High Performance Secrets from Michael Jordan

Summary

The best basket player in history was drafted as #3 in 1984 by the Chicago Bulls, a team that had never won a championship before. Yet Michael Jordan conquered 6 NBA rings, 6 MVP titles, and a few gold medals, becoming the best player the game ever had. How did he achieve so much in just a few years? By leveraging a few core principles of high performance.

Transcript

6 championship rings, 6 NBA MVPs 4 Olympic medals are some of the key achievements of Michael Jordan incredible basketball career. How did he do it? How did he sustained such an incredible performance level over so many years? By leveraging a few core hard performance secrets? Let's get to it.

Hello everyone Leon Castillo here CEO & Founder of Selfmastered: we help entrepreneurs a scale their businesses by teaching them eight core high performance skills that reliably and predictably transform to personal performance.

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So then we'll discuss the career of probably the best basketball player in history. And this is the story of Michael Jordan, someone who conquered six NBA championships and was able to perform at his peak for years on end.

Not only that, but he transferred that extreme drive for competition into the business realm, and today he's worth $2.2 billion. But how did he achieve this in just half a lifetime because Mr. Jordan is still alive and kicking? Well, by leveraging three core high performance skills that made all the difference.

The #1 secret is Mythologize Yourself. Truth is that Michael Jordan didn't want to be the best player in history. Everything he has done throughout his career, was trying to redefine what basketball means and how to be #1. In that new definition of basketball. He didn't want to play by the rules that others had set for himself. He wanted to be so good that he could be remembered as the innovator of the basketball game, he was not trying to be number one, he was trying to build a legend, something that superseded the game of ball. And the way he acted on the court the way he training, the way he talked to the press. Everything he did in his day to day life was founded on this idea of being a force of nature that happened to choose to play basketball. That's how he approached his everyday performance by knowing that he was building a myth of himself. And that's what drove his extreme competitive instinct. So that's secret #1: mythologize yourself.

Secret #2 is enforced high standards and actualizing frequently, so Michael Jordan was already a standout college athlete, and he was in the Rookie of the Year. But this was not enough, he continuously wanted to improve his game, seeking to enforce the highest standards that he could to make sure that last week's top performance was this week's minimum performance. By pushing himself and his teammates to excel, he was able to extract high performance from each and every person that he competed with and against. He was the #1 at pushing himself and enforcing the highest standard for himself. And therefore, he will take it personal if other teammates wouldn't be on the same page.

In fact, the story about how the Bulls lost against the Detroit Pistons in the playoffs, and in just a space or five to six months, Jordan was able to pack 15 pounds of muscle just to sustain the physicality that he knew he needed to elevate his game. He was always trying to enforce the highest standards and make sure that never rest on his laurels. And this brings us back to the story of Frank Slootman, the Dutch executive that one of the core secrets that he leverages was exactly the same: "How to make standards as high as possible", so we never deviate and never lower your guard. Secret #3 is Work on your weakness.

So the truth is that Michael Jordan was extremely good at identifying the bottlenecks within his system, understand his weakness, and working on them. Against the mainstream advice have doubled on your skills and just hire your weaknesses. He was so clear about the fact that the only way to become the legend he wanted to be is by training everything and training everything is what he did. In fact, borrowing from the Theory of ConstraintS which is pertains to the management philosophy, "It says that the limit of a system is the weakest lin"k. So what Michael would do was self-assess in a 360 manner, what was the limit of his abilities and work on that. In fact, when he started his career, Michael was a very good offensive player, but he lacked on the defense front. What did he do over the years become one of the best defendants in the league? By constantly understanding that the only way of building the legend he wanted to build was by really being #1, he worked on all the weaknesses that he was able to identify about himself. Instead of resting on his laurels, he would constantly seek to become better at the things he lacked the most.

And this is really what drives superior achievement. Understanding that nobody is going to say you need to really be the best at all points on all fronts. And you need to make the necessary steps towards becoming the best you need to pay the price.

In other words, if you're bad defense for very good at offense, you are not going to be the legend you want yourself to be you need to be as good on defense as you are on offense. So work on defense more than work on offense in this specific case. And these are the three secrets that Michael Jordan leveraged to become the legend he became. #1 Mythologize yourself, understand that you are in this world to be the hero of your own journey, he understood himself as a force of nature made sure that everybody around him related to him in the same manner, which leads us to idea #2 A legend could not rest on his laurels. You need to enforce the highest standards you can for yourself or your teammates, to make sure that today's performance is miles ahead of last week, performance that's how you become dangerous in a short amount of time.

And finally, idea #3, work on your weaknesses. We all have weaknesses. And our responsibility is to find out what is the biggest problem we face at all moments and solve that first - develop the skills that transform our performance for good. That's how complex systems evolve by really solving the bottlenecks, not doubling down on the strengths. I hope this was useful. Please let me know in the comments if you learned anything about Michael Jordan that you didn't know. And of course, if you want a proven program that takes these three core ideas and helps you find your weaknesses mythologize yourself and gives you the tools to enforce the highest standards for your performance, apply for some muscle evolution program. Let's see if this is something that you can use to take yourself and your business to them.