Successful people spend more time working hard than in a comfortable place, and no matter what you do or who you are, this is what achieving big takes. Why is it so difficult to break the best performers in the world? the Jordans, Djokovics, Bryants, and Bradys? because they have been broken and torn to pieces endlessly way before you saw them succeed. The world-class type of contender faces hardship and adversity countless times before they set foot in the arena. Their training becomes the battleground where they meet pain, suffering, doubt, mental and emotional collapse, reality checks, physical limitations’ awareness, growth, and the blueprint to bounce back from defeat. This process of self-knowledge and self-development is what they breathe, eat, and sleep until they’ve automated ferocity and emotional-balanced response to any type of crisis. That’s the reality of their preparation. When the time comes that they must respond to adversity, they are so habituated to it that it becomes natural to be in a relentless mindset ready to go, if they’re not struggling at something, they feel like they’re stagnating, not growing. It’s like their readiness to face adversity has always been there, just waiting for hardship to come up, and when it happens they don’t seem to be taken aback, on the contrary, they seem like they knew when and how this was going to happen.
Strong preparation creates self-assurance, when you have put the time into it, you anticipate the conflict, and you’re engaged and looking forward to it because you know that you are ready for the fight. You don’t avoid struggle, you stare back at fear, and you don’t shy away from uncertainty and defeat. High achievers don’t face hardship with the mentality to ‘hopefully’ be good enough to put up a good fight, they jump at it to impose themselves on it, they aim to overpower the environment because they have grown to believe that they can do it; there is no shrinking back, no fear of possible consequences, or calculations of failure. By the time you see high performers winning championships, they have already paid the price to get there, they have formed a vision that differs from the average mind. But most people don’t see that, most people don’t even have the slightest idea of what a regular day of training looks like for this kind of person. When you don’t know the years of hellish training that high achievers must go through to get to where they are, it’s easy to minimize their triumphs.
