I meditate almost every single day, and what meditation does is it gives me focus. What meditation does is it gives me perspective. Sometimes maybe something doesn’t go well. I’ll go into a pocket of meditation, and it reminds me of the larger picture. It reminds me of a bigger universe. It reminds me of the shortness of life. It makes me more focused and it really refreshes my entire psychology. So if you’ve never meditated or if you’re a regular meditator, I just want you to deepen your commitment and your devotion to meditating at least for 20 minutes every single day. It will help you so much in terms of your mental focus, your clarity of thought, your daily creativity. It’ll increase your energy. It will even give you better health and much stronger physicality. So meditate to own your craft and to really live a beautiful life and to improve that mindset of yours. Related to meditation is visualization. And if you study a lot of the great athletes, what they do is they love to visualize. So I have a lot of NBA players that I’ve coached and a lot of famous footballers and a lot of NHLers and a lot of major league baseball players who follow my work. And when I work with these people, when I coach these people, one of the things we dial in on isthe power of visualization. What was that movie? It was about Niki Lauda and the other F1 motorcar racer, and I don’t remember the name of the movie. You’ve probably seen it. But the larger point is simply this. There was a part or ascene in the movie where James Hunt, the British F1 racer, had his eyes closed, and it was this really big race, and he was sitting down, and he had his hands on the imagined steering wheel, and he had his arm on the gear, and he had one of his feet on the accelerator. And he literally went through every single turn, every single straightaway of the entire race on the picture screen of his imagination. And we know for many decades, people have been suggesting to us that if you want to materialize your greatest ambitions, if you want to live your highest hopes, if you want to perform like an elite athlete, it’s really important to visualize. And yet, if you don’t do the things required of world-class performance, how can you possibly achieve world-class performance? But the key really is to remember that everything is created twice. If you look at the Taj Mahal, if you look at Piazza Navona in Rome, if you look at the Great Wall of China, if you look at any great business, whether it’s an Apple, whether it’s a FedEx, whether it’s an Under Armour, whether it’s a Nike, whether it’s an Amazon, any of the great social platforms, if you look at the great innovations of humankind, whether it is the internet, whether it is the Wright Brothers who came up with flight, whether it is Jonas Salk and his cure for polio. No matter what the innovation was, no matter what it is in our physical world, that all began with an idea on a woman or a man’s imagination. Visualization is incredibly powerful. So what I do is, personally, I get up very, very early and I just lay in bed, and I not only pray. And if you don’t believe in religious prayer, that’s absolutely fine. I call it scientific prayer. I just pray because there’s tons of information that says prayer is a game-changer. And then what I do is I meditate. And then what I do is I visualize, here’s how I want to show up in the meeting at work today, here’s how I want to behave when maybe I don’t want to do my Second Wind Workout. I see myself, here’s how I want my day to unfold when I’m with my loved ones. The willpower researchers call this pre-commitment strategies. Pre-commitment strategies. You basically think through in advance how you will behave when the temptation shows up. So when the temptation shows up, you act at world-class. The point really is make the time to visualize. Just try it out so that you build a stronger interior core so ultimately, your external empires rise with who you become on the inside.
