There’s a misconception about what the road to “success” looks like. And it mainly comes from movies.
They usually start out with the main character wanting to reach some ambitious goal.
After he learns that he has to train hard to achieve it, there is always this motivating 3-minute montage where you see the person do some crazy workouts with inspiring music. After that short sequence, they are fully prepared and usually get their reward.
There are two problems with that.
1. The training is only a tiny part of the whole movie, which makes your mind believe that he/she only worked for a few days.
2. The main character is super motivated the whole time.
But in reality, your experience is going to be the complete opposite of that.
Train Effective player, Ben Turner, trains roughly 15x a week and he definitely doesn’t rely on motivation to push him: He Trains 15x a Week!
To reach an extraordinary goal (e.g. becoming a professional footballer) you will have to train consistently for years.
And the training is not going to be exciting most of the time. In fact, it’s usually quite boring and repetitive.
So contrarian to the movies, you won’t feel motivated waking up early to get a session in before school. Or doing recovery before going to sleep at night.
Instead, you will need to rely on something different that makes you put on your boots every day.
And that’s where discipline comes in.
On day 35 of the 100-day challenge, Nick explains why you can’t only train on the days you’re motivated: When You Don’t Feel Like It.. | Day 35
Most people give up after a while because they shoot themselves in the foot. They either believe that they should’ve reached their goals a long time ago and give up too early. Or they get bored of the daily grind and lose focus.
The point is that exactly that monotonous, daily work is what’s going to make the big difference in the end. It’s not raw-raw like in the movies and it doesn’t take three minutes either.
It’s a long process!
All the successful people are/were engaged in that daily process to get to where they want to go. The question is, are you?
Stay Effective!
Nick Humphries, 25, is a footballer who played in England (Wimbledon), Scotland (Montrose), Holland (Volendam), Hungary (Vasas) as well as with the Australian U20 national team. At 16 years of age, he was just an average amateur player with limited skills. Only one year later he was offered $120k+ in scholarships. Two years later he received a contract to play professionally in Europe. How did he get better? He trained in his own way! Learn more about the training program he’s creating to help players improve on their own terms.
