#21 The Five Traits Behind Every Legend

Shakeel Aslam: That's Tiger Woods, the best caller alive, who won the Masters by 12 shots, he felt nothing. At 11, he'd entered 33 tournaments and won all 33. Instead of focusing on just one athlete, I'm gonna look across four because I've read four of their books. And that's Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, Usain Bolt, Sugar Ray Leonard. That's four different sports. And the reason why I'm doing this is because I wanted to look for the one thing they share, and it wasn't just talent. Talent is Often the lazy answer. What I've dialed this down into is five traits and I've ignored everything else. And all four of them have all five. And by the end of this, you'll know exactly which one. If you're an athlete or a coach, you'll know what you're missing. I have a hundred that says you can't hit it through that gate. I'll give you three balls. Without saying a word, Tiger reached for a club. On his first attempt, he smoked the ball the length of two and a half football fields. right through the centre of the six foot gap. Then he turned to Harmon with a smile and said, Is that the gate you're talking about, Butchie? I mean that story alone is just incredible. For anyone who's played golf, they'll know how hard it isn't to do it on your first attempt. I mean I know how good these guys are, I know how good Tiger was, but things like that make me think that I don't actually know how good he was because I just can't imagine it. If you look at it, it's a meaningless bet on a driving read, and he still can't stand to lose it to like he says, to anyone at anything. So Sugar Ray Leonard One of the greatest boxes of all time. He hadn't even lost anything yet, but people were expecting him to These motherfuckers think I'm going to lose. I'll show them. I'm not going to let Hagler touch me. And here's the part that really matters. None of this is something that you're born with. Bolt was lazy. Kobe went four and twenty. Sugar Ray Leonard was shy as a child. Tiger Woods had developed habits that put him on a path toward golfing immortality. It would not be inaccurate to say that when he didn't practice, he felt like shit. The joy he derived from winning tournaments was always fleeting. Even shattering records at Augusta wasn't enough. I didn't care that I won by twelve shots, he later admitted. I knew what I needed to do. But she knew what I needed to do, and above all, I wanted to do it. I thrived on working on my swing. I was addicted to staying on the range for hours. And let's start with the first. So the first trait that I want to speak to you about is that they hate losing more than they hate love winning. And they sound like the same thing, but they're not. If you love winning, you stop once you're ahead because if you think about the good feelings already there, if you hate losing, you never stop because there's always another chance to lose in front of you. And you know, when you're winning all the time, eventually that wears off and it you know, you run out of energy. The desire to win isn't the same, but hating to lose, I think that That can drive you a lot further. And that's why these guys keep grinding when everyone else, you know, eases off and they take it easy. And they're not chasing a good feeling. They're running from a bad one. You know, what are they running away from? It's a bad feeling. And it shows up in three different ways. I wanna read out to you ⁓ different highlights that will prove this. The first one thing that it proves is they hate to lose at anything. I and then let's look at Usain Bo and what a real loss done to him. Hands down, I was the best runner at William Nib. But at the regional championships, I was forever getting my ass kicked by a kid called Keith Spence, and that pissed me off. His dad made him go to the gym all the time, and the extra work had given him an advantage. He was more ripped than I was. Even though we were both only 13, I could not take him at the line. No matter how hard I tried, because I hadn't bothered with the gym work, because I'd skipped too many setup sessions, I had fallen behind the competition. Sabo were the most talented runner there, and he still kept losing because he skipped the work. He did not do the work, and he says it himself, he knows. And When he realizes that he hates to lose, he switches on. And sometimes th these athletes, they're not even lost yet. It's just that they've been doubted. And sometimes the doubt on its own is the is the fuel. So here's the first one. They're not chasing the trophy. They're often running away from doubt. They're running away from loss. And they hate losing more than they hate winning. So let's move on to the second trait. The second trait is that they don't avoid the best. They hunt them, they want to face them. Beating a weak opponent proves nothing to these guys because they already know they can win. So the win means nothing. And the only win that feels real is against someone who could have beaten you. So they go and find these people on purpose. And when there is a rival in front of them, they pick a record or a legend. Here's four ways to make sure the opponent is big enough. And the last one is the clever one. First, they make themselves the man who has to beat everyone. Bryant could have played with many better known, more powerful AAU teams. But he preferred the lesser-known, less ambitious team because he could dominate the roster and be its featured player. And this is about Michael Jordan. The primary driving element was the perfectionism. Tex Winter, the veteran coach who works so closely with both Jordan and Bryant, would often say it was chief among the many fundamental traits the two superstars shared. Their intense perfectionism. Kobe aimed his whole career at being the best player alive. He worked like an animal. It wouldn't be so silly to say that he's one of the hardest working athletes ever. The number of stories that there are. about him if you watch my second episode on Kobe Bryant, you'll learn some of these stories. And he fed on the comparison with Michael Jordan said running from it. And ⁓ here's an example of when these athletes walk into a more dangerous opponent. There was one more significant change in my approach to the rematch and it didn't come from Angelo or Janks or Mike. The source was Roger. Ray, you got to embarrass Duran he told me. When you do he will lose trust in himself and you will have him. Duran has to always be the macho man. Make fun of him, and he will not know how to handle it. So Sugar done exactly that. He went straight at Juran, Hearns, Hagler, the three greatest of his time, the men who could actually ruin him, the men who could have beaten him. But his plan was that detailed because he studied the danger up close. He would watch them, analyze them, and figure out ways to psychologically torment them to get an edge. First time he faced Duran, everyone knows, he got beat because Juran had one over him. He got into his head. But then after that he kinda flipped and he followed his brother's advice and he started taunting Duran in the ring and it really pissed him off and it led to one of the most infamous moments in boxing where Duran said no mass, which basically means I give up. And it's is debated whether he actually said that. But the point is he quit. He quit for everyone to see and and then boxing is a very shameless thing to do. So I want to speak about like Tiger when he didn't have a rival in his you know, a career there's no one that you can really think of where you could say, ⁓ yeah, they had really, really strong matchups. When they were playing together, it was head to head. It wasn't like that. So what Tiger did instead was that he used history. After the nineteen eighty six Masters, Golf Digest published a list of Nicholas's career accomplishments. It included his age at the time of each significant achievement. Tiger tacked the list to his bedroom wall. From that moment on, each morning when he woke up and each night when he went to bed, Nicholas was there. So there was Like I said, there's no opponent on the course that could push him. So he made Jack Nicholas the rival because he was the greatest ever at that point. He taped a list of Jack's records by age on his wall. And first thing every morning and last thing every night he'd look at them. So it's crazy. And so I think we conclude in this one that an easy win is worth nothing to them. They always go looking for the hardware. They always want to match with someone that is better from them because they use that as fuel to drive their own performances and their own competitiveness. So it brings us to the third trait, which is They perform when they do not feel like it. And that's the whole thing's because most people only do their best when they're in the mood. They've slept well, they're feeling good, they're motivated, so they're up and down. The best decide in advance that the mood, you know, whatever mood they're in, they're going to be disciplined. You know, Chris Williamson says something actually really interesting, which is about ⁓ motivation, discipline, and obsession. And he says motivation is want to do the thing. Discipline is I'm going to make myself do the thing. And obsession is I have to do the thing. And that's what these athletes were. They were more so on the obsession side of things. They have to do it. No matter how they're feeling, they're gonna do it, whether they feel like it or not. So they don't get days off like everyone else does. If you do that for years and years, it compounds. Like they say it compounds, like you know, the idea of compounding interest. ⁓ it compounds like massively. Everything adds on, adds on, adds on. If you think about a brick that you lay day by day, can you imagine at the end of ten years or fifteen years how big That wall is gonna be. It's a wall that no one else has a chance of breaking through it because you've been putting in the graph for many years, and that's exactly what these guys do. So if you do that for years, you you put yourself ahead of people who are only good when they feel good. And I want to speak about Kobe. So he mentions about when he finds a weakness. This is what he says. Throughout his career, if he was deficient in something, Bryant would display the work ethic to build every element of his competitive portfolio with an almost manic insistence. Another product of his Italian experience. So it wasn't when he felt like it, it was always. The mood never came into it. And then there was Yussein Boat who decided in advance. I coach, I said when we first got to work, anything you tell me to do in training, I'm gonna do it. If you want me to do ten three hundred meter laps, I'm gonna do them. I'm not going to even argue. And that's what that quote doesn't tell you is about how much Yussein Boat hated running over two hundred meters. He found three hundred meters and four hundred meters horrible. He found it, you know is toxic to his body, the lactic acid that would build up, he hated it. Even though he was really good at it, it was painful. But it didn't matter. He removed his own opinion up front. What he felt like did not matter. When there's a cold morning and there's nothing left to side, the decision's already made, he's gonna do it. And with Bolt, even the shortcuts built to him. It became my job to carry buckets from the nearby stream. And each drum held twelve buckets, which meant forty eight trips to the river and back. I would do anything to get out of carrying them. Eventually I figured I couldn't be doing 48 trips. So instead I would hold two at a time and struggle home with double the weight. In my mind, I was cutting corners, but carrying two buckets at a time developed me physically. I could feel my arms, back and legs getting bigger with every week. So he tried to dodge the work and built him anyway. And when the work happens no matter what, then even the shortcuts that you're trying to do ⁓ accounts. So that's the third trait. The greatest athletes they don't wait to feel ready. They're already decided. Anything that they feel, what mood they're in, gets no vote whatsoever. So let's move on to the fourth trait. The fourth trait is that they don't just practice. They study the people who are better than them for hours like they're training for a test. Most people will just do the thing over and over. The best, they also sit down and study their rivals more closely. They watch game tape, they work out what makes someone good, they analyze them and then they they take that feedback on for themselves. And then so when they turn it up, they already know the opponent better than the opponent knows themselves. Practice makes you fit. And it gets you used to what you're doing. It builds instinct, it builds technique, but studying is what makes you dangerous. So there's three levels of it that I want to speak about and they all derive from the highlights. So it starts from the live rivals that you can play up to legends that they'll never face. So here's Colby first when he set his own homework. This unique skill was the perfectly formed product of his study of untold hours of videotape of every single one of the game's great scorers. It also involved conversations and more film study with Tex Winter about footwork. and time spent with Jerry West talking about a million important details, such as the angle of his elbow in relation to his forehead for the perfect shot. Nobody assigned this. He studied every great scorer on tape and chased details as small as the angle of his elbow. And so then there's Sugary Leonard who studied men he would never even fight. A group of us used to go to his house almost every day to see films of the all time greats, such as Willie Pep and Jersey Joe Walcott and Sugar Ray Robinson on his projector. So these are dead legends and they're watching them almost every day for the principles not to scout just one opponent but how they behave, their technique, how they would manage their strategy across about. Even the man everyone calls a natural did it. And this is about ⁓ Michael Johnson. The next time I went to training I tried to copy Johnson style. I came out of the blocks and pushed my body into the same rigid upright position, but it hurt my back real bad, so I gave up on the idea pretty quickly. I wasn't deterred from learning though, and to improve more I watched videos, old footage. documentaries that told me about the history of the Olympics and the great Jamaican athletes. So again, a massive pattern across all these athletes. You have to study the greats. You have to study the greats. Both copied Michael Johnson. He studied the old footage. He did his homework and that summarizes that one. They don't just practice, they do their homework on the people they want to beat. So it brings us to the last and final one, the fifth trait, which is the bigger the moment, the better they play. Most people shrink under pressure. The big moment scares them, so they play safe or they freeze. Whereas the best go the other way. The bigger the moment, the sharper they get. You know, they have heightened sense. It's like they almost have this boost that they can put on. And that comes straight from the other four traits. They've prepared harder and they're less scared. And so when everyone else tightens up, they stay calm and they take over. And there's three parts that I've identified from these these highlights. There's the switch that flips, the task that shrinks, and the win that sticks. First, here's the switch flips. I live for big championships. That's where I come alive. In a normal race, I get fired up. I'm eager to win because I'm so damn competitive. But the real desire and passion isn't there. Not fully. It's only during a major meet that I'm really sharp. But give me a big stage, a fight, a challenge, and something happens. I get real. I walk an inch taller. I move a split second faster. I'd probably pop my own hamstrings to win a race. So a small meet is normal, whereas in a final he's a different athlete, and the size of the stage basically changes. what he is, it dictates it. And so then under the most pressure, athletes also they shrink the task. This is what Sugare says. When the bell rang for round one, I accomplished my first goal. I beat Hagler to the center of the ring. I felt like putting up a flag. My next goal was to win the round. So Hagler had this habit which Sugar realized in in the fight camp that when he wanted to set dominance, he would finish the break after each round and he would get up early and he'd go to the center of the ring. Which can be quite intimidating if you think about it. So Sugar Ray, he realized that and he exploited it. He beat Hagler to the center of the ring. So it gave him a sort of confidence. And if you can imagine what that would do to someone's head, it's the man of Marvin Hagler would piss him off and that could make him fight the wrong fight. So it's important. You have to get to the center, you've got to win the round. But once they beat you, when it matters, it sticks. Once you lose to a rival, an opponent, you don't forget it. And this is what Bolt said. I'd created a mantra that would define my mental attitude towards opponents for the rest of my career. If I beat you in a big meet, you're not going to beat me again. From that moment, I knew that once I'd taken a tough athlete for the first time, that was it. I had superiority and the confidence to win again and again. So he built that at 14 years old. The day he finally beat Keith Spence. So the fifth one, when it matters most, everyone else shrinks. Whereas the greatest athletes, they grow, they come to the party, they come to the biggest stage and they put on a performance. They don't hide away. They do not hide away. So that's five traits. Every one of these is a choice repeat until it becomes who you are. So if you're an athlete out there, if you're a coach teaching athletes, you gotta pick the one you're worst at and then start there. Start this week. Start as soon as you can. Choose the trait that you don't have that you feel like you could well, there's different ways of applying it. Choose the trait that you either want to capitalize on or choose the trait that you're weakest at. And a great athlete would be focusing on all five traits. They want to become the best at everything. This is what Tiger said, and I'll end it on this. There's no feeling I found that matches the feeling that I've beaten everybody. Second place is first loser. There you go. Talent was never the thing. That's the lazy answer. This is the real one. The satisfaction of beating everybody and hating to come second or last. Because the very best, they love to compete. So thanks so much for listening. Hopefully you enjoyed that. I'll probably do more of these cross athlete comparisons, these patterns that we can pick up from. From the athletes that I've studied directly and try and distill that into these episodes. So that's another episode down. The work continues.