Book - No limits by Michael Phelps
This comes from a business book but in sports it is the same: “In business, words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises, but only performance is reality”.
Because nothing is impossible, you have to dream big dreams; the bigger, the better. You dream. You plan. You reach.
If you put a limit on anything, you put a limit on how far you can go. I don’t think anything is too high. The more you use your imagination, the faster you go. If you think about doing the unimaginable, you can. The sky is the limit. Anything is possible. I deliberately set very high goals for myself; I work very hard to get there.
We had to have goals, drive, and determination. we would work for whatever we were going to get. We were going to strive for excellence, and to reach excellence you have to work at it and for it.
There is no point in talking smack, absolutely no need to talk beforehand about what you are going to do. It is not worth it, not worth playing the mind games. Just do your work. People who talk about what they are going to do, nine times out of ten don’t back it up. It is always better, and a whole lot smarter, not to say anything, to simply let the work do the talking. Actions speak louder than words.
You need to set goals and keep in mind that the decisions you make can determine whether you will achieve these goals.
There is no substitute for the hardwork it would always take to get better.
Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men - Erik Namesnik
Its not a shame to be beaten by a better one.
The finish line is only the beginning of a whole new race.
If you have a schedule or routine, you feel so much better physically and mentally. However, there is a huge difference between structure and the commitment of being the best you can be. Nobody can make you do anything, tell you to do anything you don’t want to do. You have to want to do it.
If you say “can’t”, you are restricting what you can do or ever will do. You can use your imagination to do whatever you want. “Can’t”, thats a tough word.
You can’t dream up confidence. Confidence is born of demonstrated ability - Bill Parcels
It was essential never to be disrespectable of any of my teammates or rivals. I simply had to be aware of the dynamic. Each of them had goals, too.
With Bob’s prompting, I discovered something else about myself early on, too. I could be motivated not just by winning. By improving my strokes. Hitting split times. Setting records. Doing my best times. There were any number of things I could do to get better. Winning never gets old, but there was a way to win that showed I was getting better, and could get better still.
Bob used to say to me, lets just see what you’ve got in you; use all the gas in the tank. I started using his saying. I would say to him before a meet, lets just see what I have in me. I wouldn’t say, I want to win. It would be, I want to see what I have in me.
At the same time, Bob emphasized sportsmanship, accountability, responsibility. The program placed an extraordinary premium on attitude. It was said, over and again, that the single most important factor in anything we do, and particularly in this endeavor, was this: What is your attitude?
Bob had a million slogans. One of them was “Attitude, Action, Achievement”. That was the order in which you could expect things to happen. You could see every day’s practice as an ordeal. Or you could see it as adventure.
We become what we think about most.
Bob also used to give a talk that went something like this: Are you going to wait until after you win your gold medal to have a good attitude? No. You are going to do it beforehand. You have to have the right mental attitude, and go from there. You are going to be an Olympic champion in attitude long before there is a gold medal around your neck.
Bob’s coaching philosophy can be distilled as follow:
Set your goals high. Work conscientiously, every day, to achieve them.
Among the many authors Bob has read, he likes to cite the motivational speaker Earl Nightingale, who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor on the USS Arizona, then went on to a career in broadcasting. The way Bob tells it, Nightingale’s work revealed the one thing that is common to all successful people: They make a habit of doing things that unsuccessful people don’t like to do.
That’s it. That’s Bob’s game. His drill, while sometimes fabulously complex, is really quite simple - make a habit of doing things others weren’t willing to do.
There are plenty of people with some amount of talent. Are you willing to go farther, work harder, be more committed and dedicated than anyone else?
If others were inclined to take Sunday off, well, that just meant we might be one-seventh better.