Heart of a Winner

Introduction

Don’t Wait for the Hamper to Be Empty

For a long time, we tell ourselves that someday we’ll reach a stage when everything is in order. We’ll have settled the problems that are still pending, and we’ll finally have the time we lack right now. Then we’ll be able to get to the things we’ve been putting off for months or years: taking care of ourselves, starting that project, training regularly, or finally making the decision that never finds its moment. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that day doesn’t exist.

Life is a lot like a laundry hamper. You can run a load, hang it up to dry, fold every item, and put it all away. For a few minutes you’ll feel like you’re finished. But while you celebrate the small victory of having everything washed and put away, you head to the shower, take off the clothes you were wearing, and realize the hamper is no longer empty. The laundry piles up again because you keep on living.

Problems work the same way. There will always be something waiting: an unexpected expense, or a loss that wasn’t part of our plans. Sometimes the problems will be small, but other times life will hit us with a force we don’t feel ready for. If we wait for everything to go away before we begin, we’ll spend our lives preparing for a calm that never arrives.

“Problems will never disappear. We need to learn to live while they exist.”

Learning to move forward under those conditions is the starting point of this book. Nobody can give you a formula for making everything turn out right, and I’m not going to ask you to think positive while you ignore what’s in front of you. I’m no fan of simplistic positive psychology. What you’ll find here is something more useful: a system for understanding how change happens and what you can do to build an improvement that survives the mistakes of real life.

That system already exists, and it has been used for decades to transform human performance. Coaches apply it when they prepare someone to run faster or to compete under pressure. Its ten principles explain why a body improves, why it stalls, why it slides backward, and why not everyone responds the same way to the same plan.

My proposal is to apply those ten principles outside the gym as well. Done well, they can help us understand why some strategies work for a while and why others stall. You’ll see why trying harder doesn’t always mean getting better results if that work isn’t heading in the right direction. You’ll also learn what makes some mistakes sink us and others teach us. Once you understand these principles, you’ll start to see them everywhere, and the way you look at your own problems will never be quite the same. This book will give you tools to train your life the way you’d train a physical body, and to direct your effort better in every area you want to develop.

Knowing What to Do Is Rarely the Problem

We live surrounded by information. Whatever you want to improve, you can find thousands of tips in a matter of seconds. Some will be good and some will be useless, but a lack of information rarely explains why we don’t change our habits. Most of us know far more than we put into practice.

We know sleep is important, and yet we go to bed staring at a screen. We know we should save, but when a raise comes in, it’s easy to turn it into new expenses. We have more advice than we need. What we lack is an understanding of the process and the ability to apply it correctly.

Imagine someone walking into a gym for the first time and trying to train their whole body with the heaviest weight they can move. Nobody with experience would call that discipline. We’d say they haven’t understood how training works. Outside the gym, though, we often admire that very same behavior. We applaud the person who never stops and keeps their calendar packed. We confuse being busy with moving forward, and then we’re surprised when that person ends up with psychological problems, or gets frustrated at not getting the life they were trying to improve. This book wants to help you stop wasting the effort you put in every day that isn’t paying off. And we’ll do it without adding more pressure to the pressure you already carry.

Training a Life

You can’t avoid training your life. Life trains us even when we haven’t chosen the program. Every schedule we keep and every decision we repeat leaves behind an adaptation. If we don’t decide where we want to head, those inertias will choose part of the path for us, and they can take us somewhere we don’t want to go. When we step in on purpose and choose the right training program for our life, we can adjust the process and direct our effort better.

“Your life trains you even when you haven’t consciously chosen the training program.”

The ten principles work like a map. They help you tell movement from direction, and choose your path better when obstacles appear. So when the mountains come, and they certainly will, the principles will help you decide whether to climb them or go around because you’ve realized they lead somewhere you no longer want to go.

Anyone Can Use This System

Books about success tend to fill up with exceptional people. This book will also contain stories of great athletes and brilliant figures in their fields, because sport pushes human principles to extremes and lets us observe them clearly. We’ll see athletes who trained for years to compete for seconds, and others who retired, came back, changed environments, or faced the judgment of millions of people.

Your goal may be something more everyday, like regaining your health or changing a behavior that has been hurting you for years. Those transformations can completely change the footing from which you’ll live the next ten or twenty years.

Applying these principles requires observing honestly what you do and adjusting when necessary. Reading this book will help you recognize patterns that until now looked like isolated events. You’ll identify when a load is making you better and when it’s only wearing you down, and you’ll also recognize why change becomes much harder when your environment doesn’t support it.

If you apply what you’re about to read, you’ll make better decisions. You’ll also begin to understand what kind of person you’re training with those same decisions you repeat day after day. That’s why we’ll answer a question that will almost certainly change your life: Who am I becoming while I try to get what I want?

Start Before You’re Ready

Maybe you opened this book during a season of change. Or maybe you’ve been thinking for a while that you should do something different with your life, even though you’re not yet sure what. Maybe you’re tired of starting over and always ending up back at the same point. If so, don’t worry: you don’t need to figure everything out before moving on. I’ll show you the way.

In fact, one of the traps we’ll look at is waiting to understand every detail before taking the first step toward the change you’ve longed for. The mind knows how to disguise fear as prudence. Sometimes it tells us we’re not good enough, and other times it says we could do it whenever we wanted, so there’s no need to start today. And when the project looks complex, it demands a perfect plan that never quite gets ready. Plans are carried out first and perfected along the way. I’ll explain how to do that properly later on.

This book will follow that principle too. It’s written by someone who, like everyone, has problems and situations to resolve. I write from my own experience of teaching others and making mistakes while I try to understand these processes. Many of the ideas you’ll find here changed as I tried to live them, and they’ll keep changing, because I will, too. That’s exactly why I want to walk through the process with you.

There will be moments when you recognize something you already knew. Don’t rush past them, because knowing an idea and living by it are different things. Other pages will sting, because they’ll show you something you don’t like about yourself. Don’t turn that discomfort into guilt. Use it as information.

Don’t try to change ten things at once while you read. The ten principles I’m going to show you are very powerful. Pick one, and make a change small enough that you can repeat it and important enough to produce a response. At the end of each chapter, we’ll go over a brief summary of the main ideas, and above all I’ll give you concrete practices to apply what you’ve learned to your life. My obsession is turning theory into practice, so don’t settle for just reading. Come back to the book as many times as you need, and use it as a manual.