Tuesday, June 12, 2018

TOM SEAVER: "PITCHING DETERMINES..."


The following comes from Angela Duckworth's outstanding book "Grit."  It gives a great example of Tom Seaver's decision making process on a daily basis and shows what the absolutely best often use a mindset.  Seaver thinks in terms of whether even the smallest of choices he made each day would make him a better pitcher:

Consider Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver. When he retired in 1987 at the age of forty-two, he’d compiled 311 wins; 3,640 strikeouts; 61 shutouts; and a 2.86 earned run average. In 1992, when Seaver was elected to the Hall of Fame, he received the highest ever percentage of votes: 98.8 percent. During his twenty-year professional baseball career, Seaver aimed to pitch “the best I possible can day after day, year after year.” Here is how that intention gave meaning and structure to all his lower-order goals:

"Pitching… determines what I eat, when I go to bed, what I do when I’m awake. It determines how I spend my life when I’m not pitching. If it means I have to come to Florida and can’t get tanned because I might get a burn that would keep me from throwing for a few days, then I never go shirtless in the sun… If it means I have to remind myself to pet dogs with my left hand, then I do that, too. If it means in the winter I eat cottage cheese instead of chocolate chip cookies in order to keep my weight down, then I eat cottage cheese."


Wednesday, April 11, 2018

COMMITMENT TO PRACTICE


How's this for commitment to practice and improving? Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of any sport with a total of 28 medals.

“Most people lose because they are trying to take shortcuts.  But there are no shortcuts.  Do you know why Michael Phelps is the greatest Olympian of all time?  He never took a shortcut.  He once went five straight years, 365 days per year, without missing a workout.”