Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable (Tim Grover Winning Series)

by Tim S. Grover

You don’t wait to be told, you don’t waver from your goal. When it’s time to act, you act, instinctively and without hesitation. As you will read in these pages: Done. Next.

The ability to be relentless is in all of us.

If you want to be unstoppable, you’ve got to make the commitment.

To be clear: one great performance—or even a great season—doesn’t make you a Cleaner; you’re supposed to play well, that’s your responsibility. It’s the ability to repeat that result over and over, season after season, never satisfied, never letting up, that makes someone truly relentless.

Your goals, your decisions, your commitment. If you can’t see the end result, how can anyone else see it for you?

Tell yourself what to do, and stop waiting for others to lay it all out.

You just need to share their relentless drive for the end result. And let nothing stand in your way of achieving it.

Believe this: 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.

Being relentless means demanding more of yourself than anyone else could ever demand of you, knowing that every time you stop, you can still do more. You must do more.

From this point, your strategy is to make everyone else get on your level; you’re not going down to theirs. You’re not competing with anyone else, ever again. They’re going to have to compete with you. From now on, the end result is all that matters.

We never saw obstacles or problems, we only saw situations in need of solutions.

“In order to have what you really want, you must first be who you really are.”

Being relentless means never being satisfied. It means creating new goals every time you reach your personal best. If you’re good, it means you don’t stop until you’re great. If you’re great, it means you fight until you’re unstoppable. It means becoming a Cleaner.

Greatness makes you a legend; being the best makes you an icon. 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.

Cleaners don’t do it for show, they don’t go through the motions. A true Cleaner never tells you what he’s doing or what he’s planning. You find out after the job is complete.

Why do I call them Cleaners? Because they take responsibility for everything. When something goes wrong, they don’t blame others because they never really count on anyone else to get the job done in the first place. They just clean up the mess and move on.

Cleaners are rule-breakers when they have to be; they only care about the end result.

Failure is never an option; even if it takes years, he’ll find a way to turn a bad situation to his benefit, and he won’t stop until he succeeds.

Cleaners are willing to die trying. They don’t worry about hitting the ceiling or the floor. There is no ceiling. There’s no floor either.

If you’re trying to be a Cleaner in business, you’ll probably sacrifice your personal relationships.

Cleaners sacrifice the rest to get what they want the most.

if you want to be the very best of the best, it’s the details that make the difference.

So just for my own thinking, I devised a three-tiered system that I’ve never shared with anyone prior to writing this book, categorizing different types of competitors: Coolers, Closers, and Cleaners. Good, Great, and Unstoppable.

A Cooler is careful; he waits to be told what to do, watches to see what everyone else is doing, and then follows the leader.

A Closer can handle a lot of pressure; he’ll get the job done if you put him in the right situation and tell him exactly what you need him to do.

A Cleaner is rarely understood, and he likes it that way.

The Closer can win the game if given the opportunity, but the Cleaner creates the opportunity. The Closer can be the star, but the Cleaner maneuvered him into the job. Cleaners never need a kick in the ass. Everyone else does. Good, Great, Unstoppable.

Physical dominance can make you great. Mental dominance is what ultimately makes you unstoppable.

When I train my athletes, it’s a dictatorship with three rules: show up, work hard, and listen.

Do. The. Work. Every day, you have to do something you don’t want to do. Every day. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push past the apathy and laziness and fear.

Cleaners do the hardest things first, just to show there’s no task too big.

Yes, I know it’s uncomfortable. I’m not telling you to love it. I’m telling you to crave the result so intensely that the work is irrelevant.

Bottom line if you want success of any kind: you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

You control your body, it does not control you. You shut out the fear and emotion and physical stress and you do the thing you dread. You don’t go through the motions and watch the clock until it’s over. You invest in what you started, pushing yourself again and again beyond where you’ve already been.

The work is about testing yourself and preparing all your options, so when you’re performing, there’s nothing to think about. Do the work before you need it, so you know what you’re capable of doing when everyone else hits that panic button and looks at you.

Comfortable makes you good. We’re going for unstoppable, and there’s a price to pay for that.

Ask yourself where you are now, and where you want to be instead. Ask yourself what you’re willing to do to get there. Then make a plan to get there. Act on it.

With Cleaners, there’s no off-switch. They’re always on.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable, or find another place to fail.

Truth: when you’re finally able to let go and be who you really are, that’s what puts you in the Zone, and only then can you control your fear and inhibition.

If he ever felt anything negative, he never showed it. That’s a Cleaner.

A Cleaner is never going to stand up in front waving a towel; he’s down at the end, alone, focused and unemotional.

There’s an incredible physical response that’s not about the music. It’s just an instinct.

emotions make you weak. Again: emotions make you weak.

When you feel rage, you lash out. When you lash out, you’re usually irrational because you’re acting out of impulse, not reason. Now you’re out of control and you’ve lost all sense of what you’re supposed to be doing.

Energy instead of emotion. Big difference.

Because the minute you start telling yourself and everyone else, “Whoa, big game tomorrow, don’t mess with me,” you’ve become emotional. That’s the worst thing you can do.

As the lights get brighter and the place gets hotter, you should be feeling darker and cooler, pulling deeper inside yourself. This is your Zone, all instinct; you can feel your way in the dark while others have to see and hear and watch what everyone else is doing.

Most people are the lion in the cage. Safe, tame, predictable, waiting for something to happen. But for humans, the cage isn’t made of glass and steel bars; it’s made of bad advice and low self-esteem and bullshit rules and tortured thinking about what you can’t do or what you’re supposed to do. It’s molded around you by a lifetime of overthinking and overanalyzing and worrying about what could go wrong. Stay in the cage long enough, you forget those basic instincts.