How the Best of the Best Get (Even) Better
After much speculation, Tampa Bay Buccaneers superstar quarterback Tom Brady has made it official: He’s retiring from the NFL. In the 22 years he played professional football—a long run for any professional athlete—Brady rang up a host of accomplishments, including leading his former team, the New England Patriots, to nine Super Bowl appearances. (The Patriots won six of these.)
You don’t have to be a football fan or even a sports aficionado to understand Brady is exceptional. To stay at the top of one’s game the way Brady has requires not just physical ability but mental and emotional fortitude setting him far above the best in virtually any field.
Behavioral experts who study people like Brady who have extraordinary accomplishments are always looking for “secrets” we mere mortals can employ in our everyday lives even if we’re not blessed with a star athlete’s genes. As they have discovered, success is just as much about attitude and adaptability as it is about talent.
Writer Graham Jones sums this up well in the June 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review, “The real key to excellence in both sports and business is not the ability to swim fast or do quantitative analyses quickly in your head; rather, it is mental toughness. Elite performers in both arenas thrive on pressure; they excel when the heat is turned up. Their rise to the top is the result of very careful planning—of setting and hitting hundreds of small goals. Elite performers use competition to hone their skills, and they reinvent themselves continually to stay ahead of the pack.”
The big question is how can you as a business owner, corporate executive, manager, or entrepreneur “up your game” by strengthening your attitude and your fortitude? Here are some of the tricks behavioral experts recommend for performing at your very best, regardless of your vocation:
Welcome high-pressure situations. It’s long been observed that what truly separates champions from the also-rans is the ability to perform well under stress. Anyone can be cool and collected when there’s no deadline and you have access to plentiful resources; it takes a special kind of individual—a champion—to avoid “choking” when everything is on the line and the clock is rapidly counting down to zero. If you’re not one of the lucky few born with a natural ability to stay calm under pressure, you can improve your tolerance by assigning yourself tighter and tighter deadlines, thus training yourself, through repetition, to keep your head even when everyone else is losing theirs.
Have a “fire in the gut.” Perhaps the most important thing separating champions from anyone else is an intense, burning desire to win. As General George S. Patton famously said, “Americans love a winner…and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time.” The caveat here is that while your desire to triumph must be total, you must still possess the maturity to accept the occasional loss. People who insist on winning all the time—no matter what—can slip to the proverbial dark side, resorting to cheating and even illegal activities to achieve victory. Even the appearance of impropriety may tarnish a leader’s character. Wins are great, but they must be honest to be of any value.
Break big tasks into smaller ones. There’s an old joke that goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” There’s wisdom here. When people freak out, it’s usually because they’re overwhelmed by tasks that, in toto, appears huge. Insurmountable. The trick to achieving big goals is to break them down into smaller jobs that are more easily completed, then attacking each in sequence. Focusing on the short-term is a time-tested way to achieve long-term success.
Compete against better opponents. Professional athletes know the only way to improve their game is to compete against better players. Sure, you can win more frequently if you compete against weaker opponents, but you’ll never learn much that way. In fact, you can easily become weak and complacent. Instead, seek challenges that push you beyond your comfort zone, forcing you to learn and adapt. Like a bodybuilder who must add weights to gain strength, you can only improve your skills if you accept increasingly harder challenges.
Seek honest feedback. Everybody loves praise. But, again, being told how great you are—or how wonderful your work is—won’t lead to improvement. Every leader should have a small circle of trusted confidants who can review what you’re doing and provide honest, constructive criticism. No, you don’t have to take every critique or suggestion as gospel, but you should look for patterns, if not actual consensus.
Play as hard as you work. As Americans, we have a certain veneration for so-called workaholics, but study after study has shown all work and no play not only makes Jack a dull boy, it makes him a less-than-stellar performer. Great champions know post-victory celebrations are just as important as the victories themselves. They provide the psychic and emotional rewards the brain needs to cement those activities into permanent neural pathways. In other words, celebrations help make victory a habit. So, after a victory, feel free to rest and rejoice. Then get back to work!
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