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BE a Champion!
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Greetings!
This is Issue 36, and I'd like to thank you for your continuous support! Please forward the newsletter to whosoever you think would benefit from reading it! If you have any suggestions for improvement, topics you'd like to see included, etc., do drop me a line as well! The newsletter goes out to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, so you can also share with others via those avenues.
I found this picture some time ago, but have not been able to discover who the originator of the quote was. The tennis star Billie Jean King, who once had her own TV show on how to play tennis, is credited with saying that "Winners practice until they can't get it wrong", which is similar, but doesn't quite pack the same punch. What an incredible saying! How many times in our lives have we been told to "Get it right"? And so we spend our efforts and resources trying to do just that - get it right! Then we get it right, and what happens? "I've done it. Now forget it! Task done!" Many of us have done that in our "academic lives". Many of us have probably also done that in our "work lives". I put in the quotes because, if you recall, none of us should be having "Separate Lives" - we only have one life, different areas. Words are powerful. They have the ability to lift up or tear down, to empower or to suck the courage out of another human being. They shape our thoughts, our actions, our habits, our character, our destiny. I therefore cannot overemphasize the importance of the above quote. It brings us to a whole new level of existence.
Calvin Klein has a range of products called "Be". That idea puts it very nicely. We might win a competition, secure a million-dollar contract, or deliver a flawless speech. Are we living those things out every day? More specifically, are we continuously living out the small practices that are the building blocks of those major successes, or are we merely "importing" and "deploying" them when and where needed? Yes, we are winners at those moments, but are we champions? When does a champion become a champion? Right now. Every day.
I'd like to leave you with one of my favourite memories, that of an old Rolex advertisement that I used to see on the back pages of some issues of National Geographic. It showed a picture of the Japanese ballerina Yoko Morishita, who performed with the likes of Rudolf Nureyev, and what she said about practice: "...human muscles have a short memory. If I miss one day's practice, I notice the slack. If I miss two days, my partner notices. Three days, and the audience notices". That was from a world-class ballerina! And we think that, when we become good at something, we don't need any more practice! Ivan Misner reminds us that the best football teams do their "wind sprints" each and every practice session! All top athletes and top teams do. F1 pit crews do too! Dare we do any less?
We all love getting better and better at things, until we achieve mastery of those things we set our hearts and minds to. Are you practicing what you say you love every day? In every aspect of life, be it work, play, relationships, whatever we set ourselves to, don't settle for just being a winner. BE a Champion! |
