Page 17 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

the 1993 Super Bowl:

I told them that if I laid a two-by-four across the room, everybody
there would walk across it and not fall, because our focus would be
that we were going to walk that two-by-four. But if I put that same
two-by-four 10 stories high between two buildings only a few would
make it, because the focus would be on falling. Focus is everything.
The team that is more focused today is the team that will win this
game.

Johnson told his team not to be distracted by the crowd, the media, or the
possibility of losing, but to focus on each play of the game itself just as if it were
a good practice session. The Cowboys won the game 52-17.

There’s a point to that story that goes way beyond football. Most of us tend
to lose our focus in life because we’re perpetually worried about so many
negative possibilities. Rather than focusing on the two-by-four, we worry about
all the ramifications of falling. Rather than focusing on our goals, we are
distracted by our worries and fears. But when you focus on what you want, it
will come into your life. When you focus on being a happy and motivated
person, that is who you will be.

5. Learn to sweat in peace

The harder you are on yourself, the easier life is on you. Or, as they say in
the Navy Seals, the more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed in war.

My childhood friend Rett Nichols was the first to show me this principle in
action. When we were playing Little League baseball, we were always troubled
by how fast the pitchers threw the ball. We were in an especially good league,
and the overgrown opposing pitchers, whose birth certificates we were always
demanding to see, fired the ball to us at alarming speeds during the games.

We began dreading going up to the plate to hit. It wasn’t fun. Batting had
become something we just tried to get through without embarrassing ourselves
too much. Then Rett got an idea.

“What if the pitches we faced in games were slower than the ones we face
every day in practice?” Rett asked.