How SuperAchievers Think | Robin Sharma

Hi, it's Robin Sharma, the author of the Leader, who had no title. Welcome to my hotel room here in South Africa. I'm in Jo', Burg, one of my favorite cities in the world, the land of the Jacaranda, the land of Nelson Mandela. I'm about to give a presentation to about 1600 people at the Santon Conference center or convention center. And I just wanted to, in real time or right now, share some ideas that I think will take you to a whole new level of success, whole new level of focus, whole new level of mastery. In other words, the mindset of mastery. And I'm going to get right into it. The first idea I want to share with you is the hypnosis of genius. Society says that geniuses are somehow cut from a different cloth from us. So when we look at a Messi, a Federer, a Picasso, a da Vinci, a Michelangelo, a Branson, a Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Bill Gates, we see the end result of all their hard work, devotion to their craft, endless hours and years of study to be best in the world at what they did. So we look at the end result, and we forget the backstory behind genius. And I guess what I'm suggesting to you is if you look at the truth behind genius, not the hypnosis, the truth behind genius is all geniuses started off and they made a commitment, no, an obsession, to know more about their field of study than anyone else who had ever done their field of study in the history of the world. And then secondly, for years and years and years, they practiced. Now, I'm going to give you an example. Bill Bradley. Bill Bradley, very famous, many years ago, very famous NBA player. And, you know, people look at him and they looked at the end result of him on the court as an NBA basketball player. And they said, you know, he did moves that no one had ever seen before. He could pass the ball almost as if there were eyes on the side of his head. He did jump shots that were incredible, but they didn't look at the backstory. And here's the truth. Bill Bradley fell in love with basketball when he was about 10 years old. And this comes from a book called Mastery. To give credit where it's due, he fell in love with basketball when he was about 10 years old, but he wasn't naturally gifted, because genius is not the realm of genetics. Genius is the realm of practice. But one thing he did have going for him, he was very tall. And so what he decided to do, to pursue his dream of being a great basketball player was he devised one of the most disciplined, elaborate, intense practice programs ever known in the history of sports. What did he do? He got the key to his high school basketball gym, and then he would go in there, and here was his practice regimen. Three and a half hours after school every day. Three and a half hours on Sunday, eight hours on Saturday. For years. So while everyone else was watching movies, gossiping, watching tv, having fun, relaxing, chilling with their friends, he had a monomaniacal obsession to be best in the world as a basketball player. What else did he do? He put 10 pound weights on his feet so that would increase the spring in his jump shot. He bought these glasses, eyeglasses, and attached these pieces of cardboard underneath them so that way when he was dribbling, he wouldn't see the ball, he'd just look around in front of him. It improved his ball handling. Okay, what else did he do? He got all these chairs and he pretended they were opponents. And for hours and hours, over weeks and weeks and months and months and years and years, he would dribble around these chairs to become an even better passer. When he was walking down the streets in Missouri, his hometown, he literally trained himself to look straight in front of him, but through peripheral vision, notice the objects in the stores around him. So that strengthened that part of the brain. Because here's another idea. You get the brain you earn, not the brain you want. And literally, through the power of neuroplasticity, you can grow your brain, Build a smarter brain, a better brain, if you exercise the brain and practice the brain, in other words. Another example is London cab drivers. Their brains were studied, and the part responsible for spatial reasoning was larger than the average brain because of the streets they had to navigate. In London, the brain can grow. You can get it stronger, bigger, smarter. So back to Bill Bradley.