WHY AN AVERAGE PERSON WILL LOSE



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MUHAMMED ALI, WILLIAM SISTERS, AND THE NEWTON'S THIRD LAW OF MOTION

I was listening to a talk by Arnold Schwarzenegger few days ago on YouTube, and he mentioned of a question Muhammad Ali answered in an interview at the acme of his career.

Interviewer: Muhammad, can you please tell us: how many sit-ups do you in a day?

Muhammad Ali: Hmm...I don’t know exactly, I can’t really say because I only start counting when I start feeling the pain, when its start hurting.

I bet he answered it the apt way. Legends like Ali wouldn’t be counting sit-ups of course. But why does the pain have to trigger the counting...

At the mention of names like Muhammad Ali, William sisters, and Tiger Woods. Praises of talent and genius fills the air. Little do we hear about the humongous practices they engaged in ‘backstage’. Beware of the media bias and remember Newton's third law of motion – To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

In a book called Bounce by the two time Olympian, Matthew Syed, he relayed an abridged history of the William sisters: because of the love of tennis that engulfs their Dad, he taught himself and his wife how to play tennis so that they would be able train their kids. And for the training lessons, Venus started at four, Serena at three. Surprised? By the time they are twelve and eleven, they got invited by a teaching pro to study at the Florida Academy. They were able to reach ten thousand hour of practice at an early age – the number of hours psychologists believe is required for mastery in any field. No wonder they excelled extraordinarily.

                                                                                                                                  

And for Muhammed Ali, he had to count only at the mercy of pain because it is only then does it count – in order to separate himself from the average. While practice and hard work are just one of the several recipe for success, it is something we can never refute. It is like pure math! John Maxwell put its best – “To win you have to ‘suffer’: if you have suffered and you didn’t win, be rest assured someone will win when you are gone, on the other hand, if have you won and never suffered, know that someone has suffered before you”