How Champions Think: In Sports and in Life

by Bob Rotella

Still, I wish a lot more players would stop being “realistic” when they dream. I believe that if Jack had won twenty-five majors and Tiger had set out to surpass him, Tiger would have twenty by now. That’s the nature of goals and dreams.

In sports or in business, if you’re not aspiring to dominate, to be the very best, you’re coasting. And you can only coast in one direction.

It’s a big advantage to aim high. When you aim high, you have a chance to be great. Even your failures will be better than most people’s best.

But when he was young and playing well, Sam said, it was a different story. In those days, as I’ve said, he’d lie in bed and replay his round in his mind as if he were watching it on television. But when he came to a shot he’d mishit, he would revise the tape he was playing in his mind. He’d erase the bad shot and envision himself making a good one. He’d fall asleep thinking only of good shots, and he would wake up the next morning feeling refreshed and confident.

Perfectionists are an extreme example of this destructive tendency. It’s hard to argue with the perfectionist’s intentions. He has high standards. He works hard. He wants to do everything well—so well that it’s perfect. And, of course, he falls short. There’s a fine line between trying diligently and being a perfectionist. But it’s important to understand the difference between diligence and perfectionism and to stay on the diligent side of the line.

He knows—and I hope I helped him learn—that how an individual responds to the things that happen to him is more important than the actual happenings. An exceptional individual expects that at least occasionally, he’ll lose, whether it’s a basketball game, a golf tournament, or a business account. He takes pride not in never having setbacks but in how he responds to setbacks.

In this case, the exceptional person is the one who can accept the vagaries of the improvement process, keep working at it, and be patient. Most people don’t have this kind of patience. They get too frustrated to stick with an improvement program if they don’t get immediate results. They might give up and accept the idea that their short game will always frustrate them.

To borrow an analogy from chemistry, enthusiasm acts like a catalyst that makes all the other attributes of a champion’s mind work better. Persistence, to take one important example, is so much easier when you’re enthused about what you’re doing. Sticking with something you love is like biking downhill. Sticking with something you don’t love is like biking uphill.

The honest competitor understands that while luck affects outcomes, it doesn’t affect effort. So he learns to take his pleasure from the daily grind. He understands that life is sometimes going to break his heart. He may work as hard as he possibly can and still not get the promotion or the sale.