else says about you, telling you what to do, how to act, how you should feel. Let them judge you by your results, and nothing else; it’s none of their business how you get where you’re going.
That’s how you become unstoppable—by placing no limits on yourself.
trust who you already are, and get to that Zone where you can shut out all the noise, all the negativity and fear and distractions and lies, and achieve whatever you want, in whatever you do.
if you want to be unstoppable, you have to face who you really are and make it work for you, not against you.
“In order to have what you really want, you must first be who you really are.”
If you want to be great, deliver the unexpected. If you want to be the best, deliver a miracle.
A Cleaner’s attitude can be summed up in three words: I own this.
Those who reach this level of excellence don’t coast on their talent. They’re completely focused on taking responsibility and taking charge,
Every accomplishment is just a stepping-stone to the next challenge; as soon as they’ve hit their target, they’re already stalking their next conquest.
A true Cleaner never tells you what he’s doing or what he’s planning. You find out after the job is complete.
Cleaners have a dark side, and a zone you can’t enter. They get what they want, but they pay for it in solitude.
Cleaners understand they don’t have to love the work to be successful; they just have to be relentless about achieving it, and everything else in between is a diversion and a distraction from the ultimate prize.
True Cleaners don’t care about the bling and the showy lifestyle; they look at the bottom line. All that matters is the end result, not the instant gratification along the way.
those who talk don’t know, and those who know don’t talk.
Physical dominance can make you great. Mental dominance is what ultimately makes you unstoppable.
The true measure of an individual is determined by what you can’t measure—the intangibles.
Your body is a business you have to take care of, or the business goes away,
crave the result so intensely that the work is irrelevant.
For all the time we spend working on our careers and talents—going to school, building a business, making money, training the body—it’s ultimately your mental focus and concentration, your ability to control your environment and the heartbeats of others, that determines whether you succeed or fail.
And the only way for him to get it back is if (a) something major and catastrophic happens to jolt him back there, or (b) he’s so unapologetic about what happened that he doesn’t care what anyone thinks or how it looks.
ways. If I’m trying to get you there, sometimes I’ll try old music that brings back childhood memories or feelings, songs you may not have heard for ten years,
I don’t use the new stuff that gets you hyped up. I want you cool and relaxed,
You’re not thinking, because thinking turns your thoughts on to everything, and the Zone is about the opposite, turning your thoughts off to everything except the task at hand.
Again: emotions make you weak. The fastest way to tumble out of the Zone is to allow emotions to drive your actions.
Emotions pull your focus and reveal that you’ve lost control, and ultimately they destroy your performance.
Everything you need is already inside you. You are completely wired with instincts and reflexes specifically designed so you can survive and succeed. You don’t have to think about using them, they’re always working.
And most people who claim to have killer instinct rarely do, because when you have that kind of power, you don’t talk about it. You don’t think about it. You just use it.
When you become too focused on what’s going on around you, you lose touch with what’s going on deep inside you.
Like all Cleaners, he didn’t study the competition, he made the competition study him.
That’s a Cleaner. When you look inside, you see what’s real.
A Closer thinks about what he wants; a Cleaner feels it. A Closer tells his heart what he wants the outcome to be; a Cleaner’s heart decides on its own, he never has to think about it.
But being conventional is for those content to be ordinary, and ordinary isn’t going to take you to the top.
Staying safe means being limited, and you can’t be limited if you’re going to be relentless.
that kind of energy simply can’t survive in the light. It completely loses its power, unless you’re willing to stand up and say, “Yeah, so what?” and go right on doing whatever you were doing. That’s how you keep your dark side dark.
Cleaner Law: control your dark side, don’t let it control you.
But being relentless means constantly working for that result, not just when drama is on the line. Clutch is about the last minute. Relentless is about every minute.
Cleaners never feel external pressure; they only believe what’s inside them.
confidence means recognizing something isn’t working and having the flexibility and knowledge to make adjustments; cockiness is the inability to admit when something isn’t working, and repeating the same mistakes over and over because you stubbornly can’t admit you’re wrong.
That’s the trademark of a dangerous competitor: he doesn’t have to know what’s coming because whatever you show him, he’s ready. No fear of failure.
You want to know a true sign of a Cleaner? He feels no pressure when he screws up and has no problem admitting when he’s wrong and shouldering the blame:
As soon as you start giving me reasons and rationalizations, I know you have something to hide, and you’re not ready to take ownership.
Once you start blaming others, you’re admitting you had no control over the situation. And without that control, you can’t create a solution.
When you’re confident, you don’t care about what others think; you can take your mistakes seriously but still laugh because you know you can and will do better.
if you want to be the best, you never have the luxury of shrugging off a bad performance. You face it, fix it, and prepare to do better next time.
But during the game, while he was in that Zone, it was all about taking control, staying cool, and getting that end result.
A great leader knows the best way to get people to raise their performance is to put them where they can truly excel,
