The Jordan Harbinger Show - 506: Tim Grover | The Unforgiving Race to Greatness

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

Tim Grover is the preeminent authority on the science and art of achieving physical and mental dominance relied upon by legendary athletes like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant at the top of their game. He's also an author, and his latest book is Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness. What We Discuss with Tim Grover: Putting aside inspirational Internet meme bromides, what does it really mean to be relentless? Why you can't even access the upper limits of the physical without putting the mental blocks in place first. Why the intangibles -- like commitment and resilience -- are more important than the measurable -- like strength and speed. The paradigm-shifting thought patterns that go into becoming a world-class champion. Why top performers aren't looking for motivation -- they're looking for elevation. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/506 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Microsoft Teams is helping priority bicycles transform the way they work. After closing their New York City showroom, they started doing virtual visits on Teams. Now, people from all over the world can come into their showroom. Learn more at Microsoft.com slash Teams. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. It's funny. Motivation to me is entry level. It's entry level.

If you need motivation, you're just beginning the race. That means somebody else is making you do something. that you don't want to do, all right, where you constantly need motivation, you constantly need motivate. These athletes and these business people, they're not looking for motivation. They're looking for elevation. That's what they're looking for. They're looking to elevate their game. They're looking to elevate their business. They're looking to elevate their lives. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people.

We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional mafia enforcer, former cult member, or national security advisor. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it,

we've got those starter packs. You've heard me mention them. These are collections of your favorite episode. organized by popular topics. It's a great way to get people introduced to the show instead of just throwing them the whole feed and they don't know which of the 500 plus to listen to. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash start to get started order to help somebody else get started. I always appreciate it when you do that, of course. Today on the show, we've all heard the common cliche, oh, it's all mental and not physical that gives us an edge at elite levels, right? It's all mental. It's very little

physical. When you are at the top of your game in, say, a sport, your competing with folks with lots of athletic talent already. And most people at that level train with a similar intensity. That's why they're pros in the first place. But today's guest will tell us that you can't even access the upper limits of the physical without putting the mental blocks in place first. Our guest, Tim Grover, is known as a trainer of champions. And I mean that from Michael Jordan to Kobe Bryant. Tim's kind of like the A team and that he's the guy they call when no other trainer, no other coach can get them to break through to their next level and then stay at the top of their game. And I can only imagine working out with him is horrible and something that I

would never want to do, but that's why I'm not a professional athlete. Tim will tell us the things that are not measurable, so commitment, resilience, those are more important than the measurable, strength, speed, etc. So it really is 20% physical, 80% mental, but it's about unlocking those top levels. And you don't need athletic skills to have the mindsets that elite athletes use to achieve results. And of course, you know me, I am not into sports or athletics. If you've been a long time fan of the show, you are well aware that that is not my usual beat. But this show, this episode, it's more about how to think, especially how to think about winning. Today we get a glimpse of the type of thinking that goes into being a world-class champion. These sorts of pattern-breaking

paradigm shifts are what the best of the best used to stay at the very top. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

Now, here's Tim Grover. I've actually heard a lot of interviews with you, and a lot of these guys who do, like, sports interviews, not you, but a lot of people who do sports shows, they have platitudes, they have a lot of bromides, like never quit, you know, chase down your dreams. And so I want to get past all that stuff because I know you don't just tell your athletes, all right, go out there and be relentless, right? You have to teach them how to do that. So I want to start there.

That's perfect. I also assume you're not the first trainer that athletes call. You're maybe the last trainer, not to, not like you're the least qualified, but you're definitely not. No one flies somebody across the country to get taped, right? Right. Yeah, exactly. When nothing else is going right, things are at the end of the people are like, all right,

something isn't going right here. My career is not where it should be. Let's call Grover. I think this is an interesting niche, if you can even call it that, because, and you mentioned this in the book, The New Book, Winning and in the old book, Relentless, the original book, it's crucial for a champion or for any high performer to know who to trust and when to trust them because highly successful people rarely get to hear the truth. So it almost seems like they bring you in because you're the one who goes, yeah, all that stuff about your coaches telling you this or that or that they just don't want you to get mad and then it affects their career negatively.

But since you're paying me, I'm going to tell you that all these things you're doing are wrong or your attitude sucks or you're giving up to earlier, you know, that kind of thing. And that's got to be kind of a special position to be in because they're calling you in like the A team, but also they can fire you. It's their problem, right? It's like that's their problem at that point. You know, it's interesting. I've never worked directly for an organization. I've always worked for the individual. And I always tell them, listen, you can fire me at any time. What am I going to do? All right, you sign a two-year deal. What am I going to do, sue you? No. If we feel like this isn't a good match, we're going to end up leaving. But you bring me in to clean things up. You bring me in to organize things. You bring me inside to take out the unessentials. Everybody else comes in. They want to add, add, add. I'm the individual that comes in and say, you don't need this. You don't. You don't need this, you don't need this. What's the role of this person here? What does this person do? Why are you doing this? What the habits are? And you have to justify it to me how it's going to benefit your career. And then if we agree that it is, then we put it in the right places for it

to maximize and excel. In any relationship, what's the first thing a person asks for? They said, be honest with me. But when you're honest with a person, how dare you? Nobody talks to me like that. Yeah. Right. So I said, well, if you want me to be honest, you want the truth. The truth should lead to more action and better results. Most of the time, the truth leads to more emotion and less results. So I always tell these people, listen, I'm not here to judge you.

I'm here to increase your performance so you can perform at the highest level. I don't judge. I'm not here to judge. Let's figure out what we need to do and what we don't need to do. in order to get to those things. And individuals come up to me and they say, I'll do anything until I tell them what anything really means. I can imagine that to be the case.

I don't know. It seems hard for me to imagine just as somebody who has never been in a professional athletic situation. Those guys and guys, and guys, for that matter, they're always there because of their immense work ethic, talent. Is it that some people coast on their talent and they're just not used to working through that limitation? Is that part of it?

You know what? It's funny. You can get by at the high school level. You can even maybe get by at the collegiate level. But once you hit that professional level, everyone is extremely talented. So the gifts that you had that separated you early, they may not separate you as much anymore. Every professional individual I've known, you're going to hit some adversity. And a lot of the athletes, they are so good at such a young age that everybody's handled all their adversity for them.

So now they're at a level where they actually have to do it for themselves, and they've never had to deal with it. They've never had to deal with it. So now they have to deal with it. They're like, they don't know what to do, whether it could be an injury, whether it could be a family situation, a relationship situation. They've always had somebody else cleaning their stuff up for them. Or when they have an injury, they've never had to work that heart, or they had something

taken away from them that they were so gifted at for such a long time. So the earlier you can develop that work ethic along with that talent, the more successful you will be. It reminds me of like the smart kid, for those of us who can't imagine being that talented athletically, which is definitely me. I'm in that camp. But this is like those smart kids that can just walk into a test in high school. And they're like, it's geometry, calculus, whatever. And they do it.

And you just, guys like me who study are just like, you know, I hate this guy. He walks in, forgot we had a test. I've been studying it for three weeks. And he's like, oh, the super hard problem at the end does it in his head. No, it doesn't need his calculator, you know, forgot his calculator and gets an A minus or an A. And I'm like, I'm getting a C plus and I'm like, yes, I'm going to pass this class, right? Then those guys get to, let's say, Wall Street. You know, they go to law school.

They crush it. They're the top 10%. Then they get to Wall Street. And it's like, oh, this is everybody who's smart and worked really hard. And your dad's not the guy who owns the law firm anymore. And he can't smooth the fact that you fail the first couple. of assignments. They're like, you can't show up late anymore because you like to go to bed at 3 a.m. We need you at 8 and you're not functioning at 8 and you've never had to like

pay the piper of that lack of sleep. Yeah, there's no longer a huge endowment that's been going to the school through your family where you got, now you got to actually go out and earn the stuff. Well, that has a lot to do with the ability to, and I talk about this in the book winning where everyone knows when you go to school and you go through an education process, everyone tells you what to think. You know, here's the book, here's how the lessons, here's history, here's the philosophy, here's how you solve a calculus problem, here's geometry, here it is. Everything is what to think.

When you get out of school and you get in that workforce and you get in that competitive environment, you have to learn how to think. And a lot of people don't have that ability. They only know what to think, what to think, what to think. But having the ability to know what to think and how to think, how to think, it's individual. It's an individual to you. It's your ability to understand problems. It's your ability to figure things out. It's your ability to see things in a way that nobody else will see it. And the greatest athletes, the greatest business persons have the ability to know what to think and how to think. I mean, you look at, you know, Jeff Bezos. What he did, it didn't exist. Right. You don't find it in a book. You know, Elon Musk, these individuals, all these people that are Sarah Blakely, all these individuals, they have the ability. not only into what to think, but how to think. And your best athletes also have that ability.

What do you think about these guys who write books like, all right, 10 steps to this or 15 rules for ABC, right? They're just telling you what to think a lot of the time. Don't you wish it was that easy? Yeah, of course. I mean, a lot of, yeah. Five steps or 10 steps. Listen, neither one of us are professional athletes, but we work out. It doesn't matter how much you work out. You could literally train for three months straight at a high intensity level. If I told you, go climb 10 sets of stairs, 10 flights of stairs, you're going to be out of breath. Yeah. All right. So people always make it seem like when they give you a step, like it's an easy thing. No, it's a way to simplify thing. It's a way to simplify winning where to make it look like it's so easy. You only need

five steps or you only need these 10 things to be successful. Listen, the steps are in And not only are they infinite, they're constantly changing. You don't know if the step is underneath you. You don't know if it's the left. You don't even know if it's right. You don't even know if it's there sometimes. You just have to believe that there is another step. And that's how you get to winning.

There's nothing about winning that's that simple. It's like I get this question all the time. What's the one thing? There is no one thing. There is. But everybody, they want to cut out the infinite things and just get to the one thing. The only one thing is winning. But in order to get to winning, there's infinite things that you have to do to get to that area.

I can then sort of extrapolate what you might think about motivational folks on social media or even podcasts where they're like, all right, you've got to just do this. And you've got, here's a photo of me meditating in the snow, right? Or like doing a handstand with one arm, which is impressive. I can't do that. Right. But I wonder what real athletes think about that because that's the stuff they use to sell like sports watches or socks.

But I don't think real athletes, I don't think Kobe Bryant saw an Instagram photo of somebody doing a headstand on one arm and was like, man, that's awesome. You know, I don't think that ever happened. No, you know what? It's funny. Motivation to me is entry level. It's entry level.

If you need motivation, you're just beginning the race. That means somebody else. is making you do something that you don't want to do, all right, where you constantly need motivation, you constantly need motivation. These athletes and these business people, they're not looking for motivation. They're looking for elevation. That's what they're looking for. They're looking to elevate their game. They're looking to elevate their business. They're looking to elevate their lives. I've never one time had to raise my voice to my athletes because their motivation, was at such a high level. It was internal. It was an external. You know, it's kind of like that sugar

high. You know, you go to these different conferences and everybody gets you all fired up and they, everybody's clapping hands and they're giving you high fives and everybody's jumping up and they all tell you, let's go. And then once the event's over, where they're like, where are we going? Right. There's no direction. There is no direction. And it's just like, if you eat a lot of candy, you're buzzing around all over place, it's the same thing with that motivation. You go on this extreme high, and then there's this extreme letdown. Once you figure out what the work that it's going to take and the time and the effort that you're going to have to put in, not somebody else that's going to be constantly pushing you and telling you and so forth. You have to figure this out,

a lot of it on your own. I think that's why the stuff that you mentioned is so popular, right? They're getting psyched up and getting motivated. One, it's fun. And two, like, if you tell me I just have to go to this get site seminar and they'll lay out the roadmap and they'll hold my hand all the way through it. That's really tempting for somebody who doesn't know anything about business. And that's what you see a lot with like multi-level marketing companies. They're like, oh yeah, just buy this and then follow your upline and they'll tell you what to do. And it's all mentorship. And you're like, great, a mentor, they're going to pull me up with them. Oh, it's only $10,000 or whatever it is. But none of that is real because the people that are really successful are the ones that are just doing

all of this sort of like black box stuff where like you said, the steps not only are vague or possibly something you don't even know about. They're not necessarily even there. Yeah. I always ask all my athletes, my business part of my businesses that I speak to, the CEO, the clients, I always ask them, describe winning in one word, one word. And, you know, when you go to these motivational things, you'll have people come in and say, you know, it's fun, it's happiness, it's exciting, it's exhilarating, and all this other stuff. When you talk to the individuals that win over and over again, this was some of the answers that they gave me. We put this in a book. Uncivilized. It's hard. It's nasty. It's dirty. It's unpolished.

It's rough. It's unapologetic. It's unforgiving. And then Kobe Bryant, his answer was, Winning is everything, but you have to do everything for winning to be everything. That's how these individuals describe winning because they're not thinking about the celebration at the end, which is small and short. They're thinking about the race that they had to go through in order to get to winning. And in that race, that's where all the things are. That's where you spend more time in the uncivilized, in the nasty, in the unpolished, than you do actually in the winning. It's kind of like a graduation from high school. That's two days of fun or a day of fun or whatever, but the rest of it is high school. Most of us remember the four years more than we remember

the graduation ceremony. It's people's parents that remember those ceremonies that I didn't even go to. That makes two of us. Yeah, I never went to my high school graduation, college graduation law school graduation once the hard part was over i was kind of like on to the next thing i don't need to sit here and like pat myself on the back my parents are proud of me they already told me that i don't give a crap about the strangers who are here you know and most people that are clapping for you they don't even know why they're clapping no and most of the ones that are clapping are actually not clapping for you because they're happy they're not yeah they're waiting for you to fall because there's more to talk about and there's more excitement in a person's life because

they can deal with failure more than they can deal with success. That's an interesting point. I think, do you think that people are waiting for you to fall because it makes themselves feel better or just because it's, does it humanize it in some way? Why do you think that is? Because I know that, like, there's petty people that want other people to fail because they've never tried. There's that.

But is there something more to it? Yeah, well, I say most people are afraid of success because once you become successful, now everybody sees that version of you. And in order to get success again, you've got to become a better version. You've got to become a stronger version. You've got to become a smarter version. You've got to become more of a winning version. So people like to stay in the middle.

And that's where a majority of the people are because that's where the comfort is. You're not super successful. You're not at the bottom. You're kind of in the middle. You have a lot of conversations. You have a lot of stuff to get along with individuals with. And then once that individual starts to separate from that group, Instead of that group uplifting that individual, most of them are trying to pull them back because they couldn't get to that next level of success and they don't want to be left behind.

One of the chapters in the book is winning makes you different and different scares people. So success makes you different. People are scared by different. What they don't understand, they're automatically turned off by. The example is perfect of what you just said. sit in a conversation with 30 individuals and you tell them you never went to your high school graduation, you never went to your college graduation, you never went to your law school graduation. People are like, what do you mean? How could you not do that? Because majority of the people

do those things. And you're like, this is done, this is complete. I don't need validation from anybody else. What's next for me? Your wins were, I graduated high school. I graduated college, I graduated law school. Those wins are done. What's my next win? What's my next win? To me, it always seemed like, look, when you're young, all you know is school, but it's really clear from the jump that that's just preparing you for life.

So there was a part of me that's like, wait, I haven't achieved anything. All I've done has gotten out of, like, the part where now people aren't afraid I'm going to, like, accidentally kill myself by falling, you know, or like, now I have the basic skills enough where I can walk into an office and at least be somewhat trainable, you're kind of like a blank slate. Before that, you're just like pieces of wood on the floor. So it didn't seem, not that it was entirely unworth celebrating, but you're right. It was like no validation from the outside was required. And certainly not the kind of validation that you get from, well, it was also expensive to go to those things. I don't know if you remember. It's like, you know, a thousand bucks to

rent those things or whatever. Yes. And also think about it. What's the question after the celebration that somebody always asked you, what's next now? What are you going to do now? What are you going to do now? So you talk about going for those individuals that are on an extreme high from that motivation of I just finished. When they get asked that question,

you talk about a crash coming down because most individuals don't know. They don't know where the next win is. That's a good point. I actually, I don't remember thinking this, but I'm pretty sure that part of me not going was, well, one, I want to be on a plane going somewhere else because I only have a month off or whatever before my job starts. But the other thing was,

I don't want somebody to ask, like, oh, where are you working now? I mean, we spend three years planning how to get jobs in law school. I don't want to talk about that anymore. Yes. I don't want to be, you know, we measuring with all the other people who are working at these different firms. Like, that's our whole career is going to be like that, probably. So you wrote in the book, you don't have to love the work. You just have to want the end result. And I think that's a real difference from what we see in our sort of social media landscape where, Even companies that are advertising things, it's like, oh, you got to want the journey. And it's like, well, maybe a guy like me has to want the journey if I'm trying to, like,

lose those last 10 pounds or, like, hire a trainer and show up every morning. But a real world-class athlete doesn't really need that, right? That's not on the docket. There's a lot of these cliches out there that instead of helping you, they actually hurt you. You know, they said, you got to love the process, all right? The process, you have to do the process. The process is not an option. In anything you're trying to become successful at, you have to do the process. The end result is not guaranteed. You know, you can go through a year of process and get closer and closer and still not get to the end result

and the process starts all over. All right. So you have to do that. The process you have to do, it's a non-negotiable. The end result is not always going to be there. I don't know a single individual that loves 100% of what they do, 100%. That's not there. But if you crave that end result, you think my athletes enjoyed practicing? You think they enjoyed the 90 minutes or two hours workouts that they had to do with me every single day,

sometimes twice a day? They didn't enjoy those things, but they crave the end result so much that the work was irrelevant. They knew they had to do the work in order to get that end result. And, you know, this other one is, about it's the journey, not the destination. Well, here's my problem with that.

Why are you taking the journey if there's no destination? So what are you doing? Just aimlessly walking around or flying around or so forth? Most people that take a journey, they take a journey with a destination. Winning requires that destination. You just can't be aimlessly walking around, but that's just another way of saying, take your time. You have plenty of you.

You got time to do this. You got that. I always say this. While you're going on three, one, two, three, somebody's already left on one. They've already left on one, and they got a head start in their journey, your journey, but they also have a destination of where they're going to. Tell me a little bit about meeting Michael Jordan, because I think this story illustrates that leaving on one.

You mentioned it in the newest book as well. It's like he was ready to go on one, literally. Listen, we wouldn't even get to one, and he was ready to go. When I met Michael, the whole process was there was no emails back then. there was no social media. This was back in the late 80s. So I saw a small article in the newspaper saying how Michael was tired of taking the physical abuse from the Detroit Pistons. So what I did was I literally sent a letter, a written letter stamped to every player in the Bulls organization except Michael Jordan. Because my philosophy was back then, I was like, well, if I could show the results with these other players, then maybe I can get Michael's interest. Or Michael was so good, he probably already had somebody he was working out with. Those letters got to every single player. Michael reached into somebody else's locker, saw the letter read it,

and told the team athletic trainer and doctor and said, find out what this guy is about. So the best of the best, who is already at the top of his game, are always more coachable. They're always looking to get better. So I went through a three-month process making sure the athletic trainers and the medical staff knew what I was talking about. Actually, when I went to school, I actually learned something. And then three months later, they told me, just here's the address.

They didn't tell me who this was for, so I had no idea who I was meeting. They gave me an address and they said, hey, just be at this house at 1.30 and the client will meet you there. And this was before Michael was before the gated houses and the security and all. all that other stuff. So you could literally just walk up to the house and ring the bell. So I walked up to the house not knowing who it was. I rang the doorbell. And Michael Jordan opens up the door. And we sat and talked for 30 to 45 minutes. I explained my philosophy. I told him what I could do, the program I would set up for him. And he told me this doesn't sound right. And I said, this doesn't get any writer. I said, give me 30 days. 30 days turned into 15 years.

There was an anecdote, I think, in the book where you said, all right, when do you want to start thinking like I got to order all this crap from, I don't know, Dunham's or whatever, supporting goods stores where we're in existence in that era. Yeah. And he's like, tomorrow at 8 o'clock or 5 o'clock, whatever time in the morning. And you're just like sandbags. Yeah, that's exactly. So I literally had that evening to figure out, I looked at the space, you know what I had to do.

I had some contacts with some small equipment companies. And I literally picked up that equipment. me and a couple of friends moved it in, into the house and put it together that evening for this workout the next morning. And that's exactly what you said. I couldn't have waited on three. I could have told Michael, well, you know, I can't do this. I can't, you know, this is going to take two weeks.

This is going to be there. You go figure it out. And that's what I said. Listen, I knew he was a type of individual that moved on one and I had to be the same way. And you didn't, the thing is people could go, oh, well, you should have prepared for that knowing who he was. But you didn't even know he was going to answer the door. Like to reiterate, you thought this is going to be somebody who's maybe even warm in the bench

they're just testing you out, giving you a test run, who knows? And I didn't expect it to be an individual that was like, okay, you know what? Yeah, now that I've understood, I have your philosophies, I'm going to talk to a few other people. I'm going to think about it. I'm going to do that. These people, when they believe it's something and they understand that you have to take a gamble on yourself, and meaning take a gamble on yourself is sometimes taking a gamble

with somebody else, they're ready to go now. They are ready to go now. And these individuals so high strong, they're so internally motivated where they don't need the rah-ha-ra-ha. They want to see results. They want to see results over and over and over again. And they want to see results that benefit their ability to perform at the highest level. Whether it's an athlete, whether it's a CEO, it doesn't matter who it is. You've written about focusing only on internal pressure because you can control that. And I wonder, does this mean that we should put more pressure on ourselves than others can throw on us so that it's never unregulated or surprising?

I mean, I guess it'll always be surprising. But I guess if we're putting the pressure on ourselves, then what we get externally is never going to be too much for us to handle. Does that make sense? 100%. I agree with you all the way on that. To me, pressure is a privilege. If you're put in a pressure situation, that means somebody believes in you.

That means somebody believes in you. If they believe in you, why don't you believe in yourself? All right? Pressure is a privilege. Pressure defines who you are and who you're not, but it also defines who you can become. Because pressure exposes a person's strength. It exposes a person's weakness,

but it also exposes the individual on how they handle certain situations. I mean, I give it this great story of my, in his last Utah, last championship, game six. There's 42 seconds left on the clock. 42 seconds. They're down by three points. Not a single other Bulls player touched the ball in those 42 seconds. Not one.

Not one. Michael got the ball. He scored. Utah brought the ball down. All right. He stole the ball from Caram alone, took the ball down the court again, and scored again. that's what meaning pressure is a privilege. For most individuals, that's the most stressful situation out there.

And I just say, listen, stress is just pressure that you didn't decide to deal with. Because if you deal with a pressure situation every single day or every time it comes up, you won't have to, it won't turn into stress. It will not turn into stress. But in order to be put in that pressure situation, your obligation to yourself has to be greater than anybody else's obligation to you. You know, if somebody else tells you, you got to want it, well, does that mean they want it more than you do? You got to want that end result.

You got to want that pressure. Your expectations on yourself should be higher than anybody else's expectations on you. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Tim Grover. We'll be right back. Now back to Tim Grover on the Jordan Harbinger Show. It sounds like this isn't, you know, myth and power of positive thinking, but it's about how. having the confidence to know that you can handle any situation that comes at you, any sort of permutation whatsoever, because you've practiced it, you've drilled it until you were blue in the

face versus, I'm trying to sort of distinguish this from a lot of the folks that come through and they're like, oh yeah, you know, relish the challenge that comes your way and like, that sort of like feel the burn where it's like, oh, you screwed up all your logistics because you were unprepared, oh, well, the pressure's going to make you better. And it's like, well, no, that was a lack of preparation, not the right, not the right kind of stress, maybe. Exactly. And, you know, I have this thing that I say, every single one of your plans should be a plan A. There shouldn't be plan A's, plan B's, plan C's. Because, listen, to me, if you have a plan B, that means it's not as good as your plan A. You should have multiple plan A's. They should be equally as effective, equally as good. Your first plan A may not

work, but your second plan A may or your third plan A. But if you literally have plan A, plan B, plan C, you're creating a safety net that you don't need. Many times pressure is you got to throw yourself over the ledge instead of having somebody else throw yourself over the ledge. You got to know that that next step is, you got to believe in your ability to know that's what that next step is there. You know, winning isn't going to meet you halfway. It's going to meet you at the end. And it's going to watch you go through that unforgiving race to see what's going to come out on that other end. It's like a battlefield that goes on in your mind all the time. You have these constant wars, these constant bombs that are constantly going on in your head.

You know, your anger, your fear, your anxiety, all these different things. And yourself and other individuals are trying to explode those things. They're trying to get you distracted. They're trying to get you out of focus. are trying to teach you not to deal with pressure. You know, that's that kind of that old adage of, you got this. Well, what do you got? What do you have?

What is this? What exactly is this? Because your definition of this is completely different than my definition of this. And what you said about the routine, about the preparation, about doing things over and over and over again, allows those individuals to excel and compete and handle those pressure situations. and get the results that other individuals just can't get. It's interesting to look at the example of Michael Jordan in your book. This might have come from the earlier book, Relentless,

but it's also come from some of the talks that you've given that I've seen, where the show doesn't start and stop with the game, right? I'm trying to remember this, but like Michael Jordan would always wash his car, even if it was raining or something like that, right, and then drive up. You know what I'm talking about? You know, for most individuals, the preparation starts when they, you know, when they get to practice or they get to shoot around or get to the, the game. His preparation started the minute he woke up. Everything he did on that particular day

was to prepare himself for the game. The meal, the pregame workout, he had his timepiece. I always said Michael didn't wear watches. He wore timepieces. There's a huge difference. He didn't drive cars. He drove automobiles. The car was already cleaned. The suit was laid out. So everything had a routine. So he didn't have to think about those things. So he could stay focused on the game, on the opponent, all the other thing. Those were his necessary steps in order to diffuse the battlefield in the mind. Because if you have all that chaos going on the day of the game, you're thinking about your tickets, you're thinking about what to wear, where your clothes are, where your practices, where everything is, those bombs are constantly exploding in the head. You have that routine,

you have that pattern, you say, this is what I do to succeed. This is what I do to stay focus. This is what I do to win. This is what I do to win over and over and over again. And those routines got really disrupted for a lot of individuals with a pandemic. Because a pandemic forced all new routines. There was a bunch of changes. And some people were able to adapt and other individuals weren't able to adapt. A lot of people always wanted to say, man, I wish I could work from home. You got a chance to work from home, all right? People want to say, I want to spend more time with my significant other. Well, you got a chance not only to work from home, but maybe spend more time with that person. It isn't always what you think it's going to be. Are you speaking from

personal experience right now? Well, no, I'm just saying it's not that, listen, I'm sitting here. I'm talking to you through, you know, squad chest, and I have my dog in my lap, and I literally have my cat walking through that desk that I have. The doorbell could be ringing. It's raining outside. When you actually have to go to an office, those things aren't with you. Those aren't distractions.

That isn't a new normal. That wasn't a part of your new normal routine. Having your kids homeschooled while you're trying to work. Do you have the ability to adapt or are those mind feels constantly going on because now your routine has been severely affected? Now, for a lot of individuals, that was a good thing because you were in a routine that wasn't beneficial to your success. It was just one of those things that you just did every day over and

over and over again. It's just like, you know, how's your day going? My day is good. Another day, another dollar. How you doing? I'm surviving. You know, all the old adages that people always say, every time everybody asks me how my day is going, I always say, it's a great day. It's great. And I could be having the worst day out there, but I can't let anybody else know that's what's going on. If I tell myself, it's going to be a great day, it puts me in the correct mindset. And some of my worst days are nothing compared to some other individuals. What the experiences they're going through life and the heartaches that they're going through. So I look at it that if I'm able to open my eyes and put my feet on the ground, everything else is up to me after that.

It's interesting you should bring that up. I read in your book that are you half Indian or part Indian? Actually, I'm all Indian. Both my parents are Indian, yes. So, I mean, that's a country right now where you think about, like, man, I'm lucky I don't live there, you know, picking plastic pieces out of the garbage like you see on National Geographic or whatever, where these, like, the poor people have no access to water, let alone school or shoes or anything. It's unbelievable.

That's what I just said. It's all perspective. Listen, I don't have everything I want, but I have. have more than what I need. I have more than what I need. And you look at other individuals and you just take things in there. Listen, I'm fortunate enough to do what I set out to do. I went to school for this. I'm one individual that said, hey, this is what my education background is. This is where I invested my time. This is where I invested my money and I actually get a chance to do that. You get how many individuals that go to school for one thing or get educated in something else and

end up doing something completely different. All right. I'm blessed. and fortunate that I was able to find a path, my own path to winning, to get me to where I want to be. Knowing now that you're Indian, I wonder if when you were training Michael Jordan and all these elite athletes to win world championships if your mom was still like, so are you going to go to medical school now next year? Jordan, great story, and I'll share this with you. I actually got accepted into medical school. So when I went to college, my parents asked me, what are you going to study? What are you going to do? and I told him I wanted to train professional athletes.

And they were like, what are you talking about? Like, trained professional athletes. Like, even back then, sports athletes did not have individual trainers. They dealt with the training staff that the team had. So this was something that was not even conceivable back then. What kind of doctor does that, Tim, I don't know. Exactly. So, you know, and growing up in an Indian family, especially back then, you have two career choices.

Doctor is being one. and the doctor's being number two. That was it. And then as time evolved, you got, you know, later on, lawyers were, you know, you were able to go to, you wanted to be a lawyer or an engineer or whatever it would be. So my parents didn't understand, but they said, listen, we still want you to take the entrance exam to medical school. I said, fine.

So the first time I took it, I totally bombed. Oh, man. Totally bombed. And my dad goes, nice try. He goes, I knew this was going to happen. I've already registered you for the next one. Because he knew I was going to blow it on purpose. What a vote of confidence.

Hey, I already registered to shoot for the other one. I don't even need to know the score. Yeah. Well, he knew I blew it on purpose. He was like, all right. He's going to be like, all right, well, see, Dad, I'm not smart enough to get into medical school. There's no. He was like, yeah, he goes, I've played this game, too.

I understand. So then I took it again and I scored fairly well, and I got accepted into, you know, some pretty high-end medical schools. Then having to tell them, I'm not going. You talk about winning is the ultimate gamble on yourself. That was having confidence in myself to know that I'm going to choose a different path and I'm going to get that end result because that was my ticket to the freedom of the life I wanted to live, not what somebody else wanted to live.

You know, you take the chance on yourself and you never doubt what the outcome is going to be. No, when you start, listen, you have a law degree. Yep. You never doubted, hey, this is what I'm going. to do and this is what the outcome is going to be. This show? Yeah, no, the law, if anything, the law degree was me going like, ah, I guess I should try something else, you know,

got to buy myself some time here. That was what that was. Exactly. So you had fear. I had fear when I was like, oh, I'm going to train professional athletes. You had fear when you said, all right, I'm going to do this exceptional podcast. And I try to tell it, it's okay to have fear, but winning doesn't want you to have doubt. You cannot have doubt.

You had fear, but you had no doubt. Others individuals may have had doubt. You didn't have any doubt that this was going to be successfully for you. This is what you wanted to do. This was the gamble on yourself. There's a big difference between the two. Most people thought I was a total idiot for doing this, especially people who were in law school. My parents were pretty supportive, actually, surprisingly so.

Probably because they thought, oh, he'll get over this phase and then he'll get a real job. They were like, I'm not going to even try and fight him on this. he'll eventually, but all my law school classmates, almost without exception, where like you are so stupid. You should be focusing on your career. This is just going to get you fired from any job you have

because they're going to see you're like moonlighting and wasting your time. You know, nobody even knows a podcast are. There's no money in it. This is dumb. Like it's a hobby. You're just wasting your time. But see, the interesting part about that statement

is you were focusing on your career. It just wasn't the career. Yeah, it just wasn't a law career. Yes, that was a point. Like, it wasn't a lack of focus. It was like, actually I am focusing in on my career. I'm just not focusing in on the career you think I should take. Yeah, that's a good point.

That's a really good point. There was a lot of like, you're wasting your time doing this. And meanwhile, there's plenty of time to focus on a few different things. Half the people that were like, you're wasting your time. I was like, you're at the bar five days a week. What are you talking about? I'm wasting my time. Let me see a bar tab from yesterday.

You ate six pictures of Sangria, man. Hilarious. Would you say that emotions make you, well, this is an overly generalized statement, would you say that emotions can make you weak in performance dependent activities, right? I do. And again, you know, it's funny, I'm glad you got a chance to read the book and review it because a lot of topics that you're bringing up. You know, we discuss in this book winning. One of the chapters, again, is winning isn't heartless, but you use your heart less, all right? which means your mind has to be stronger than your feelings. Your mind is over your feelings. Think about all the unsettling or bad decisions that you've made in your life. No thanks.

But a lot of them were through emotions and through feelings. You knew up here what the right decision was. You knew from a mental standpoint, what do you mind? This was the right decision. But from an emotional standpoint or from a feeling standpoint, you're like, I'm going to go this way. I'm going to go this way. Your heart in that decision was stronger than your mind, and it didn't turn out very, very well. It just didn't. It just didn't. So feelings make you overthink everything. Feelings make you overthink, overthink, overthink, overthink, your mind makes decisions. And it may not be popular decisions. If you would have went with your heart and everybody else's heart

and everybody else's emotions, you and I would not be talking here right now. You'd be in law school. You'd be practicing law somewhere. And now if I needed to hire you for whatever law practice you were going in, maybe our paths would have crossed. But your mind was stronger than your feelings. You were like, this is what I'm going to do. This is the path I'm going to take.

I got to take my heart out of this. I got to know that I am not the problem. When most individuals, when they get their feelings, when they think about an emotional thing, they feel like they're the problem. Like take the law school thing, your buddies are saying you need to focus in on law school. You need to focus in on your career. You need to focus in on becoming a successful lawyer. So then now you're sitting here and thinking, well, I'm not going to.

Am I really the problem? Yeah, maybe they are right. And you start to get a little emotional. And then when your mind comes in, you make that decision, you're like, no, I'm not the problem. They're the problem. I know exactly what I want to do. And it's the decision from the mind is going to negatively affect a lot of other individuals because that's not the decision they want it for you. Yeah, that's an interesting point. And I think a lot of people are dealing, a lot of students deal with this because they get pressure from everywhere and people who are

in any kind of transition. But I would imagine some of your corporate clients deal with this as well because they've got boards. Even if they're a CEO, they've got the board saying, well, hey, you know, look, this other company in our niche is doing this. We should just pivot and do that. I mean, you really have like a lot of outside influence that's not necessarily qualified or in a position to make a decision. And it gets you second guessing yourself. The art of overthinking is creating problems that don't exist. If you constantly overthink, you start creating problems that don't even exist. My greatest athletes, whether they're in football, baseball, they don't worry about taking a swing. They haven't swung yet. They don't worry about

taking a shot they haven't taken yet. They don't worry about, well, if I miss, this is what's going to happen. If I make it, this is what's going to happen. Now you get so much emotion involved in that thing. Make a decision. Don't make suggestions. Make a decision and see what the outcome is. Because when you make that decision, you start to perform with energy. And most people perform with emotion. When you make the right decision for yourself, when you use your heart less, you perform with energy, not with emotion. And that's the most successful CEOs. That's what the most successful business people, the most successful money managers, the most successful athletes, the most successful teachers, the most successful anything that you can think of. They perform

with energy, not with emotion. Just think about individuals that are waiters or waitresses at restaurants. If they performed every single day with their emotions, it would not be, yeah, see, I don't even have to go any farther. You already know. You already know, we've all been in that situation. We've always seen with that. They go in and they perform with energy. They do what they have. They deal with different customers' complaints, not like this. This isn't right. Isn't here. I'm sorry, your table isn't ready. Don't da, da, da, all this other stuff. If they use their heart in all that thing, it would create more chaos. Yeah, it's funny. We think. We think. about people in those positions and it's like, hey, don't use your emotions. But then you hear

with other high performers like, oh, harness your emotions, harness your emotions. Is that something that should not be done? What about like controlled anger and things like that? Yeah. So this is what I hate when, this is a big thing with professional organization, high schools and all this other stuff with teams. Everyone says, you know, play with emotion. Play with emotion. Yeah. Well, what emotion you want me to play with? You want me play with happiness? You want to play with sad? You You want me play with anger, you want to play with fear, you want me play with anxiety, because one emotion a person is going to play with maybe different than everybody else. Don't play with emotions.

Play with energy. Play with energy. Because emotions, they're too fluctuated. They're too up and down. If you're going to play with an emotion, you play with one emotion, not with emotions. You got to take the S out of it. You have some individuals that they play, they got this blank look on their face, they're extremely focused in the way they are perform a task, the way they do something, and you have other ones

that are constantly fired up, but they stay fired up, and they're fired up with that one emotion. There's no up and down roller coaster. There's those things. That's how you do this thing. And I have this thing, and this is also in the chapter of the heartless chapter in the book, control your thoughts, you control your emotions, control your actions. So control your thoughts, control your emotions, you control your actions. How often do you think you get so angry that you lose control? I mean, it has happened sometimes. Do you have kids?

I do have kids, yes. Okay. They know what buttons to push to make sure that you can't control your emotions. Listen, we've all been there. No one is perfect. Everybody gets angered. It's the ability to go from one emotion to another. That's the key.

If you can't go from such an high and be able to stay there for such a long level, you've got to be able to come back. Are you in that anger state for such a long period time or are you have the ability to come back into more of a neutral state or more of a happiness state? I always say with my athletes, don't go with anger. All right. Go with controlled rage because anger is just what you said. Somebody else puts you into that anger stage. That's so true. Usually when you're angry, it's somebody, like you said, your kids, your significant other, your friend, or whatever it may be. Controlled rage is something, it's internal. You get to

control how much of that rage you want to let out, how much is necessary, if any of us is necessary, but it's under control. And if you can't control that anger, you can't control that rage, that's going to lead to destructive behavior. Well, we'll definitely talk about destructive behavior. I'm thinking about my kid. He's 22 months old. So, you know, he can't really make me that angry because he's not like, I wrecked your car, dad. He's like, I took the bottle again and dumped it out again and I'm looking at you because I know you get super pissed off and he's just laughing at me. So I, it's a really, it's almost like he's like a drill instructor where he's like, I'm going to keep making you like mildly annoyed by dumping out everything you give me and looking for your reaction.

After a few times, you just go, this is just him testing me. So I lose every time I get upset about this. And I can't show it because he's 22 months old. What kind of father gets pissed off at a toddler? So like, it makes you really, really. realize that your emotions are all about your reaction to everything and nothing will teach you that like a toddler. Yes. Or maybe a pet. Yes. Right. Exactly. You got to be able to control. You got to be able to control your emotions. But you can't control your emotions unless you control those thoughts first. We don't act on every single

thought. You see a toddler pouring that thing out in your first reaction maybe to run to it or grab it. And now all of a sudden, you're like, no, you know what? That's not the right thought. Because if you think that that is the right thought, then you're going to have the wrong action behind it. So the control of knowing how to control your emotions and at what stage you control it is extremely important because most of the time, like I said, other people have more control over your emotions than you do because that's a way for them to control. That's a way of them to control you by saying something that makes you feel guilty or something that you're insecure about. And they know if they just continue to peck at that on a regular basis, you'll be getting into an emotional state. And if you get that individual in an emotional

state, you have control over that individual. I always say, don't let other individuals push your buttons. You need to be able to pull your own, you need to be able to pull your buttons, and then you have the ability to push the buttons that you want to get that end result. If you're constantly letting someone else push your buttons, they have control. They know what buttons to push to get what reaction out of you. So do you have the ability to pull your own buttons and to push them and know which ones you need to do to get through that race in order to constantly win, win, and win. You know, when your son stops doing that, that's a win. That is a win. But if you don't do it the correct way, that win is going to take so much longer. Do you think that's why

Michael Jordan goes, would used to go into the other team's locker room and just kind of, I don't know what he was doing in there, saying hi to people. It seemed innocuous, but he was just in there to be like, I'm on your territory. It's like that whole like not touching, can't get mad. I'm not touching you. You can't get angry. Like that kind of thing. Right. The reason he did that was to, now everybody was focusing in on him instead of focusing in on the game. So now if the coach was writing plays up there or they were watching film or whatever, now all of a sudden everybody's like, well, they forgot about that. Michael just walked in. And especially the young guys, they wanted to see how Michael was dressed, what he was wearing, the shoes that he had on, who he was coming to talk to. And why is he

doing this locker room? And Michael would come in sometimes and just say, hey, who's guarding me tonight? The other team would say, you know, it's Calvert or it's whoever. It'll be like, boy, it's going to be a long night for you. And just walk. And now everybody starts laughing because now what happens is Michael actually took over the headspace. before the game even started. They're so focused in on that moment. They're totally forgetting about what they have to do an hour later. That's really devious and good, because I can imagine a coach being like,

hey, forget about that. And everyone's like, I can't, you know, okay, sure. And they're just like two seconds later paying attention to it. It's like the athlete that always, you know, everybody tells you, don't think, don't think. You know, just go out there and perform. Well, what's the first thing that happens when somebody tells you don't think? Right. You start thinking.

You think. Why not? Why shouldn't I think? Is there something wrong thinking? Yeah. Right. You start thinking. recovering from a loss, this sort of touches on emotion a little bit. You mentioned in the book

Winning that when you're recovering from a loss, you just dissect it until it falls apart. What's going on here? That's kind of a brilliant tactic, actually. Well, so this is how I look at a loss. Here's another cliche that I just tell just absolutely just, ooh, it irks me and it teaches people the wrong thing. And that's why a lot of people can't get to where they're at because these cliches have been going on for years and years and years and years. And I'm trying to give people, this is not how the champions do it. This is not how the winners do it in life. They always say, when you get knocked down, you need to stand right up again. You know, you get knocked down, stand back up. Well, a loss is a knockdown. If you just jump back up,

you're going to fall again because you didn't realize what puts you on that floor. So I always say, when you get knocked down there, stay down for a little bit. Understand what you were doing down there. How did you get down there? Educate yourself. Learn from that experience. Because when you stand up, you can't stand up the same person. So if you get knocked down once and you figure out why you got knocked down, when you stand up again, you're going to be stronger than you were when you get knocked down. When you get knocked down again, you stay down there a little longer and you figure up, you stand up again, you're going to be smarter.

When you get knocked down a third time, and your knockdowns are infinite. When you knock down, you stay down there again. It's another loss. You stand up. You're going to be more resilient. So every time you stand up, you have to stand up. you have to stand up a different individual than the individual that got knocked down. Otherwise, your losses are just going to be more losses, more losses, more losses.

Yeah, it looks good to everybody else when you get knocked down and you stand back up again, but you're standing up the same person. You didn't learn why you got knocked down. And sometimes you only need to be down there for a minute. Other times you have to be down there, maybe for weeks, maybe even for a month, until you figure out what's going on of why you keep ending up with this loss and you're not in this race to win. It's kind of like dating where people keep getting attracted to the wrong kind of partner

and then it's like, hey, maybe stop dating and go to a therapist and find out why you keep getting together with people who steal your money or whatever. Yeah. It's kind of that similar scenario. Like you have to reflect on it. Otherwise, you're just getting beat up for no reason. Exactly. Exactly.

This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Tim Grover, over. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening to the show. It means the world to me. The team loves it. We just had a meeting recently where we talked about how awesome all of you listeners are. Your support of us in the reviews that you write on Apple Podcasts, the emails you send us, your support of our advertisers, that all keeps us going. And by the way, all the discounts, all those promo codes and special URLs and stuff, I don't expect you to remember all that stuff. You can find them all in one place at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please do, consider supporting those who support us. And I know you think, oh, it's a big show. Everybody's

probably using those links. I don't need to. Everybody thinks that way. We lose like 50% of our sales referrals because people just Google a thing. Please do use our code. Please go to Jordan Harbinger. com slash deals. Use those discounts. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for today's episode. We make those so that you can grab the drills, some of the exercises, talked about during any episode of the show, all in one easy place. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Tim Grover. You mentioned that great champions, you know, they bring the team up, they make the team better, but they're hard to work with. And I think it was, you'd said that Michael Jordan in the last

dance, other players say, oh, he's an asshole, he's hard to work with, because he didn't let emotions get in the way. How can we tell if somebody on our team or in our organization is a champion driving everyone to be better and is difficult to work with for that reason, very? versus somebody who's actually just a toxic asshole that needs to be removed from the team or the organization. Because there's plenty of people who are terrible to work with, right, under the guise of making everyone better, but they're just shitty people.

Listen, are they getting the end result? You know, everyone has a different way of elevating the team around them. And not every method works for all those individuals. But is that person, the one thing Michael said, I will never ask you to do something that I won't do myself. I come to practice, I work, I practice extremely hard. I do what I'm supposed to do. I'm coachable. I may be vocal. I may be hard on you, but winning is not easy. It's not easy. And if you haven't won anything, let me show you how to win. Are people just talking or are they actually winning? Are they getting those results over and over again? That's how you tell if a person is toxic or not. Are they, You're just jabbering, and it's easy to uplift yourself. It's easy to elevate yourself.

All right, that's the easy part. Do you have the ability to elevate the individuals around you? That is the most difficult thing to do. So what works for one individual is not necessarily going to work for the other individual. You may have an individual. On that Bulls team, Michael was the in-the-face guy. He was in your face, told you like it is. All right. And then there was Scotty, who Scotty was more of the uplifting person. He talked

to a little bit softly and so forth. So Michael knew who he could talk to. And there were many times he was like, Scotty, you go talk to him. Because Michael knew if he talked to him the way he did, it was actually going to get more of a negative result than a positive result. And that's leadership also knowing to when to delegate authority to somebody else so everyone can get that ultimate result. That individual that you talk about who's just so toxic, they're selfish in a bad way. They're selfish where it's only about them. It's not about anybody else. It's about them, them, them. When these great leaders in business, when these great leaders in sports, these great winners, everybody benefits. Yeah, are they all going to benefit at the same level?

Listen, obviously, you know, the CEO is going to, he or she or they are going to get, they're going to benefit more, all right, but even the individual that has stock options in the company or who might be making the minimum wage, they benefit from a winning culture. They benefit from a winning organization. And if they stay with that organization long enough, they will be able to know the steps that are necessary to get to a higher level. Let's talk about the dark side. This is probably my favorite part of any of the stuff that you write about. I assume a lot of people ask about this, because, well, first of all, what is the dark side, right? This is like, we see the results of this on television, usually, when we watch documentaries

about, like, Tiger Woods or whatever. I mean, and I'll ask you about him in a bit. But what is the dark side, first of all? Well, I'll tell you what the dark side is not. Okay. The dark side is not about vampires and Star Wars and so forth. That's whatever I think. The dark side, everyone has one.

It's what keeps you going when nothing else will. It's that internal fuel. It's that chip that's not on your shoulder. It's a chip that's inside of you that nobody else can touch. Only you can touch. So when everything is going wrong, where you have no energy, where you're literally living in an apartment and you have no food in that house, your dark side tells you, keep going.

It's that internal voice that's in your head that tells you we're going to get there. Keep working. Block everything else. out. And it's unique to each individual in here. I give a great example. You know, you have a lot of individuals that are raised by only one parent for whatever reason or maybe no parents at all. You may have an individual that uses that as an excuse the rest of their life. I didn't have a good family structure. My father wasn't there. My mother wasn't there or whatever it is. And then you have that other individual that says, watch me. That's their dark side saying,

watch what I'm going to do with this situation here. It what keeps you going when nothing else will. It's that internal fire. It's that desire that nobody can take away from you. It's dealing with those skeletons in your closet. It's dealing with, I have this thing that winning knows all your secrets. The dark side knows all your secrets. Now, if you don't want to share them, that's up to you. But you have to accept that part of you. You have to accept, hey, this is what's going on. I tell this story when I was a child. I was one of those individuals that always said, you know, at the middle of the night,

I would call my mom and dad and said, you know, dad, mom, there's a monster under bed, there's a monster under the bed. And this went on for a while. And you know when it stopped? I'm trying to think. Do I still do that? Yeah. Yeah.

It stopped when I realized I was the monster. It was a thing that I wasn't willing to deal with. It was a part of me. And when I finally accepted it, that monster is a part of me. There's a monster in all of us. We just have to know whether it's a good monster, is a bad monster. Can we control it? Can we not control it?

When I realized I was that monster and this was what allowed me to be me, that monster underneath the bed went away. Now it became my job to learn, can I control this monster that's inside, or the name that they give it, the monster inside of me. That's that fuel. That's that energy. That's that exhilaration that pushes you and that drives you. It has the ability to say no when everybody else is telling you to say yes. It's your dark side came in when everybody was said, you went to law school. Whether you paid the tuition, your parents paid the tuition, you were on a scholarship, whatever. Your dark side was like, I'm not going in this direction,

when everybody else is telling you to go in this direction. Do you want athletes to access their dark side? Is that where you want them to go, or is it better to be in a more positive type of place? I want them to only access their dark side as long as they can control their dark side. If they can't control their dark side, don't let it. You've seen this destructive behavior in all forms of life with individuals that, one, they don't know what their dark side is. They get it confused with something else.

And when they do let it go, they have no control over it. And it leads to destructive, destructive behavior. Know what your dark side is. Understand it. Know that you can control it. Know that you can control it. Know that it's going to attack your fears. Know it's going to attack your insecurities.

It's going to be with you. It's a part of you. You have to accept it. I need my athletes to show up as a whole. I don't need them to show up only part of them. Bring everything with you and use what you need when you need it. You mentioned in the book there are CEOs that say, oh, I don't have that.

And then it's like eight months later the board's calling you because the guy's running the company into the ground, because he doesn't know, it's like the devil on the shoulder, right? If you don't really think the, if you don't see the devil on the shoulder talking to you, you think that you're making these decisions, but really it's controlling you. Exactly. That's a perfect example, perfect example. Powerful high performers that often get embroiled in scandal,

a lot of people say, oh, it's unchecked power. Do you think it's the power that they get because they're used to accessing their dark side? You know, like the DUIs or the people who end up getting caught with like, they got three women on the side or something like that. You know, what do you think's going on there? It's something they can't control. They think, well, they don't even think. They know they have this knowing feeling that I can get away.

I can keep getting away with these things. And now all of a sudden you're not in control anymore. It's in control. Not sometimes. It always leads to destructive behavior. It always usually leads to an exit of some point. So I said you've got to be able to harness it and you got to be able to control it. You got to know when to use it and when not to use it.

You got to know when to show it and when not to show it. But it's a part of you. It is a part of you. It's like everybody that's won something exceptional. And there's pictures of Kobe doing theirs. There's pictures of Michael. There's pictures of CEOs and business, CFOs, all these other things. They appreciate, they crave the solitude in the dark.

And what I mean by the dark, in a room, it doesn't have. to be a dark room, but it could be a place where they're just there by themselves. There's pictures all over Instagram of Kobe holding the trophy, just going somewhere by himself, holding the trophy. There's images of Jeff Bezos. There's images of all these individuals that are in their office by themselves after a huge width. They need that solitude. They need that darkness to understand. That's where they kind of unwind. That's kind of where they get to understand who they really are. And you can't run from it because wherever you run, it's with you. It's going to be with you. But there's such, you can't be great in what you do without it. You can't be exceptional.

You can be good. But when you're good, you're not really judged. When you're great and when you're unstoppable and when you consistently win, you're going to be judged. And people that are willing to show their dark side and know how to use it, they're not afraid to be judged. Do you think that's why a lot of players, like Kobe had the Black Mamba alter ego. Do you think that's why a lot of players contain that dark side in an alter ego instead of just letting it spill out everywhere? Yes. And, you know, again, I'm glad you read the book because that's in the book. It says Winnie knows all your secrets. And that's all about the Black Mamba. He couldn't live his life that way in his personal life, but on the basketball court, in a business life, it was like,

this is who I am. This is who I need to be. have to say now, and I have athletes all the time that talk about, you know, the mama mentality. And I tell the mama mentality, it's not a mindset. It's a lifestyle. And I've seen it destroy more careers than I've actually seen it help because that lifestyle that you have to live in order to get that wins over and over and over again. It's not for everyone. It is in a dark place. It is in a dark place. And, you know, obviously, listen, he didn't pick a garden snake. You know, he didn't say a garden snake mentality.

He picked the most venomous snake out there to be his alter ego. Yeah, it's not the dandelion mentality or whatever. I don't even know. I don't even know what other snakes there are. I've got like two. My snake vocabulary is very limited. How do we know if we're indulging our dark side for a result, right, to get something done, or we're just simply not respecting other people, not respecting our family?

Because I want to be careful not to give a pass to bad behavior because someone says, well, I'm a high performer. So I got, you know, it's my dark side, you know, sorry. No, no. And that's an excuse. That's an excuse. You could be an extremely high performer. And high performance, performing at the highest level is your dark side. That is your dark.

You're not the individual that you said earlier that doesn't go to the bar five days a week. That doesn't have a bar tap. You know, that could be the person that works too much. That's their dark side. All right. It could be the person that doesn't celebrate their wins. They just want more wins. They want more wins. They want more wins. All right. The individual that just uses that, oh, that's my dark, you know, I'm a high performer. And, you know, that's my dark side. They're not using their dark side. That's just an excuse because they're just being, you know, whatever you want to call them. They're just not, yeah. There's a difference between people that use that as an excuse and people that know how to use it for their advantage. The dark side's a very powerful thing. And we go into it really, really in detail. We went into really detail in Relentless, and then we went into even more detail into winning. And if you read that chapter, if you get that book and ask you the only chapter you read, you get a clear understanding of what it is and how each individual has

it and how each individual can use it and control it and have a better understanding of it. I thought it was a helpful chapter. I still think the concept is helpful because there's a lot of people, like right now there's almost a cult of like, oh, you know, work life balance and you got to be this way and you got to be that way. And it's almost like, but it's the same social media sort of influencers telling you, you know, just get up and be motivated to do what you want to do. Maybe this isn't what they mean, but it's kind of like saying, ah, stuff all that stuff that you feel into the back and be this different way. But that doesn't really work because you kind of need that raw, you need that raw dark side to come out because that's the side that says like,

there is no balance in what I'm doing right now. I'm focused on this and only this, and other things are going to suffer, and I will have to fix that later, but the people around me that are close to me have to realize that this is what's happening right now. Like, this is the, I got my evil mask on right now, you know? Jordan, that's, I couldn't have said it better. Listen, winning wants all of you. There is no balance.

And another chapter in the book, you know, there is no balance. There's so many books that are written out there about balance, balance, balance, listen, you don't find balance. You don't find it. Everybody's trying to find balance. You don't find balance. You create it. And the way you create balance is different than way some other individual creates balance. All right. And what everybody tries to do when they tell you you have no balance in your life, what do they try to do? They try to add more stuff.

So now you're trying to balance even more things. You know how you get closer to balance? You get rid of the unessentials. And there's so much inside of us. There's so much in our minds. There's so much in our thoughts. There's so much in our emotions. There's so much in our actions that we need to delete, that we need to get rid of. And if you get rid of those things, you actually get closer to balance. Are you going to be perfectly balanced? You're not going to be perfectly balanced. And don't judge somebody and don't try to find somebody else's balance and then try to use it as yours. The most people that talk about balance are the ones that are extremely successful now, but they don't talk about the times where they were so unbalanced before to get to

this level. Yeah, that's funny you should mention that there's a guy who's been on the show before that I really love Scott Galloway. And he talks about, he says, work life balance, that doesn't, if you want to be economically successful, because that's the angle he's coming from. He says, there's no balance until you're like 40. You know, before that, you're just, you live at the office all the time because you're working on your startup or you're working in your company and you're getting ahead and you're working six, seven days a week, and you suffer through that so that when you're 40, 45, then you can have balance because you've earned it. You're welcome to have balance before that, but you're probably not going to end up in, I think he says, like, the top 10% of earners.

Just by, it's just facts. Totally. Really. Totally agree with him. 100%. Totally, totally agree. It's like you said, the Instagram gurus and the motivational individuals, they love to talk about the feel good things.

You know, everyone sees winning as this euphoric thing. And it is. But this book is the language of winning, of what it takes for each. I don't care how small your win is, how big your win is, this is what you have to go through. This is what the race of winning requires. I don't care what level you're at. This is what it's going to take. And people just don't like to talk about it.

And I'm that one individual that not only wants to talk about it, I want it to be heard because it's essential. It's essential to your success. As an individual, as a business person, as an entrepreneur, whatever it may be. As a parent, it's essential. Tim Grover, thank you so much. Great insight here on what it takes to win as opposed to just waxing philosophical about it on Instagram. So really good insight. Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate it. Thank you again. Listen, winning, the unforgiving race to

greatness. It's in all of us. It's in all of us. Jordan, thank you so much. Great, great interview. Thank you very much. I appreciate you saying that. Your interview way back when to where you are now, I won't say it's a different person. It's a much improved person. Thank you. You've taken this to a much higher level. I'm impressed. I really am.

I actually watched the other interview the other day just to kind of like, let me look at Jordan. I was like, oh, yeah, I remember this. I remember here, same. Hey, thank you. I appreciate it. I'm always working really hard to get better at this. I have coaches for like vocal tonality and improv comedy. I'm not trying to be funny, but it's just it helps you think quicker, you know?

It shows. It shows. a great investment. Thank you. Yeah, we'll link to the book in the show notes, as we always do. I really appreciate your time. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's a trailer from my interview with Layla Ali, daughter of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali. She's got a great story about how she ended up the only other boxer in her family and how she carries her father's legacy. Whether you're into sports or not, I think you're really going to dig it. You have to have it in you to want to be a fighter. It's not something that you just go,

Well, I think I'll just try boxing, you know, because you're going to get your ass beat. If you get in you, you don't have it in you, when you get that opportunity, it was a brawl. I mean, it was bloody. It was like crazy. And I was like, I want to do that. You would think anyone punching you would hurt, right? Yeah, sure. But as fighters, it's like, oh, that person can punch, that person can't.

Tap and tap, tap, tap. And then every once in a while that, bam, that hard way, oh, okay, I felt that. If you're listening to your camp saying, she's nothing and she this or she that. And then you have to get your ass in there, and then you feel that punch. Like, no, she can punch. And no, she's not just a pretty baby. You see me across that ring looking at you, like, yeah, remember all that stuff you talk? Now it's about to happen. It's just me and you. Nobody else can get in there with you, you know? And it's like, I'm going to remind you of all the things you said they didn't know that street side of me.

Not everyone has that. You don't have to. Sure. But I do. Now you get to meet someone. You said see how they walk. See how they hold this stuff. See if there's any fear in their eyes. He didn't like it. No? No. You guys were sparring before you even put the gloves on. Oh, yeah. He supported me, though. He came to a lot of my fights. He couldn't be at all of them. I could always see that glare in his eyes of him being proud. and just to come into that arena and having everyone chanting, Ali, Ali, and you just see him light up to see me in that ring and him just remembering himself. Our boxing styles were similar, the way I'm shaped, my body shaped. So just seeing all of that had to be a super crazy experience for him. For more with Leila Ali, check out episode number 309 of the Jordan Harbinger show.

Tim's an intense guy, as you may have noticed. I like doing these. You know, it's a little outside my comfort zone because I'm not used to the whole sort of sports world. Tim had some pretty good points that we talked about off air. Most of the time when people ask for advice, we aren't looking for an answer. We're just looking for what we already know or already think, or we're looking for confirmation or validation of our ego. And Tim said to not look for the roses, look for the thorns.

Now, of course, you should be able to celebrate a little bit, but true champions, you know, the ones he is working around, they're always looking for the thorns, right? The celebration stuff that we talked about earlier, it's always sort of the minimum of that. And now this seems like it might be unhealthy, and I'm open to interpretation on this. But I'm the type that can't stop or chill out, right? I like working. It's not sort of a compulsion. I really do enjoy it deep down.

I don't want to chill out or relax. I like working on vacation. I might not choose to zero out my inbox, but vacation means I get to work on different things, not just sit at a beach with a drink all day. I do hope I mellow out later on in my life, though, I got to tell you. And I'm wondering if this is more of an affliction. than a lifestyle. You know, it's not something that I don't like hustle porn. I don't think it's healthy. So if you're not like that, I probably envy you as opposed to think that what we're doing

is healthy here. I just want to be very clear on that. I also love the distinction between allies versus friends, right? Friends tell you what you want to hear. They're cheerleaders. And that's great. It's great to have cheerleaders. But allies tell you what you need to hear. And so while you might get emotional support from friends, allies are actually telling you how to get better. And that's a huge, huge difference in distinction that I think is worth paying attention to. Tim further said that winning requires you to question what you have learned, right? If you do the same things as everyone else, you're going to be like everyone else. Even if you're at a higher level than them in other areas, you're going to get stuck.

So you have to break out of that system entirely. And Tim was very clear on this. It's in the book. He mentioned it during the show. it's about getting one 10,000th of a percent better. At the top, top, top levels, you're talking about fractions of a percent being a major advantage. And, you know, I see that in business. Of course, we see it now in athletics now that Tim's explained it to us or if you're

an athlete yourself, you know what he's talking about. And a lot of people, when they're at a high level, but not the top, right? They're not at the pinnacle. They're not really one of those exceptional characters. It seems like the cost of taking chances, you know, redoing your whole routine, redoing your golf swing. You know, Tiger Woods did that. Top of his game, and he starts to redo his swing,

and everyone's like, why? If you think the cost of taking chances is too high, wait until you see the bill for doing nothing. Big thank you to Tim Grover. The book title is winning. We're going to link to that in the show notes, as we always do. Links to all of that goodness is in the show notes,

as it always is. Please use our website links if you buy the book from any author. That helps support the show. I know it's small money, but it adds up. If you use the dang links, y'all. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes.

There's a video of the interview going up on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or hit me up on LinkedIn. I love connecting with you there because I get to see what the real you are like. You know, I look at your jobs and I ask you questions about the weird titles you have after your name or the letters. I don't know what they mean. I find that fascinating.

And, you know, on Twitter and Instagram, it's okay. But, you know, I kind of half the time you're just like it's like a picture of a gerbil or something. I don't know. Something about LinkedIn is just a little nicer. Anyway, I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course. That course is free. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. And most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to that. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with

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