I saw a question recently that stood out to me…
"How good are you on your worst days?"
What a great question!
It truly is the difference between "pretty good" and "great"...
Between someone you look up to and someone, you aspire to be like. Every NFL football team signs a quarterback and hopes he can lead them to the Super Bowl and the championship.
Good quarterbacks can win you a football game.
Occasionally, Blake Bortles beats Tom Brady in a regular season game. Every once in a while, Kirk Cousins upsets Aaron Rodgers in a division rivalry game... But you can't bank on getting an all-time great performance from someone that isn't very good when they aren't at their best.
As a Cleveland Indians fan, I will never forget the 2016 World Series...
The Indians and Cubs played in some of the greatest baseball games ever. In game 3, I had the chance to watch the first World Series game in Wrigley Field before World War II.
My date and I were the only Indians fans in the lower bowl—front and center on the third row behind the dugout. By the way, Cubs fans weren't so nice now that the game finally mattered.
Because of injuries to a few of the Indians' key pitchers, they had to throw out Josh Tomlin as the game-three starter...
He was average at best.
Before that game, though, his father was dying and they wheeled him in on a chair to watch his son pitch in his first-ever World Series. Josh stepped up big time, the Indians won the game 1-0, and it was one of the most fun nights of my life.
A few days later, the Indians and Cubs had taken one game since then and were squaring off in game 6 in Cleveland.
Win this game and they win the World Series.
The entire stadium was going nuts...
I was not; I was mostly just nervous. I had a really bad feeling about the game.
To the uneducated fan, we had a guy pitching that had just won 1-0 earlier in the week; we were set. But I had watched Tomlin pitch all year and I knew that when he wasn't his best, he was pretty bad. His ERA that year was 4.40, well below the league average.
In the first three innings, the Cubs took a 7-0 lead and never looked back. They went on to win the game 9-3 and finished off my tribe the next day, winning game 7 in extra innings.
Just like in sports, I think it is important to ask ourselves, "If I'm not my best today, what will that look like?"
In sports, it means disaster, automatic loss...
In life, it can be less complicated.
Early in my real estate career, when I was called for sale by owners every morning, I tried to keep it simple.
I knew there would be days I felt great, and I knew there would be days when I didn't feel so good. I didn't want to wake up and debate with myself on whether or not I was going to make my calls ever, so I made that decision one time that no matter what, I was getting on the phone daily.
I set hundreds of appointments that turned into commission checks and closed deals on days I felt terrible.
On days I had drama in my dating life or on the days my parents were going through a nasty divorce... If I only made those calls on the days I felt like it, I wouldn't have made many calls or closed many deals.
The same thing is true with our workouts: waking up on time, hitting the goal of your contact each day, and working on yourself.
My mentor Mike Ferry used to say, "The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is successful people have merely learned to do the things that unsuccessful people don't want to do."
I was talking to a close friend recently, and he was making fun of cold plunges. He said the science is iffy and mentioned that most people need help even to tell you the benefits of doing it.
This friend is financially successful, has a great family and friends, and lives a very comfortable life. I told him if, for no other reason, it is great for guys like him and me because it makes us very uncomfortable, and that is hard to do these days with the lives we have. That helps you with your self-discipline in every other area of life.
He began telling me that he has amazing self-discipline... However, I knew he was about 30-40 lbs heavier than he wanted to be... I responded, "So you are telling me that if you could pick any body you wanted, no questions asked, you would pick the one you have right now?" He got the point and agreed; maybe he had some work to do on self-discipline.
There are three things that you can't fake and money can't buy:
A healthy physical body
A peaceful mind
Loving relationships
These three things have to be earned. You can't buy any of them; many have tried and failed miserably.
The truth is most people are disciplined in their habits when all the conditions are met.
But how peaceful is your mind when you discover that your two biggest deals just fell through and 40% of your yearly income evaporated? How disciplined are you on the diet when it's 9:00 pm and you forgot to have dinner? Your buddies order pizza and you can smell it from the next room.
How do you do when you aren't at your best? Either you are about it, or you aren't.
I recently took my first leadership group with We Are The They to Cancun...
I had a new goal to get my weight down to 185 lbs.
I had been around 215 at the beginning of the year and was stalled out at 200 before the trip.
I knew that my biggest problem was the empty calories from alcohol. I knew I would need to stop if I was to hit my desired weight of 185 lbs.
The easy move would have been to stop drinking after Cancun. After all, there would be 75 of us down there; the whole thing was at an all-inclusive resort with free drinks, and who doesn't love a margarita on the beach?!
But I wanted to prove to myself that I was serious about this...
It's easy not to drink on a Wednesday afternoon in Orem, Utah. It's next level to be around fun people for four days straight and be one of the only ones not drinking alcohol. I committed before I left and am about to come up on two months with no alcohol.
The night on the party yacht was a tougher one not to be drinking. I knew mentally, emotionally, and physically how much stronger I was because I kept that commitment to myself, even on a night when my body was not at its best.
Even when my circumstances told me this wouldn't be a night to waste.
So how good are you, really?
How committed are you to your goals, really?
How do you react on the days or in the moments when you aren't your best?