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

by Tim S. Grover

If I don’t have their complete trust, nothing gets done.

The fact is, you can’t train your body—or excel at anything—before you train your mind. You can’t commit to excellence until your mind is ready to take you there.

You already have the talent; my job is to show you what you can do with all that talent so you can bust out of that cage holding you back.

Your body is a business you have to take care of, or the business goes away, and if you forget that, believe me, I will remind you.

No options. Most people have too many options, and they rarely choose the tougher one.

So I’m not giving you options. Nothing for you to think about. Let me do all the thinking for both of us.

Just show up, work hard, and listen. That’s your part of the deal. Do the work.

Do. The. Work. Every day, you have to do something you don’t want to do. Every day. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push p...

you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Every time you think you can’t, you have to do it anyway.

Any workouts involving the words easy and comfort aren’t workouts. They’re insults. You can work out at home, but if whatever you’re doing makes you feel “comfort,” something is very wrong.

HAaahha

People refuse to work out or control their diets because it’s not comfortable for them. But how comfortable can it be to drag around all that extra weight and all the physical problems that go along with it?

Challenge yourself. Don’t be afraid to be uncomfortable.

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.

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.

as soon as you allow others to push your buttons, they’ve won.

“Just searching for something to activate the Black Mamba,” he said after the game. Just finding his way back into the Zone.

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

If one thing separated Michael from every other player, it was his stunning ability to block out everything and everyone else. Nothing got to him; he was ice. No matter what else was going on—the crowds, the media,

They lose their cool confidence, they start feeling emotional, and make no mistake about this: 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.

Instead of feeling cool and prepared, you’ve lost all sense of focus. And without focus, you fail.

Emotions pull your focus and reveal that you’ve lost control, and ultimately they destroy your performance. They make you think about how you feel, and you’re not supposed to think, you’re supposed to be so well prepared that you slide into the Zone and perform with grace and purpose. Not possible if your mind is on other things.

I want you in a routine, and I don’t want that routine to vary, whether it’s a meaningless preseason exhibition or the championship game of the Finals. Do what you do every day, so you never have to account for your environment or the situation. Everything stays the same.

Your instincts become so finely tuned that you have a reflexive response that allows you to attack without thinking. In other words, you’re in the Zone.

Overthinking. Overanalyzing. That’s how you lose the natural ability that made you great in the first place.

When you become too focused on what’s going on around you, you lose touch with what’s going on deep inside you. Those are the guys who are perfect in practice, but blow it when it counts.

sure as hell wasn’t going to wait for game time to find out. His mastery of the game was so flawless it didn’t matter what was coming at him, he was ready.

Like all Cleaners, he didn’t study the competition, he made the competition study him.

The greats never stop learning. Instinct and talent without technique just makes you reckless, like a teenager driving a powerful, high-performance vehicle.

Instinct is raw clay that can be shaped into a masterpiece, if you develop skills that match your talent. That can only come from learning everything there is to know about what you do. But real learning doesn’t mean clinging to the lessons.

. but he also works relentlessly on what he learns from that video. That’s a Cleaner, not just learning but taking what you’ve learned and creating ways to improve on it.

research tells you what others have learned, instinct tells you what you have learned.

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

When you’re great, you trust your instincts. When you’re unstoppable, your instincts trust you.

Instinct is what tells you how to finish the fight. When you’re listening to a mess of external directions, you’re going to end up trying a million little things, without complete confidence that any of them will work.

There is zero chance you’ll get anywhere if you allow yourself to become paralyzed by soft excuses and countless reasons why you’ll never get to where you want to be. Trust your gut to navigate the hard road to get there.

Need this

I know conventional wisdom gives you every reason to stay out of trouble, resist temptation, and live a clean and virtuous life. But being conventional is for those content to be ordinary, and ordinary isn’t going to take you to the top.

He knew what he was doing, he knew the consequences before he did it, and he did it anyway.

Reminds me of

He could have controlled his actions if he wanted to, and he didn’t. Why? Because when you’re used to winning, you want to keep on winning at everything. That relentless drive to control the uncontrollable, to conquer everything in your path . . . that’s the dark side driving you to be who you really are. No challenge too great, too intimidating, too dangerous, because you have zero fear of failing. Zero. The satisfaction doesn’t come from the risk, it comes from mastering it. I own this.

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Staying safe means being limited, and you can’t be limited if you’re going to be relentless.

As soon as a Cleaner achieves success, and the adrenaline rush recedes, he needs more and he gets it. The high of getting that result is so great, it’s just too hard to come back to earth. He needs to devour it, over and over, always craving that taste of total and complete satisfaction. But what happens

One way or another, he’s going to be the best at something.

shouldn’t have thrown him through the first-floor window. I should have taken him to the third-floor window and finished the job from there.”

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That’s what the dark side does: it shuts down the laws of right and wrong and allows you to discover what you’re really made of, what you’re capable of doing.

Be honest: Would you be as successful if you followed all the rules and always behaved and never took chances? No, you’d be just like everyone else, scared about failing and worried about being liked.

For Cleaners, every moment is a pressure situation, and everything is always on the line.

you’re a Cleaner, you know that intense rush of needing to control something, attack something, right now. Never, ever, do you go through a day thinking, “That was relaxing.” To a Cleaner, relaxing is something weaker people do because they can’t handle pressure.

Remember, you don’t compete with anyone, you make them compete with you. You can control what you put on yourself; you can’t control what the other guy puts on you. So you focus only on the internal pressure that drives you. Run to it, embrace it, feel it, so no one else can throw more at you than you’ve already put on yourself.

Kobe never reacted, never flinched. Not once. After the game, reporters asked how he was able to not respond. His answer? “Why should I?” I don’t want to hear that someone can’t “handle pressure.” Everyone can handle pressure. Most people choose not to because it’s easier to stay safe in the comfort zone. But if you want to be successful, to have

Stress is what brings you to life. Let it motivate you, make you work harder. Use it, don’t run from it. When it makes you uncomfortable, so what? The payoff is worth it. Work through the discomfort, you’ll survive. And then go back for more.