Oh man, did this one resonate with me when I heard it.  It is so true, in our modern world of hyper-accessibility to anything and everything you want, the ability to endure even the slightest bit of delay or suffering for something has dwindled to the point of ridiculous.  Convenience has made us soft.

I am writing this particular blog during the 2024 Summer Olympics, and this is an easy analogy to use.  The athletes that are representing their countries in their respective sports are the best of the best as we all know.  The masses envy the height of athletic prowess and performing under pressure on a world stage, but not the LIFETIME of work it took to get to there.  It literally is a lifetime of hard work, struggle, pain, blood/sweat/tears and more.  Countless hours of gym time, juggling school, work and more around a training and competitive play schedule is difficult.  Ask any student athlete.  There are thousands of track athletes running the 100 and 200 meters in the US, but there are four that are in Paris at the Olympics right now.  Six.  That’s it, hundreds of thousands of potential people narrowed down to three men and three women.  And I am willing to bet that the top 100 “out-suffered” the rest.  In many cases, this is what it comes down to, and these six did so even more.

While I can’t help you get to the Olympics, I can share some advice that has pushed its way forward over the course of my life.  There are three questions to start with, and you’ll have to refine your answers as you move through the process of whatever you are trying to accomplish.  Here are three questions to ask:

 

How much pain can you take? 

                                              What are you willing to sacrifice? 

                                                                                          Do you have a short term memory?

 

Let me start with the last one first – Short Term Memory.  Whether you are an athlete or new to a job position, you need a short term memory to operate under.  By this I mean that you need to retain the good things and the lessons you learn, but you MUST let go of and forget the blunders, belly flops and embarrassing moments that go along with the process.  If the first time you go to the head of the class to do a class presentation and it doesn’t go as planned, this does not define you as a terrible Public Speaker.   This means that you need more practice before your next run at this.  Forget about that first attempt and move forward.  You have to let the past be the past and not drag it with you into the present and future.  At some point you are going to need to do a best man’s speech or a presentation at work, so get this through your head:

You. Just. Need. More. Practice.  Purge the shortfalls and focus on the lesson(s) that you learned and more forward.

The best athletes recover from mistakes and misses better and faster than the rest of their competitors.  During my competitive career I reached a point that I had confidence in the next shot I was going to take, regardless if I had missed the last five in a row.  The right shot is the right shot, and there is no straying from that.  I put the time in to be able to hit that shot in that situation and I was not going to deviate from that.  I forgot about the misses and focused on hitting the right shot the next time that situation arose.  If I got tentative and played defensively instead, I was likely to lose anyway, so I might as well go down swinging.  A large majority of the time this was the right approach.  Yes, I had losses, of course, but in a conservative guess, I am thinking 70% of the time I chose the right path.  I love this quick thought from one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Roger Federer.  Click here to listen to this quick 3 min clip, and I encourage you to listen to the rest as well.  In the 1500+ matches he played on the ATP TOur, he won 79% of those matches.  But he only won 54% of the points in his matches.  54%!  That is a razor thin margin, and this is one of the best players ever.     Great life advice “served” in a tennis analogy.

Next up, what are you willing to sacrifice?  I have spent countless hours on a practice court and in the gym.  This includes Friday nights and Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings.  While my high school friends were out partying and meeting girls, I was at the health club hitting forehands and backhands.  On my vacation to Jamaica with my girlfriend I hit 200 drive serves a day for 7 straight days.  No one else around, nobody wanting to be inside on a racquetball court while on a tropical island…but me.  I was willing.  When I left, I was a better player for it.  I developed a new weapon in the off season that helped me win more matches and end up in the top 20 in the world.

The Olympians did the same, and more.  I didn’t touch a racquet until age 15, most of them were knee deep in their pursuit before age 10.  I got a late start but was playing a small sport, so I had some leeway to still make it work.  I wasn’t the most gifted athlete by any stretch, but I had the greatest of all assets on my side: Work Ethic.  I was willing to log the hard miles, to run the hills, to grind.  I carved myself from a rough piece of stone into a statue of an athlete.  I was undersized and started later than almost every peer on the Pro Tour, but I made it anyway.  You can too, if you are willing to put in the work.

And last but certainly not least, How Much Pain Can You Take?  A journey to the top is painful in a lot of ways.  It is physically taxing of course, but there is a high degree of mental and emotional pain that also accompanies it.  I have had some crushing losses, including never scoring a point against a close friend and Tour roommate at in tournament.  And oh by the way, it was in my hometown…  That sucked, to put it mildly.  It was written up in the sport’s magazine and it haunted me for years.  I had to defend that and do my best to overcome the stigma of this for two seasons worth of events.  I choked in the State Championship finals one year, losing to my workout partner who I had NEVER lost to in singles before or since.  I froze up, could barely hit the front wall during play.  It was awful, people laughed at me.  It took another ten years to put my name on that trophy, and I had to come out of retirement to play doubles with someone to do it.

I absorbed a lot of pain in different forms throughout my career and my life.  There were only two choices:  Quit, and let the temporary setback become a permanent solution, or Get up, Dust off and Get back into the Fray.  How much pain you can handle and still keep moving forward is truly the secret to having a good life.  I am very proud of my accomplishments on the Pro Tour and in my business career as well.  It was never easy, but it was worth it.

What do you want for yourself?  If it is anything that others want as well, you’re gonna have to work for it.  You are going to have to outwork others, and maybe still get a little lucky as well to make things happen.  But if you are not willing to work and suffer, you will not get what it is you wish, that is a given.  Learn to toughen up; take a hit and keep coming.  Life is not a spectator sport.  While you may not end up on the Olympic podium, it is incumbent upon you to hit YOUR big time and maximize your potential.  And when you do, you will have some great stories to tell and some precious memories that others will only be able to guess what it was like out there in that situation.  Mitigate your regrets.

Pain is the gatekeeper to success.  Don’t let it be a wall,

but rather just a hurdle to get over.

I wish you luck in your endeavors.