Michael Jordan's one of my clients. This is why. He is a six times national champion. No one's done this. He won three championships in a row in NBA basketball.
He then retired and came back and won three times in a row again. But what was his secret? He made it look so easy. Michael makes 500 shots a day every single practice, and he would do two practices a day.
He had to make a thousand shots a day before he'd go to sleep. Every. Single.
Day. That's 6,000 practice shots a week. That's 24,000 a month. That's 288,000 shots a year.
That's 4.3 million practice shots in his 15-year career. He's made 4 million practice shots to make 24,000 real shots. That is how you...
you get good at something. How many of you have ever gone to an environment, could be a university environment, could have been a seminar, where you learned something you thought was important, you thought it was valuable, no one was selling you, and then you went home and did nothing. I found that knowledge is not power. People talk about knowledge all the time. Knowledge is potential power.
The real power is in our execution. So what I've been obsessed about for about a, I guess, now this will be my 47th year. I started when I was two, right? But in 47 years, I could be an idiot if I didn't notice there are patterns.
Patterns that'll make you angry, sad, frustrated, overwhelmed. Patterns that'll make you passionate, driven, excited, fulfilled, grateful. And once we understand that we are not our patterns, that it's just something we learned along the way, we think it's us because we've been doing it so long.
It's actually very easy to change a pattern. Hard to change yourself. and you don't have to. I didn't come by here to change you.
I wanna walk you through then how we get to the result that you really want. What we're gonna do is show you how to take the tools that control the way you think and feel directly. When people think about their goals, I don't know about you, but I would be frustrated with myself for so many years because I'd have these huge goals and then I wouldn't achieve them, or I'd approach them but not where I want, or I'd go to a seminar and I'd learn something really valuable and then not apply it. So. So then I beat myself up and it doesn't serve you because when you beat yourself up, your energy goes up or down.
What would you say? Down or up? Down. When your energy goes down, you don't take action.
And then one day I started working with athletes and then I got to work with some of the greatest athletes in the world. And one of the things I noticed was they didn't think I should learn something once and then it was there. The greatest athletes in the world understand one thing, repetition is power. Today in society, we've heard something once and we think we know it. If you're not doing it, you don't know.
know it. I literally took a speed reading course. I said, I'm going to read a book a day.
I didn't do that. But in seven years, I read 700 books in the era of human development, psychology, physiology, anything I could make a difference. But then I got jaded because I'd like heard all the stories. I'd heard this before. And when you have that mindset, you lose your edge.
But I was just burnt. And the reason I was burnt is I wasn't really applying it. I had knowledge without execution.
And so I started looking at these athletes and going, OK, what makes this person? and the best in the world. They're doing the same thing they know over and over and over and over and over again. That's what makes you a master. So I caught myself and I shifted my whole life.
And then I noticed something else. I need the repetition to be a master of something. I need to get myself excited to do something that's the same, but find a way to do it better every time.
Not just go get new more stuff. But one of the things that most of us still miss is it's not just practicing, it's practicing giving your all. Just practice.
Practicing won't do it. It's like being there in the experience over and over and over again. So I tell people, if you see someone who's truly successful at anything and you think they're better than you are, they are not better than you are.
They may know something you don't know, but more importantly, you get rewarded in public for what you practice constantly in private. I can't get across to you enough how my life changed when I stopped saying I know it because I'd heard something or I understood it. If you want to master anything, you go through three stages. The first stage is cognitive mastery.
Cognitive mastery simply means you understand it. And you know what? Understanding doesn't give you anything.
And yet you have to understand first to make progress. The second step of mastery is when you go beyond understanding and you have enough repetition and it becomes more like emotional mastery. That's where you feel it.
You don't just think it. And when you feel it, now you tend to do it a lot more. But in order to get that, you need repetition and you need energy. Now, you guys are awesome.
Your energy is already there, but you don't want to let it drop. So if we have energy with it, our body retains it. Because information without emotion is barely retained. When there's a lot of emotion, you'll remember.
It's that simple. So we're going to create emotion. by motion. I don't believe in positive thinking. I believe in intelligence.
Intelligence means you see things as they are. You don't BS yourself. You don't lie to yourself. But you also don't make it worse than it is, so you don't try. Most people make it worse than it is because they don't want to be disappointed.
They don't want to fail. Now, if you can see things as they are, not worse than they are, accurately, then you have to do the second step, which is you do have to see it better than it is. You need a vision.
In the good book, it says, without a vision, people perish. No matter what your religion or mindset or non-religion is, there's truth in that. Without something to look forward to, it's hard to deal with challenges. If you improve you 10%, it will...
more than make up for every challenge you could face. And you can do a lot more than 10%. Get yourself in the place where you make the distinctions but you get them in your body, because the third step, the final step, is physical mastery. Physical mastery is you don't have to think about it, you just do it.
It's in your body. It's like, I don't know if any of you have this experience, but when I first started to drive a stick shift car, when I was 16, I remember the guys like do this and this and this and look at the rear view mirror too. And I'm like, it'll never work.
It's too much. But after a while it's inside you, it gets in your body by repetition. And now you can drive the car and chew gum and think about something else and talk on the cell phone and hopefully not text, but all those at once, can't you? Because it's in your body.
For the last, well, 47 years, I've been obsessed by a question. What makes the difference in the quality of people's lives? Why is it some people you can give them everything?
They can have a great family, they can have a great education, they can have great economics, and they find themselves living in and out of rehab. And then someone else, they were abused physically, mentally, emotionally, whatever. They had no advantages. And yet somehow...
It created a hunger in them that made them so driven that they found the answers. And now they're the people whose names you know. It's not just intelligence.
I believe intelligence is a huge benefit. I love wickedly smart people. But how many of you know some very smart people that can't fight their way out of a paper bag on a daily basis?
Say I. If you want to know the real secret to success, I can give you one word. Hunger. The hungry people always find the way to victory. I don't mean hungry to succeed for the weekend or to make it into your swimsuit or make a certain amount of money. I mean hunger to be more, do more, create more, give more, share more.
A hunger that doesn't go away. The people that have that kind of hunger, even if you have no resources, you'll find them. You will get them.