How Champions Think: In Sports and in Life

by Bob Rotella

Optimism is often an act of faith, a belief in something that cannot be proven. Padraig had it. Anyone can have it.

“People tend to become what they think about themselves.”

enough to see that we are each the biggest influence on our own destiny. More importantly, he understood that we each have the power to construct our own self-image and that the self-image we construct will very likely determine what we become in life.

Confidence is essential to patient, sustained effort, and patient, sustained effort is what leads to success.

He just kept looking for a way to win with what he had.

They weren’t looking for Hogan’s suggestion that there was a time to decide that their swings were good enough and to go out and play confident golf.

As William James would have predicted, they become what they think about themselves. They think they’re good at math and science, so they are.

But Cal, in contrast to his younger self, now realizes that it’s the process that’s most important, not the results.

Learned effectiveness flows from the character traits we’ve been talking about—optimism, confidence, respect for your own talent, persistence, and commitment.

thinking about technique is not something you want to do during a performance process.

He makes a great pass to give a teammate an open layup. The teammate misses the layup. The good point guard doesn’t scowl or pout. He gives the guy who missed the layup a high five as they get back on defense; his body language promises there will be other open looks, other layups, and different outcomes.

“Will anyone ever catch Nokia?”

Patience is not something one buys, owns, and has forevermore. It can be ephemeral.

But the reality is that many tournaments, especially majors, are not won in legendary fashion. They’re won by guys who play a solid two or three under par on Sunday and let the field back up.

The problem is that while all good teachers believe in certain fundamentals, they all like to tweak the details and they all present those fundamentals in different ways. So a player can subject himself to a barrage of apparently contradictory advice. With different, conflicting ideas flitting through his mind, a player gets worse instead of better. It’s easy to get lost.

Athletes have to develop a filter that tunes out nearly all of this.

I would advise such a kid to stay in school and get good grades so that if he eventually decides to try another path, he’d have options open.

I use the quotations around the term because I don’t really believe in burnout. I think people who say they’ve burned out have in fact chosen to have a negative attitude.

I know that’s hard for a young golfer today. There’s so much information available to players. They see new statistical analyses of their games every day. They see their swings on video all the time. A lot of them have a device called the TrackMan that sits on the range next to them and delivers twenty-six “data points” about every swing they make. They can know the launch angle, clubhead speed, and spin rate of every shot they hit. The chimera of a perfect, powerful, repeating golf swing seems to hover at the end of the range.

He kept the game very simple. He stayed with the swing he learned from Jack Grout for his entire competitive career. I believe that’s a big reason he won major titles well into his forties.

success validates technique.

There’s a happy medium between listening to everyone and taking all the advice you’re offered, and listening to no one and stubbornly hanging on to the same flawed techniques and habits. It’s a subtle sweet spot, but it’s one that champions seem able to find.

The exceptional person, the person who does great things, doesn’t see things that way. The exceptional person has a vision—of great performances, of a great career, of a great something—and doesn’t care about what others might say or think. He ignores information that suggests his dream is unrealistic. He just sets about making that vision a reality. He sees things before others see them. He creates his own reality. Afterward, other people may say to him, “We knew you could do it. We always sensed you were going to be one of the great ones.” But that’s probably not what he heard in the beginning. In the beginning, he probably heard, “You have to be crazy to think you can do that.”

Back when she was still Stefani Germanotta, she used to walk down the street thinking of herself as a star. She certainly didn’t pay any attention to what people in her childhood neighborhood might have thought was a realistic aspiration for Stefani Germanotta. She created a persona for herself, and she made that persona a reality. She believes others can do the same.

The honest competitor understands that while luck affects outcomes, it doesn’t affect effort.