The quality of your practice determines the caliber of your performance. So what I want to share with you is the importance really of practice. And the Spartan warriors say, “The person who sweats more in training bleeds less in war.” Isn’t that a good one? The person who sweats more in training bleeds less in war. And so when we look at a great performer, maybe it’s a great basketball player, a great football player. Maybe it’s a great scientist, like an Edison, a great innovator. Maybe it’s an Elon Musk or a Richard Branson. Maybe it’s a great humanitarian, like a Mother Teresa. We sometimes think, these people don’t practice. And when you look at the best performers, what made them great was not how they lived every day. It’s really what they did in their free time and how well they practiced.
So let’s look at a David Beckham. People marvelled at how he used to bend the ball. They used to say, “Bend the ball like Beckham.” He had an ability of sort of hitting the ball in a certain way that it just took this trajectory that made him look superhuman. Well, if you go to the backstory, his father said, “This kid lived on the field. All he did was practice.” If you look at the Brazilian soccer players, or some people call it footballers, the Brazilian footballers, well, are they so gifted because so many of them are playing an iconic? But you look at the backstory, it was their practice that created their epic results. Most Brazilian kids from the time they are two or three, they want to be famous footballers or soccer players. And so some of them are very poor. They would look at the mansions of the rich soccer players and they would say, “My ticket out of poverty is being great like these iconic soccer players or footballers.”
And so all they would do in their free time was play football and practice. Their entire society would have these talent hubs. That’s the term of art used by researchers, these talent hubs, where there were the proper coaches and the proper schools to make sure these Brazilian footballers were given the best possible coaching. And the teaching techniques were the cutting-edge teaching techniques. And guess what? Their peers, like everyone around them, wanted to be football players. So by the time a Brazilian kid is like 12 years old, they’ve touched the football millions of times. And so, of course, they’re going to be brilliant. Of course, they’re going to be unstoppable. Of course, compared to everyone else, they’re going to look like they have these natural talents, but they don’t. It’s just because they practiced relentlessly to the point of mastery.