THE ART OF LOCKING IN - The Most Powerful Motivational Speeches for Success, Athletes & Working Out

I used to play the Halloween theme song and it was important that it was Michael Myers because the mask itself was void of emotion. It has nothing to do with camaraderie. It's stone cold killer and I would listen to that song over and over and over again. That's when you know you better run. I wasn't in the mood to talk to anybody. You know, I just wasn't in the mood. I didn't want to hear anything. I was in my mode, my focus. I wasn't going to let anybody break that. But if you are able to get up every morning with that kind of fire, you will be successful in life. I guarantee you that. Going around is a state of mind. If you can go four rounds, you can go six, you can go six, you can go 10, you can go 10, 15 and so on. It's a state of mind. It's very difficult to believe that if fighters back then can go 45 rounds, why can't we do it nowadays? It's the only state of mind. And I never played for money. You know, if I ever played for money, I would have complained a long time ago that I was being underpaid. You know, I've accomplished everything that I could. How did you get your mindset into this alter ego to be comfortable being Black Mamba? At practice or when I'm training or doing games, I switch my mind to something else, switch my mode into something else. For me, it's the equivalent of Maximus, Desmus, Meridius and Gladiator picking up the dirt, smelling the dirt. It's go time. So that was my mental switch. It was like an actor getting ready for a film. You got to put yourself in that cage. When you're in that cage, you are that character. And then when you leave, there is something completely different. But when I'm in that cage, bro, don't touch me. Don't talk to me. Just leave me alone. I don't know any of my surroundings when I'm locked in. Like, I can't hear anyone. I can't like think of anything besides the game. As long as I feel great and as long as I can still play at a high level and mentally, I'm sharp and I'm there and I'm giving everything to the game. Nothing can distract me from what the main objective is. Me and Tom Brady are one and the same. We don't play until we can't walk no more. It's tunnel vision right now. I'm just so, my mindset is on a whole other level. Nothing could distract me. Nothing could get me off my game. You know, basketball for me was the most important thing. So everything I saw, whether it was TV shows, whether it was books I read, people I talked to, everything was done to try to learn how to become a better basketball player. Everything. Everything. And so when you have that point of view, then literally the world becomes your library to help you to become better at your craft. Seeing this guy, he's so freaking determined to say, I came and gave everything I had and I'm going to give it to the last freaking second. That's what you did. Trivial things weren't going to pull my attention. Can I get to that level? I don't know, but let's find out. Whatever I'm afraid to do, I do it. Anything I'm afraid of, I confront it. And that's my personality. Like right now I'm scared to death, but as the fight gets closer, the less nervous I become because it's reality. And in reality, I'm invincible. Before the game, I could be nervous. I'm pretty much nervous at every game. But once the ball goes up for the jump ball, I think all that nervousness just kind of goes away and I revert back to things that I've practiced, things that seem to be very routine. And I'm very comfortable in that environment. How many people wouldn't give up a right arm to try to do something like that? How many people can do it the way you do it though? Depends on how much you practice. I had a purpose. I wanted to be one of the best basketball players to ever play. And anything else that was outside of that lane, I didn't have time for. It has to do with the emotional space that you can put yourself in. It's all about focus. I don't care who you are, where you're from, doesn't matter. It's having a focus and having a purpose. You wake up every single day to get better today than you were yesterday. You try to reach your full potential by getting better every single day. And that's the quest. But in order for me to actually fulfill my commitment and my gifts and fulfill what I think I can become, I have to be able to tap into the process and lock in on that. If your job is to try to be the best basketball player you can be, to do that, you have to practice, you have to train. You want to train as much as you can as often as you can. So if you get up at 10 in the morning, train at 11, 12, say 12, train at 12, train for two hours, 12 to two. You have to let your body recover. So you eat, recover, whatever. You get back out, you train, start training again at six, train from six to eight. And now you go home, you shower, you eat dinner, you go to bed, you wake up and do it again. Those are two sessions. Now imagine you wake up at three, you train at four, you go four to six, come home, breakfast, relax, so, so, la, la, la. Now you're back at it again, nine to 11, you relax. And now all of a sudden you're back at it again, two to four. And now you're back at it again, seven to nine. Look how much more training I have done by simply starting at four, right? And so now you do that. And as the years go on, the separation that you have with your competitors and your peers just grows larger and larger and larger and larger and larger. And by year five or six, it doesn't matter what kind of work they do in a summer, they're never going to catch up. My edge was my intensity. My edge was my focus and my commitment. You know, I put everything into the game. I prepared. I dreamt about it. I visualized it. I always prepared myself mentally for whatever is coming. And I felt that that was my edge. I've had friends, you know, they were always telling me, yeah, you're in the gym all the time, all day, every day. You worked at it. This is all you did. We're just talking about love and dedication of being in the gym. What was really your work ethic like and for how long did you stay disciplined? I mean, every day, I mean, since, you know, 20 years, it was an everyday process and trying to figure out strengths and weaknesses, right? So I had to rely on skill a lot more. I had to rely on angles a lot more, had to study the game a lot more. Phil Jackson gets asked between you and MJ. He said something about you that to me, the level of respect for that is a whole different level. But he said nobody in his history of coaching had your level of work ethic. But I enjoyed it though. So like from the time I was, I can remember when I started watching the game, I studied the game and it just never changed. The aspirations, the dreams of what it takes, the commitment to hard work, but more importantly, if you want to be great, oh man, prepare to get up off that mat. You're going to get knocked down over and over and over. And even when you feel like, no, I can't be hit this hard. Or if you're down there thinking it's no way I can get up from this. That's when you're just starting. That's when your survival skills have to kick in and hopefully you've trained enough in your mental preparation and really believe enough in yourself to get up. What's your routine? Like, uh, which order do you do things? We are animals of routines. You know, 19% of my days, they are very similar. I wake up, I have my cold plunge of my, of my machines. I have my showers and everything. First thing I diving first thing in the cold first thing. Yes. So I take my water, my shower, my cold plunge, I coming out to have lights in my eyes. And after that, I take my coffee. And when I starts my day, your mental strength is coming from that, from that moments that in a hard moments, you know, you should do it. Maybe in the beginning, you feel hard to start, but after when you finish the gym or cold plunge or, or even the training, you will feel better. Walk me into the prep, into a game, into those moments. Like what does it take to have your mindset ready? When it comes down to it, believing in yourself, you know, a lot of hard work and a lot of visualization. And I know that kind of sounds like very, very simple, but you know, I think the Vinci said simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, right? I would try to practice those things over and over Colby and Jordan were my heroes. And that was one of the things, you know, if you watch basketball, you hear about how clutch people are, and it's not always making the last shot. You know, it's under pressure doing what you're supposed to do and coming out successful. So I put the work into this like every day, all day. And then when I'm done with it, guess what I do? I dream about it. I visualize it. I see myself being successful. I see myself hitting those shots with a little time on the clock. And then I'll do it again and say, Hey, what if we're down to, then I'll do it again and say, what if we're down three? You know, it's a never ending game. And anytime I was successful in those situations, I mean, you know, I would always let people know it's through dedication, through your hard work and through mental preparation and visualization. If you do those things, if you can see yourself being successful in your mind, then it will appear in the physical reality. If you're calm and collected, when you get the opportunity, I always work towards it. You know, the NBA was my goal from the jump every day, all day, but I just didn't do it with words. I went to go seek the information. If I heard Michael Jordan got a thousand shots up. Well, if he's doing it, I want to be like that one day. I need to get a thousand shots up. I look for any morsel of information that would help me in my, in my journey. If I heard about how hard they worked, I wanted to do that same thing, you know, because it just, it just made sense to me. If the pros are doing this, then this is what I am aspiring to do. You have those goals that you want to reach. At the end of the day, even Alexander, one of his famous quotes is I have met the enemy. It is I right. And although that is one element of an enemy, that's great. We need that. Michael had it, Brady had it, Kobe had it, but there's a crazy psychologically, you can call it, you know, psycho competitor that they're constantly in the search of recruiting their next enemy. It's like, you know, life is boring. If I don't have my next target, you know, I'm, I'm almost, you know, bad for myself if I don't have the next target, the next enemy. And if I choose it the right way, then I'm able to bring out a side of me I've never seen before. Success is the only revenge. As you expand, they shrink into irrelevance. As you get louder, no one can hear them. You don't beat them. You cast a shadow so big, no one can see them to begin with. And that's what it comes down to. Like, what are you willing to sacrifice at the end of the day? You know, people don't understand the level of sacrifice it's going to take. And there's been moments where I realized that I compete because I want to win. I love winning. I love being the best in the world. I've sat many times trying to find the balance of what I want within all this. If I was losing, I wouldn't be competing. I'm here to win. It is hard. It's hard when you're young to wake up in the off-season at 6 a.m. to go train and work out knowing that all your friends are sleeping in and eating pancakes. It's hard when you're on your way to practice way down with all your gear and it's 90 degrees out and all the other kids are at the pool or at the beach. No matter who you are, there are bumps and hits and bruises along the way. And my advice is to prepare yourself because success and achievement come from overcoming adversity. When the rest of the world says no to you, you say yes to yourself. You say yes, I believe. You say yes, I can do it. You say yes, nothing can stop me. If you want to be a great player, if you play every single day, two, three hours, every single day over the course of a year, how much better are you getting? Most kids will play maybe, you know, an hour and a half, two days a week. It's not going to get it done. People are champions when they really see themselves with no limits, when they really see themselves great because when you see yourself there, you are much more willing to do the work. You are much more willing to break barriers that others don't break because they don't really see themselves breaking those barriers. And this young guy Djokovic is 19 years old and he plays Roger for the first time in a Grand Slam. He's nobody. When Novak Djokovic started, Rafa and Roger were winning everything. It's impossible to win a Grand Slam with those two guys. You can't beat them. They're just way better than everyone. And he's interviewed before the match and he says, I'm going to beat this guy. And I remember the press went really bad against him. But he was seeing him there. He was seeing himself there. He was seeing himself better than them, which maybe people saw that as being cocky, but he was just very confident about his abilities. And he ended up being the best of the three. He beat all the records. He beat them on every level because his self-belief was extremely high. His self-esteem, the way he was seeing himself. That's how I know if someone is a champion. And a lot of people fake it, which is better than not faking it, but it's not as good as really believing it deeply inside. Talk to the young players. They will say, I want to be number one. I mean, they wish. Yeah. The ones who really want to, you know, because they're not only saying it, but they're putting on the work. And this is a big difference because when you really believe you can get there, it's much easier. It's never easy to work hard, but in a way you are willing to do everything to get there. When you wish it, you do things halfway or you don't do it fully. So that's a big difference. But when you look at the road to winning, people look at you and they're like, you're a success, but your road has so many more steps. Those steps are infinite. Sometimes you get to see them. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes they're there. Other times they're wobbly. You don't know if that next step is going to be there, but you have enough belief in yourself to say, I know it's there. I'm going to take that step. I may miss the step. I may fall. I may get scraped. That step may go into quicksand, but I know there's another step. I know it. I believe inside me that there's another step that I have to take that somebody else isn't making me take. Those steps are infinite. Winning is infinite. Those steps are infinite.