I’d like to be a pro-athlete. I think playing on the pro badminton tour would be pretty cool (I have played badminton since I was 4). I covered a lot of major events as a writer and thought it was pretty awesome. The travel would be cool. I am a very competitive person and I love the sport as well, so if I could make a living traveling the world playing badminton I would do it, but I don’t want it bad enough to do the things necessary to achieve that. A lot of people are like that about all of their dreams. It would be nice, but their not interested in the work required. This brings me to another point, people want success so they can take it easy.
The idea that success will allow you to relax or retire completely is in my opinion one of the greatest barriers to people achieving success in anything. The mindset goes something like this “I will build up this amazing business, make a whole bunch of money, and then I’ll take it easy”. If you work hard for success so that you can take it easy, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful. You become used to hard work, so your tolerance goes up. Things aren’t so hard anymore. So you shouldn’t be working hard so you can take it easy, you should be working hard so that what you used to think was hard work, is now easy for you. Now don’t confuse working hard with mindless inefficiency, that’s being mentally lazy, or if you want another analogy that’s like someone who’s a workhorse in a sport, but refuses to work on their technique (cause it’s hard for them!).
I know that Donald Trump once said that the time he ran into the most difficulties with his business was when he sat back and rested on his success thinking that he didn’t need to work hard anymore. Big mistake. The more success you have the more you have to lose. This attitude is of course entirely applicable to sports. Do you think now that Raphael Nadal has made it to the top of tennis, and Tiger Woods is dominating golf, that either of them are slacking at all? Of course not, they are working harder than ever because otherwise the rest of the field is going to catch up with them.
You need to have a hunger, an insatiable appetite for whatever your idea of success is. If you’re not obsessed with achieving your goal someone else out there is, and they’ll beat you to the punch. My attitude is that there are thousands of other people out there all vying for the same things that I want, and so long as I work harder than they do, and I want it more, there is little that they can do to stop me. This of course means that you are the only person you really need to compete with, your inner loser who is going to be whispering in your ear that you have done enough, that you can finish later, or you’ll do more next time. It’s now or never. Life balance is important too, but that’s something that we can address in other posts.