Overcoming Laziness

Motivate Yourself By Having An Opponent

Posted by john on September 13th, 2006 — Posted in Cures For Laziness

Basketball great Isiah Thomas was asked how a player could focus and get mentally tougher while going into a championship game, where he was surrounded by distractions.

“It’s possible,” Thomas said. “You have to sustain concentration on your opponents.”

He went on to add:

“I just stayed in my hotel room and watched tape. I never got involved in the atmosphere of the Finals. My first Finals we’d played the Lakers, and we went out there and won Game 1 and lost Game 2. But we wanted to make sure we didn’t get caught up in the whole Hollywood atmosphere of Los Angeles. The people there tried to suck us up into that; they sent limousines to our hotel to take us to the Playboy Club and to parties. But we didn’t go for it. Instead, 24 hours a day I was thinking about the opponent I was going to play against.”

Source: NBA.com: Handling the Pressure

So how does this translate to your life? The solution is to concentrate on your opponents or enemies, since success is the best revenge. (If you don’t have any enemies, invent some.)

When you’re doing work, imagine how you’re gaining an advantage over that person and leaving them in the dust.

A lot of successful entrepreneurs have got an axe to grind. A lot of successful people in business got really angry about something that happened in their life, and the passion for their work is a way to channel their energy.