Olympic skier Eileen Gu lives by "I train like I've never won and I compete like I've never lost." In training, she obsesses over tiny errors. In competition, she assumes she's the best and everyone else is fighting for second.
Chapters
I have a saying where I say, I train like I've never won and I compete like I've never lost. Say that again. That is so good. I train like I've never won and I compete like I've never lost. And that's important because, A, I find it's difficult to win, but it's way harder to stay there. And for me, you know, now through 2 Olympic cycles, and also so much happens between age 18 and 22, like staying in peak form during that period of your life specifically as a woman is very, very difficult. From my last Olympics to now, I went through all of college. Like, I was a high school grad and now I'm a college grad, and that's just 2 different people. Um, so that's one. The second thing is it keeps you hungry, and that's what allows you to perform over time. The third thing is in order to be a winner, you have to have this like insatiable, almost like obsessive, religious, just like all-in mentality when you compete. But because it is so intense, you cannot sustain it always, because that's what creates really dangerous egos. It's what creates the like hubris and overconfidence and complacency that undermines good training, because you have to be very critical of your own training. You— for me, I see only my mistakes when I'm training. There's— I can never do anything right. Like every single thing, I'm like, oh, you know, I'm 2 degrees off on that. Oh, I was like a second early. Oh, look at my upper body. I was like 3 degrees, you know, whatever. That's all I think. But when I'm competing, you need to make the switch. And I'm like, I am the best person who has ever stepped foot here. Nobody's even going to touch me. Everyone's competing for second. Doesn't matter. That's it.
