The torch of preparation
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
I will prepare and some day my chance will come.
All things are ready, if our mind be so.
The key is not the will to win… everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.
I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.
A champion always prepares to win.
Prepare your mind to receive the best that life has to offer.
The (Complete) Formula for Getting Lucky: Preparation (personal growth) + Attitude (belief/mindset) + Opportunity (a good thing coming your way) + Action (doing something about it) = Luck
I have noticed that the Universe loves Gratitude. The more Grateful you are, the more goodies you get.
What you focus on expands.
What we do, and how well we control our attention in the service of our goals, becomes part of the environment that we help create and that in turn influences us. This mutual influence shapes who and what we become, from our physical and mental health to the quality and length of our life.
The greatest discovery you'll ever make, is the potential of your own mind.
People only see what they are prepared to see.
The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.
The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.
The only real limitation on your abilities is the level of your desires. If you want it badly enough, there are no limits on what you can achieve.
If the mind is disciplined, the heart turns quickly from fear to love.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections.
Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised.
You must get comfortable with eliminating things in your life that are getting in the way of clarity and focus.
You need to go beyond hacks and quick fixes, and instead develop practices.
If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
It’s not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.
Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.
Practice that’s spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility. But these benefits come at a price: when practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied, it requires more effort. You feel the increased effort, but not the benefits the effort produces. Learning feels slower from this kind of practice, and you don’t get the rapid improvements and affirmations you’re accustomed to seeing from massed practice.
The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.
In the end, mastery involves discovering the most resonant information and integrating it so deeply and fully it disappears and allows us to fly free.
Preparation is obviously important, but at some point, you must stop preparing content and start preparing mind-set. You have to shift from what you’ll say to how you’ll say it.
The farmer has patience and trusts the process. He just has the faith and deep understanding that through his daily efforts, the harvest will come. And then one day, almost out of nowhere, it does.
Like it or not, we are constantly forced to juggle tasks and battle unwanted distractions—to truly set ourselves apart, we must learn to be creative amidst chaos.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
I determine to render more and better service, each day, than I am being paid to render. Those that reach the top are the ones who are not content with doing only what is required of them.
Today I will do what others won’t so tomorrow I can do what others can’t.
As an elite athlete, there are only five things that you can truly control -- your training, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and mindset. If it doesn't fall into one of those categories, I tell my athletes, forget about it. Control the things you can control, and ignore everything else.
The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.
It’s hard to be your own coach, but not impossible. The key thing is to set up structures that provide you with objective feedback—and to not be so blind that you can’t take that feedback and use it.
Build up potential energy, so that unexpected opportunities can be amplified.
It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an amateur at many different things.
The biggest lie ever is that practice makes perfect. Not true—practice makes you better.
If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, then someday you can do the things you want do when you want to do them.
One is not born wise; one becomes it.
I have also come to understand that although some people are naturally happier than others, their happiness is still vulnerable and incomplete, and that achieving durable happiness as a way of being is a skill. It requires sustained effort in training the mind and developing a set of human qualities, such as inner peace, mindfulness, and altruistic love.
The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment, it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone.
Progress is a natural result of staying focused on the process of doing anything.
Everything in life worth achieving requires practice. In fact, life itself is nothing more than one long practice session, an endless effort of refining our motions. When the proper mechanics of practice are understood, the task of learning something new becomes a stress-free experience of joy and calmness, a process which settles all areas in your life and promotes proper perspective on all of life’s difficulties.
A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis.
You can make a million mistakes, just not the same one twice.
It’s hard to stay motivated when you’re confused. When you simplify your life, it gathers focus. The more you can focus your life, the more motivated it gets.
Groucho Marx once said he found television very educational. “Every time someone turns it on,” he said, “I go in the other room to read a book.”
The extraordinary dedication of the young Mozart, under the guidance of his father, is perhaps most powerfully articulated by Michael Howe, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, in his book Genius Explained. He estimates that Mozart had clocked up an eye-watering 3,500 hours of practice even before his sixth birthday.
“Care less about results. Care more about putting in the work. Care less about problems. Care more about making progress despite them. Or if you must fix something, focus on the solution. Care less about what other people think. Care more about who you want to be and what you want to do. Care less about doing it right. Care more about doing it at all. Care less about failure. Care more about success. Care less about timing. Care more about the task. In general, the idea behind imperfectionism is to not care so much about conditions or results, and care more about what you can do right now to move forward with your identity and your life.”
Mental toughness is the ability to focus on and execute solutions, especially in the face of adversity.
Do not let anything interrupt those tasks that are most critical for growth in the important areas of your life. Find a way, no matter what, to prioritize your daily process goals, even when you have a viable excuse to justify not doing it.
Why do so many of us succumb to fear? Because it’s more convenient and more comfortable for us to let our dreams disappear than to muster up the discipline and the work ethic to go out and transform them into reality.
More than anything else, expertise tracks with hours invested.
What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool headedness. This he can get only by practice.
I fixed the ball, I took a deep breath and then I concentrated on the technical gesture that I train every day.
Discipline. It means doing what you have to do when you need to do it, whether you want to or not.
Learn from the past. Prepare for the future. Perform in the present.
Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course: the space between your ears.
Talent is never enough. With few exceptions the best players are the hardest workers.
The reason most of us fail to achieve real and sustainable change in our lives is because we focus too much on the desired outcome and not enough on the progress we are making.
A champion always prepares to win.
I’ve learned that possibly the greatest detractor from high performance is fear: fear that you are not prepared, fear that you are in over your head, fear that you are not worthy, and ultimately, fear of failure. If you can eliminate that fear—not through arrogance or just wishing difficulties away, but through hard work and preparation—you will put yourself in an incredibly powerful position to take on the challenges you face.
It's about us getting ready to play. It's not about the other team. We'll beat ourselves before they beat us. That's always our approach.
The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.
You need to recognize when you’re making a choice that requires willpower; otherwise, the brain always defaults to what is easiest.
Meditation is not about getting rid of all your thoughts; it’s learning not to get so lost in them that you forget what your goal is. Don’t worry if your focus isn’t perfect when meditating. Just practice coming back to the breath, again and again.
The noise of urgency creates the illusion of importance.
The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower.
Deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.
Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training.
Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training.
Generally, the quality of our performance is a function of the intensity of our focus.
If you want to trigger flow, the challenge should be 4 percent greater than the skills.
A child without discipline is a child without love.
Most people still don't think of qualities like happiness as being a skill, that can be enhanced through training.
Mindfulness is a form of mental activity that trains the mind to become aware of awareness itself and to pay attention to one’s own intention.
The man who has a favorite restaurant but not a favorite author. He’s picked out a favorite place to feed his body, but he doesn’t have a favorite place to feed his mind!
And I learned a valuable lesson: success is not something you pursue. Success is something you attract because of the person you become. What you pursue usually eludes you like the butterfly you can’t quite catch. But if you want to be successful, you must attract success by developing the skills and the appropriate mind-set. What you learn about the marketplace and its goods and services… that’s what’s valuable. The key to getting paid very well in the marketplace is to develop very valuable skills.
Elite performers work hard in preparation and easy in competition.
In order to have mental consistency, you must find the optimal mental thought that yields the best opportunity to have a successful performance and repeat that thought process every single time.
Elite performers focus on the process. Others focus on the outcome.
As Aristotle wrote a long, long time ago, and I'm paraphrasing here, the goal is to avoid mediocrity by being prepared to try something and either failing miserably or triumphing grandly. Mediocrity is not about failing, and it's the opposite of doing. Mediocrity, in other words, is about not trying. The reason is achingly simple, and I know you've heard it a thousand times before: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
One of the lessons I learned in all those years of practicing karate is that progress only comes in small, incremental portions. Nobody becomes great overnight. Nobody crams information if he wants to be able to use it over the long term.
He who stops being better stops being good.
If you think you’re already perfect, then you never will be.
Concentrate on what will produce the results rather than on the results, the process rather than the prize.
Why do you want a new truth when you do not practice what you already know? Far better to read a few books and make them your own than to read many books quickly and superficially.
Attention can be trained very naturally, with affection, just as you train a puppy. When something distracts your attention, you say “Come back” and bring it back again. With a lot of training, you can teach your mind to come running back to you when you call, just like a friendly pup.
We expect professional and financial success to require time and effort. Why do we take success in our relationships for granted? Why should we expect harmony to come naturally just because we are in love?
Surely education has no meaning unless it helps you understand the vast experience of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid?
Intellect helps us to see the best means and manner of doing the right thing.
In life you will face a lot of Circuses. You will pay for your failures. But, if you persevere, if you let those failures teach you and strengthen you, then you will be prepared to handle life’s toughest moments.
Pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance, and beautiful silence.
Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.
Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.
Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It's about seeing things in a new way. When people...change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework. Their commitment is to growth, and growth take plenty of time, effort, and mutual support.
People may start with different temperaments and different aptitudes, but it is clear that experience, training, and personal effort take them the rest of the way.
You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.
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