I’ve been a big sports fan for as long as I can remember. Sports, for me, are a source of relaxation and entertainment. They promote mindfulness in ways that few other activities can. But what I like most about sports is the real world analogy. Many of the skills and character traits that go into making successful athletes and successful teams translate into other areas of life. And so sports are a metaphor for life. They’re as entertaining as they are instructive.

Kenn Dickinson is the President of Fast Break Executive Coaching. He knows a lot about sports from his days as a professional athlete. Dickinson gave a powerful TedTalk at a local TEDxSnoIsleLibraries event in which he talked about the secrets of elite athletes. As he likes to joke, “he had a front row seat. . . at the end of the bench, watching, and observing, and learning from these world-class amazing kind of athletes.” Dickinson concluded that two primary habits were responsible for their success: visualization and deliberate practice (or what he termed specific work). The inspiring takeaway is that anyone can apply these tools to build better families, careers, businesses, relationships, and lives.

Transcript:

I want to introduce you to a friend of mine: Mr. Wilson. No, not Russell Wilson from the Seahawks. He plays with this oblong ball, and it doesn’t bounce very well. But Mr. Wilson and I have been friends for a long time. We go way back, and he’s been by my — I mean, I first met him when I was — at Christmas time. I was about four years old, and there was this big box in front of the Christmas tree, and I just dove in and opened it up, and there was this big orange ball. And he’s been by my side ever since. When I walked down the street or went to school, I always had Mr. Wilson with me. And then I went on to college and obviously played college basketball. Then I went on to play professional basketball, and he’s been actually a part of my life in my business career. So we’ve been on this journey for a long time, and it’s been an interesting journey.

And one of the things that we’ve been able to do is meet some amazing people. Those amazing people are elite athletes; not just your regular athletes but your elite athletes. Now, a lot of you are going to say, “I can’t relate to these people. “They’re superhuman, these men and women.” I’ll give you a little secret: they’re just like you and me. I actually had a front row seat. OK, I was at the end of the bench, watching, and observing, and learning from these world-class amazing kind of athletes.

But what I want to give you today is a window into that world that a lot of us don’t have an opportunity to. And a lot of us think that these amazing athletes are there because of their talent, but Mr. Wilson and I realized it’s really not. It’s about a competitive mindset. They actually see, and think, and behave so much different than we do. And that’s what I want to share with you: some two key points that we saw that maybe you could use in your daily life or in your business.

The two points are visualization and deliberate practice. Let’s start with visualization. A lot of us think that visualization is about seeing a goal ahead of us. But actually these people travel in time. They actually take their emotions, their senses – seeing, hearing, touching – and they go into the future. What they’re doing is defining their own reality, their own future, and they’re living there. And then they come back, and then they have already created an imprint, a blueprint of what success is going to be for them.

Let me give you an example. I used to be a really good shooter, and I used to shoot a lot of free throws. Before I shot a free throw, I would actually– and you can take the time if you want to follow with me –is close your eyes, and I would think about how I was holding the ball, I would think about the arc of the ball, I would think of a really good backspin, and it goes right through the net. And what was really cool to me if I could make the net flip up onto the rim. Then all I would do was open my eyes, take a couple dribbles, and I would just let it go. Nine out of ten times, I would make it, 90% of the time.
What I didn’t realize at that time was with neuroscience today when you actually visualize what I was doing, you’re actually using the same part of the brain as if you were doing it. And it’s so powerful today. Even Jordan Spieth, the number-one golfer in the world, you’ve probably heard now with technology their communication with him. Michael Geller would say to Jordan Spieth, “Paint a picture.” Well, what he’s saying is, “Look at the flight of the ball. Watch it hit the green; watch it roll onto the green. How is it going to react?” Jordan would say, “Got it,” and he says, “Make it happen,” and so he does.

One of the most powerful one of these visualizations happened with a gentleman named Colonel Nesmeth. He was an average golfer, shot around 95. But something happened in his life, tragically. He became a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. He was a prisoner for seven and a half years in a solitary confinement of a cell no more than 5 feet by 5 feet by 5 feet. What would you do if you were in that situation? Well, he didn’t want to give up hope. He wanted to overcome this, so what he did is he actually played golf. He didn’t think about golf; he was actually playing golf. He visualized it. So what he would do for four hours is play his golf course back home. He would put a tee in the ground. He would hit it, watch it go down the fairway, put the club back into the bag, and start walking down the fairway. He would hear the birds. He would hear the clippers of the mowers. He would feel the wind on his back, and he would keep on walking along. He would come up to his ball, and he would repeat it again, and he would feel the club in his hands.

At the end of seven and half years, he was finally released. But he did this every day. Now remember I said that he had a shot around a 95. That was his handicap, or his strokes. What do you think he did when he came back
after not touching a club for seven and a half years? You would think he would at least shoot a 95, but probably higher. The amazing thing is, he shot a 75, 20 strokes less than what he did, by just doing visualization. This is a more powerful tool that we can use in our daily lives. If you’re a sales rep, visualize your sales presentation. If you’re going to a job interview, visualize what’s going to happen in the job interview. How many of you want to lose weight? A lot of us want to lose weight. Visualize what you’re going to look like when you lose your weight. Put on the dress, see yourself in the mirror. Eat the food that you need to do, because when you come back, you’ve already created an imprint of what success is going to look like for you. Jack Nicklaus had a saying, “I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp in-focus picture in my head.”

The second thing I want to talk about is we all want to be successful. But nothing cripples success or performance than damaged confidence. So we see these athletes as being super confident because of their talent, right? But it’s not. There was a study in the UK that was extensive, and determined innate gifts do not determine success. So then what’s going on? It’s hard work. No, it’s not just hard work, it’s specific hard work. And that was discovered by Anders Ericsson from Florida State University. And he did a groundbreaking study determining about deliberate practice. What is deliberate practice by Anders Ericsson? “It is the activities that are explicitly intended to improve performance that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence.”

There’s four tenets that I want to share with you today. One of the tenets is: you have to make it personal, and you have to base it upon principles of fundamentals. A lot of us would practice shooting free throws by getting on the free throw line and doing it many, many times. What deliberate practice is is using something in your fundamentals to build upon. So I would actually go to the front of the rim and actually shoot straight up, because I knew arc was an important fundamental in shooting. Then it would come straight down through the hole, or the hoop. Did you know that two basketballs can fit through a hoop at the same time? That’s how big it is. So one of the tenets is basically working on something of your fundamentals and strengths.

Then the next is obviously repetition: repetition, repetition, repetition. So I would do this for 50 times, and then I would do it 100 times.
But then I would add the third tenet, which is stretch your abilities. Get out of your comfort zone. So then what I would do is then I would have to do it without the ball touching the rim. Think about how hard that could be. That is what makes deliberate practice so difficult, because it’s tedious and painful. But if you do it, you’ll be successful in what you want to accomplish.

The fourth tenet is something that we naturally should know but we don’t; that is you need feedback. How are you going to improve without beginning the feedback? A lot of us do things on our own, but guess what? Don’t these people have coaches? Don’t they have people, advisers, and people looking at them to give them the feedback that they need? So, now after you’ve seen deliberate practice, it kind of makes sense why they are so confident in what they do. Now, it’s not what they do or who they are, but it’s how they do it.

So the refresh is use visualization. That is the ability to create a new reality for yourself, determine it, live there constantly, and come back. And then your choices and your decisions are all based upon what you have just determined.

The other is deliberate practice. And deliberate practice, you have to work on fundamentals, and you have to work on the right fundamentals.
The next step after that is basically, “Am I building upon those fundamentals?” And a lot of us know what we’re supposed to do, but we don’t do it.

And the third part is: this is a journey for these people. It’s a constant progression in life. And they’re always asking one simple question, “Am I doing everything I possibly can?” Because they never stop; it’s a journey for them. So they’re always breaking down new barriers. They’re always creating new challenges for themselves. They’re always about winning. And a lot of people say, “Winning? Oh, my gosh.” No, it’s not about vanquishing an opponent. It’s about their way of ability to measure or benchmark where they are in this process, and it’s a process to them, so failure is not a killer to them. John Wooden once said, “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change can be.” So this is a journey that they’ve been on and are continually going.

Now, there’s a lady that inspired me, and it was a tremendous story. And I want to know: how many people have heard of Penny Chenery? Not very many people have. But Penny Chenery — you might know by her sidekick, Secretariat. Secretariat and Penny Chenery were on a journey. If you remember the story, Secretariat was not ever supposed to be a Triple Crown winner. It was a afterthought of a coin flip. But Penny Chenery had a vision, had visualized where her and the horse could be as a Triple Crown winner.
So they were on this journey for the years, and so they won the Kentucky Derby, they won the Preakness, but now came to the Belmont: the graveyard for horses. Here’s a horse that was overweight, was lazy, but they used deliberate practice on that last race and worked that horse in a specific way. They said it was crazy because he had no recovery time, but they challenged the horse. And if you remember, Penny Chenery walked up to Secretariat and said, “I’ve run my race, now it’s your turn to run your race.”

And boy, did Secretariat run his race. He left — most of the time when he leaves the starting gate, he’s always in the behind. But for some reason, in this race he went out in the front. And Turcotte, the jockey, didn’t do anything. He said, “I was here for a ride.” And by the quarter mile, no horse had run this fast ever, and by halfway through the race, it was only him and another horse called Sham. And everybody in the stands says, “No horse can do this. This is impossible. He’s going to kill himself.” But guess what? He kept on going. And he left Sham behind. And he said it was like a locomotive going down the back stretch and around the home curve. He won by 31 lengths. That’s unheard of in horse racing. That’s two seconds. Nobody’s even come close, not even American Pharoah this year, a Triple Crown winner. So it was an amazing feat for this journey for this lady and this horse. Did you know that in the 20th century, Secretariat was rated the 35th best athlete of all time? A horse!

Even on top of that, the Belmont was rated the second best sporting event of all time in the 20th century. The only event above that was Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 points in an NBA basketball game. So this was a tremendous journey that Penny Chenery and Secretariat were on. I want to leave you with a quote that Penny Chenery had to say, “We will win if we can, and live with it if we can’t, but you never know how far you can go unless you run. You have to run your race. I don’t care how many times they say it can’t be done. I will not live the rest of my life in regret, and no matter what happens, we are going to live rejoicing every day.”

Mr. Wilson and I have been on this journey, and we want you to run your own race. And a lot of you will say, “I don’t want to be an elite athlete.” You don’t have to be. But why don’t you see how far you can go using visualization and deliberate practice? Thank you.

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

Sun Tzu, the famous mind behind the Art of War, studied war throughout his life. As a general, victory wasn’t something he could afford to be glib about. It was literally a matter of life and death. Tzu observed that all victories had one thing in common: they were never won on the battlefield. They were won in royal courts, military tents, and training camps where strategizing and preparation took place. And the best victory was the one in which no blood needed to be shed.

Life has many parallels with war, even in peacetime. Life is a struggle between good and evil. Life is a struggle between love and hate. Life is a struggle between selfishness and nobility. Life is a struggle between success and failure. And wisdom must be brought to bear if outcomes are to be favorable.

An exam isn’t passed or failed when the teacher hands out the paper. An athletic competition isn’t won or lost when the referee blows the whistle. An interview isn’t aced or bombed when the hiring manager asks the first question. A business doesn’t prosper or go bankrupt when the doors are open. A marriage doesn’t succeed or fail when the vows are recited. Health isn’t had or lost when an individual turns 40. Anger isn’t controlled or given free reign when someone utters an insulting word. And temptation isn’t overcome or indulged when the impulse to do evil appears.

If outcomes are predestined, they are predestined in the mind, well in advance of their materialization.

Jeff Bezos is constantly in the conversation for richest man in the world. In July of last year, Bezo’s net worth was estimated at $125 billion. That’s an insane amount of money. But Jeff Bezos wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His mother was in high school when he was born and his father was a bike shop owner. Bezos built Amazon from the ground up into the E-commerce leviathan that it is today. The Amazon brand name is synonymous with quality, professionalism, and cutting-edge technology. Amazon’s competitors are few and share one thing in common: the instinct to imitate.

Money isn’t everything in life. That much is abundantly crystal to everyone who reads this blog. But without money you can’t eat, let alone take care of a family. I don’t often seek money advice, but when I do I want Jeff Bezos to be the guy giving it. I’ve transcribed a YouTube compilation in which Bezos reveals his tried-and-true keys to success. And his expressed definition of success is a lot broader than you might expect. It involves finding your passion and living with no regrets, even if it means sacrificing your bottom line.

Transcript:

You guys will find that you have passions, and having a passion is a gift. I think we all have passions. And you don’t get to choose them, they pick you. But you have to be alert to them, you have to be looking for them. And when you find your passion, it’s a fantastic gift for you because it gives you direction, it gives you purpose. You can have a job, you can have a career, and you can have a calling. And the best thing is to have a calling, and if you find your passion, you’ll have that. And all your work won’t feel like it to you. . .

Many many kids and many grown-ups do figure out over time what their passions are and sometimes we let our–I don’t think it’s that hard–I think what happens sometimes is we let our intellectual selves overrule those passions. And so that’s what needs to be guarded against. . .

One of my jobs as the leader of Amazon is to encourage people to be bold and people love to focus on things that aren’t yet working, and that’s good. It’s human nature. That kind of divine discontent can be very helpful. But it’s incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets, and you need to encourage that. And if you’re going to take bold bets, there are going to be experiments. And if there are experiments you don’t know ahead of time if they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work. So bold bets AWS[Amazon Web Services], Kindle, Amazon Prime, our third-party seller business–all of those things are examples of bold bets that did work, and they pay for a lot of experiments.

I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com Literally billions of dollars of failures. You might remember pets.com or Kosmo–I could give myself a root canal with no anesthesia very easily. None of those things are fun. But they don’t matter. What really matters–companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in the desperate position where the only thing they can do is make a kind of Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence wheeas companies that are making bets all along, even big bets–but not bet-the-company bets. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate, that’s the last thing you can do. . .

You can be out of work and have terrible work-life balance, even though you’ve got all the time in the world, you could just feel like “Oh my God, I’m miserable.” And you would be draining energy, and so you have to find that harmony. And I think for most people it’s about meaning. People want to know that they’re doing something interesting and useful, and for us because of the challenges that we have chosen for ourselves, we get to work in the future. And it’s super fun to work in the future, for the right kind of person. . .

You need to be nimble and robust, so you need to be able to take a punch. And you also need to be quick and innovative and doing new things at a high speed. That’s the best defense against the future. And you have to always be leaning into the future. If you’re leaning away from the future, the future is going to win every time. Never ever ever lean away from the future. We all have adversity in our lives. I doubt if you know somebody, any friend, or anybody that you talk to. There’s no lack of adversity. By the way, that’s good because it’s what teaches us how to get back up. You fall down, you get back up. It always happens. You get certain gifts in life, and you want to take advantage of those.

My advice on adversity and success would be to be proud not of your gifts, but of your hard work and your choices. The kinds of gifts you get in life–you might be really good at math, it might be really easy for you. That’s a kind of gift. But practicing that math and taking it to the next step, that can be very challenging and hard. And take a lot of sweat. That’s a choice. You can’t really be proud of your gifts because they were given to you. You can be grateful for them and thankful for them, but your choices–you choose to work hard. You choose to do hard things. Those are choices that you can be proud of. . .

Being an inventor requires because the world is so complicated–you have to be a domain expert. Even if you’re not at the beginning, you have to learn learn learn learn enough so that you become a domain expert. But the danger is once you’ve become a domain expert, you can be trapped by that knowledge. And so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert AND have that beginner’s mind. Have that [ability to] look at it freshly even though they know so much about the domain. And that’s the key to inventing. You have to have both. And I think that is intentional. I think all of us have that inside of us, and we can all do it. But you have to be intentional about it. You have to say “I am going to become an expert, and I’m going to keep my beginner’s mind” . . .

You can’t skip steps, you have to put one foot in front of the other. Things take time. There are no shortcuts. But you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity. . .

It’s easy to have ideas. It’s very hard to turn an idea into a successful product. There are a lot of steps in between, and it takes persistence, relentlessness. So I always tell people who think they want to be entrepreneurs–you need a combination of stubborn relentlessness and flexibility. And you have to know when to be which. Basically you need to be stubborn on your vision because otherwise it will be too easy to give up, but you need to be very flexible on the details because as you go along pursuing your vision you’ll find that some of your preconceptions were wrong. And you’re going to need to be able to change those things. So I think taking an idea successfully all the way to the market and turning it into a real product that people care about and that really improves people’s lives is a lot of hard work. . .

Don’t try to chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day. I think we actually saw this–you see it all over the place in many different contexts. But I think we saw it in the internet world quite a bit where the peak of the internet mania in say 1999. We found people who were very passionate. They kind of left that job and decided I’m going to do something in the internet because it was almost like the 1849 gold rush. You find that people–if you go back and study the history of the 1849 gold rush–you find that at that time everybody who was within a shouting distance of California–they might have been a doctor but they quit being a doctor and started panning for gold. And that almost never works, and even if it does work according to some metric–financial success or whatever it might be–I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied.

So you really need to be very clear with yourself and I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80 looking back on your life and trying to make sure you’ve minimized the number of regrets you had. That works for career decisions. It works for family decisions. I have a 14-month old son and it’s very easy for me to–if I think about myself when I’m 80, I know I want to watch that little guy grow up. I don’t want to be 80 and think “Shoot, I missed that whole thing, and I don’t have the kind of relationship with my son I wished I had.” And so on and so on. So if you think about that.

I guess another thing I would recommend to people is that they always take a long term point of view. I think this is something about which there’s a lot of controversy. There’s a lot of people, and I’m just not one of them, believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is you think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me. Everybody needs to find that for themself. I think there are a lot of paths to satisfaction. And you need to find one that works for you.

Kobe was a 5-time NBA champion and Oscard award-winner for his short film “Dear Basketball.” His success, both on and off the court, won him many fans from all walks of life. Here I present ~30 of his most motivational quotes, most of which were taken from the Goalcast article here. I also added a handful of quotes from the following short Kobe Bryant interview–entitled “What if today Was Your Last Day?” I think it is well worth your time. (Update: The video was removed but you can access the quotes below.)

30 Inspiring Kobe Bryant Quotes

This is the moment I accept the most challenging times will always be behind me and in front of me.

Everything negative — pressure, challenges — is all an opportunity for me to rise.

The most important thing is to try and inspire people so that they can be great in whatever they want to do.

Rest at the end, not at the middle. And that’s something I always live by. I’m not going to rest, I’m going to keep pushing now. There’s a lot of answers I don’t have–question I don’t have. But I’m just going to keep going.

The most important thing is to try and inspire people so that they can be great in whatever they want to do.

Winning takes precedence over all. There’s no gray area. No almosts.

Once you know what failure feels like, determination chases success.

I realized that intimidation didn’t really exist if you’re in the right frame of mind.

I’m reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose.

I’m extremely willful to win, and I respond to challenges. It’s not a challenge to me to win the scoring title, because I know I can.

My parents are my backbone. Still are. They’re the only group that will support you if you score zero or you score 40.

The beauty in being blessed with talent is rising above doubters to create a beautiful moment.

A lot of leaders fail because they don’t have the bravery to touch that nerve or strike that chord.

The moment you give up, is the moment you let someone else win.

I can’t relate to lazy people. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you.

If you’re afraid to fail, then you’re probably going to fail.

Pain doesn’t tell you when you ought to stop. Pain is the little voice in your head that tries to hold you back because it knows if you continue you will change.

Use your success, wealth and influence to put them in the best position to realize their own dreams and find their true purpose.

If you want to be great at something, there’s a choice you have to make. What I mean by that is, there are inherent sacrifices that come along with that. Family time, hanging out with friends, being a great friend, being a great son, nephew, whatever the case may be.

We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.

My brain . . . it cannot process failure. It will not process failure. Because if I sit there and have to face myself and tell myself, ‘You’re a failure’ . . . I think that’s almost worse than death.

The most important thing is you must put everybody on notice that you’re here and you are for real.

Trust me, setting things up right from the beginning will avoid a ton of tears and heartache…

I create my own path. It was straight and narrow. I looked at it this way: you were either in my way, or out of it.

We can always kind of be average and do what’s normal. I’m not in this to do what’s normal.

Haters are a good problem to have. Nobody hates the good ones. They hate the great ones.

It’s the one thing you can control. You are responsible for how people remember you—or don’t. So don’t take it lightly.

The challenge for me was always compassion and empathy. I started really making a conscious effort to better understand. That doesn’t mean when you have compassion and empathy you go soft on them. It’s more like you put yourself in their shoes and understand what they’re feeling, and then you have to make certain decisions–what buttons do I need to push for this player to get them to the next level. As a leader, your job is to get the best out of them, even if they don’t like it at the time.

It has its ups and downs. Things are never perfect. But through love, you continue to persevere, you move through. And through that storm, a beautiful sun emerges. Inevitably another storm come. Guess what? You ride that one out, too.

I think love is a certain determination, a persistence to go through the good times and the bad times with someone or something that you truly love.

For more, see This Is Why I Became Successful (Kobe Bryant).

The hard work that no one wants to do brings the results that everyone wants to see.

Ask 100 people on the street what separates a man from a boy and you may get 100 different answers. If the respondents are anything like my inner circle growing up, many of the answers will have something to do with traditionally masculine attributes–like toughness, assertiveness, and physical strength. A man, they say, is someone who embodies these attributes, a boy is someone who doesn’t. Traditionally masculine attributes have their place, but in this post I want to take a different angle that I believe far better captures the essence of manhood.

The defining characteristic of boyhood is selfishness. Boys are all about themselves. They take whatever they can take, but are incapable and disinterested in giving back to those around them. If you were like me as a child, your universe was centered around yourself. Like a mental baby, you expected adults to take care of you, and you resented responsibility. Sure, you had to obey your parents and help out around the house from time to time, but it was something you did begrudgingly. Life as you imagined it was primarily about your hopes, dreams, emotions and aspirations, even if they were underdeveloped at this stage. Let’s call this stage the taking stage.

Every man I know whom I respect as such underwent a metamorphosis at some point in his life. He went from being about himself to being about the team. He went from living in a self-centered universe in which only his interests mattered to living in a team-centered universe in which the interests of many people mattered. In short, a boy becomes a man when he goes from searching only for what he can take from the world to looking for ways he can give to the people closest to him.

The family is a common example. A man attends to his wife and kids. Their welfare is chief among his considerations. In fact, a man’s welfare is secondary such that he would sacrifice it for the good of the family if it became necessary. A boy can’t relate to this thought process. His concept of being a part of something bigger than himself to which he is expected to contribute is weak or non-existent. There are many examples in addition to family and romantic relationships. I know many single, unmarried guys who are highly motivated by a desire to add value to their family, friends, and communities. If boyhood is the taking stage, then manhood is the giving stage.

A boy becomes a man when he goes from searching only for what he can take from the world to looking for ways he can give to the people closest to him.

I’m not suggesting a man doesn’t look out for his own interests. The difference is a man recognizes that his interests are inextricably connected to the interests of other people. I recall Hall-of-Fame Defensive End Michael Strahan, when asked on TV about an award he had won, said something to the effect of “It meant nothing until I handed it to my mother.” This quote captures what being a man is all about–measuring individual success by the effect it has on those closest to oneself.

A team gives a man purpose in life. Something greater than himself worth fighting for–a why behind his life’s occupation. Having a why actually makes a man more masculine even by traditional standards. There’s only so much an individual will do for himself, but when you put him on the right team, his fighting spirit exponentially increases. In fact, I know many fathers who wouldn’t think twice about running into a burning building for their children — or working long hours and making small sacrifices on a daily basis. That is evidence that a maturation process has taken place. That is manly behavior.

Will Smith generates hit movies at a more prolific rate than any other actor in Hollywood. His most recent success was his role as the genie in Disney’s blockbuster remake of Aladdin. Will Smith rose to fame in the 90s playing the goofy teenager that couldn’t stay out of trouble in the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Since then, his on-screen character and real-life person have evolved. If you best remember Will Smith from his teenage years, you may be taken aback by the amount of wisdom he has acquired over the years. I know I was when I first heard him speak. Today I’ve transcribed a YouTube compilation of Will Smith’s best motivational life advice. It spoke to me, and I’m confident it will speak to you, as well.

Transcript:

I’m motivated by fear. Fear of fear. I hate being scared to do something. It’s very simple. This is what I believe, and I’m willing to die for it. Period. You can’t be scared to die for the truth. The truth is the only thing that’s ever going to be constant. And you can’t fear what might happen to you if you were to tell the truth because what happens to you if you don’t tell the truth is worse than telling the truth will ever be. . .

The first step before anybody else in the world believes is you have to believe it. There’s no reason to have a plan B because it distracts from plan A. . .

And I think, psychologically, the advantage that that gives me over a lot of people that I have been in competition with in different situations is it’s difficult to take the first step when you look how big the task is. The task is never huge to me. It’s always one brick. I believe, and I learned very young that you don’t try to build a wall. You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say I’m going to big the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built. You don’t start there. You say I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. There will not be one brick on the face of the earth that’s going to be laid better than this brick that I’m going to lay in this next ten minutes. And you do that every single day, and soon you have a wall. . .

I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic. You know, while the other guy is sleeping, I’m working. While the other guy is eating, I’m working. . .

The separation of talent and skill is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams and want to do things. Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours of beating on your craft. . .

I always knew that I could work hard enough. There wasn’t an issue with discipline. There wasn’t an issue with the ability to sacrifice or the willingness to sacrifice. There’s no easy way around it. No matter how talented you are, your talent is going to fail you if you’re not skilled. If you don’t study, if you don’t work really hard and dedicate yourself to being better every single day.

This one year my father had his shop and he decided for whatever reason that he wanted a new wall on the front of his shop. So he tore it down, probably about 16 feet high and 30 feet long. He just completely tore the wall down, and my brother and I had to dig a six feet hole for the foundation. We were mixing the concrete by hand. A year and a half. We were building this wall for a year and a half. Every day after school we were coming, mixing concrete, putting it in the hole, doing it, and it was just myself and my little brother.

And I remember standing back looking at that wall saying there’s going to be a hole here forever. A year and a half later we laid the final brick. And my father stood back with my brother and I, and I know he planned this. He says he didn’t, but I know he had been planning this and writing this for the past two years. We stood back and looked at the wall, and he looked at me and my brother and he said “Now don’t yall ever tell me that you can’t do something,” and walked into the shop. . .

As a child, my parents always told me you could be whatever you want to be, you can do whatever you want to do. And that office, that position, the highest office on the face of the earth. It was something I heard my parents saying it but I didn’t totally believe it. Yet I went out in the world and I carried myself and I held myself high and I stood there and I looked people in their eyes and I talked to people as if I was deserving of everything that this planet has to offer. I really want to say to children out there and to people who are watching. Confucius said one time, “He who says he can and he who says he can are both usually right” . . .

Having the opportunity to study greatness. Any time you have that opportunity, there are certain intricacies that will make clear who you are. It becomes that much more clear who you are. The definition of who I am is very clear to me, and it also redefines who I want to be in that I know for a fact that I’m stronger than I thought I was. You can’t help but ask yourself the question what would I do if I was in Muhammad Ali’s shoes. I’m not the best at anything. Eddie Murphy is funnier than I’ll ever be. Denzel is more powerful than I’ll ever be. I think that my strength is I can do everything well. I can do a little bit of everything and that’s what I concentrate on to be my strength. I’ll never be able to compete with Denzel. . .

Enjoy connecting with people and ideas. I have a mission statement. Every year for probably the past 10 years I’ve worked out a mission statement for myself. And for the last few years the mission statement has stayed the same, and it’s been improve lives. When I go into something I’m looking for how the quality of this piece could potentially improve lives, but it’s all along the way. It’s when you make the movie and how you’re interacting with people in the process, the concept of improving lives runs through the center of everything I do. And then I realize that the way to improve lives is to continually improve yourself. So with that every morning when I get out of the bed, I haven’t fixed everything in the world yet, so there’s always something to do. . .

I want my life, I want my work, my family, I want it to mean something. If you’re not making someone else’s life better, then you’re wasting your time. Your life will become better by making other lives better. . .

A few months ago I said that I believed that if I chose to I could be the president of the United States. And I think as I’ve had the chance to intellectualize why I said that I think that there’s a certain delusional quality that all successful people have to have. You have to believe that something different than what has happened for the last 50 million years of history–you have to believe that something different can happen. The one thing that I truly try to communicate in the interpretation of Ali is the complex simplicity of greatness. How greatness is not this wonderful, esoteric, illusive, God-like feature that only the special among us will ever taste. It’s something that truly exists in all of us. . .

Loss is bound to joy. Pain and suffering are bound to joy. Being able to survive something is actually a big part of being able to find that next wave of joy. You appreciate smaller things. . . I hated being scared. That I didn’t want to even take the meaning. I just hated being scared to do something. And I think what developed in my early days was the attitude that I started attacking things that I was scared of.

Fear is known to trigger a fight, flight, or freeze response. Fear can lead to aggressive action (fight), avoidance behaviors (flight), or no action at all (freeze). Today, I’ve transcribed a short clip in which NBA legend and business mogul Michael Jordan shares his view that work ethic eliminates fear. FYI, the clip begins at 0:42. [Update: The video was removed, but the transcript is accessible below.]

Transcript:

Interviewer: This whole thing about you practicing. If you talk to any of your teammates, they would say even if they saw something in the game, “You should have saw him on Thursday.” To practice with you was like they had a game instead of practice.

Jordan: When I got to the pros with Kevin Loughery, you know, when I was drafted #3. Kevin Loughery used to put me on the starting 5, we used to be killing the second 5, but he wanted to test me out. So let’s say we’re going to 8. It could be 5-1 or 5-2 against the second team. If we lose, you gotta run. He would switch me in the middle of the game to the second team. And I”m saying “Well, OK, you’re trying to prove a point. Boom. We’ll bounce back and win the game.” Those are all training tools and every day in practice was like that to me. It was a competition. So when the game comes, there’s nothing that I haven’t already practiced. It’s a routine. Whatever happens in the game now, OK, I’ve done this before.

Interviewer: Was fear of failure a motivator?

Jordan: I never feared about my skills because I put in the work. Work ethic eliminates fear. You know, so if you put forth the work, what are you fearing? You know what you’re capable of doing and what you’re not.

Interviewer: As a member of the Chicago Bulls, the last shot, game 6.

Jordan: Oh, Utah. . . I practice as if I’m playing in the game. So when the moment comes in the game it’s not new to me. That’s the beauty of the game of basketball. That’s the reason why you practice. That’s the effort. So when you get to that moment, you don’t have to think. Instinctively things happen.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.