Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

When Jordan was cut from the varsity team, he was devastated. His mother says, “I told him to go back and discipline himself.” Boy, did he listen. He used to leave the house at six in the morning to go practice before school. At the University of North Carolina, he constantly worked on his weaknesses—his defensive game and his ball handling and shooting. The coach was taken aback by his willingness to work harder than anyone else. Once, after the team lost the last game of the season, Jordan went and practiced his shots for hours. He was preparing for the next year. Even at the height of his success and fame—after he had made himself into an athletic genius—his dogged practice remained legendary. Former Bulls assistant coach John Bach called him “a genius who constantly wants to upgrade his genius.”

For Jordan, success stems from the mind. “The mental toughness and the heart are a lot stronger than some of the physical advantages you might have. I’ve always said that and I’ve always believed that.” But other people don’t. They look at Michael Jordan and they see the physical perfection that led inevitably to his greatness.

The Babe

What about Babe Ruth? Now, he was clearly no vessel of human physical perfection. Here was the guy with the famous appetites and a giant stomach bulging out of his Yankee uniform. Wow, doesn’t that make him even more of a natural? Didn’t he just carouse all night and then kind of saunter to the plate the next day and punch out home runs?

The Babe was not a natural, either. At the beginning of his professional career, Babe Ruth was not that good a hitter. He had a lot of power, power that came from his total commitment each time he swung the bat. When he connected, it was breathtaking, but he was highly inconsistent.

It’s true that he could consume astounding amounts of liquor and unheard-of amounts of food. After a huge meal, he could eat one or more whole pies for dessert. But he could also discipline himself when he had to. Many winters, he worked out the entire off-season at the gym to become more fit. In fact, after the 1925 season, when it looked as though he was washed up, he really committed himself to getting in shape, and it worked. From 1926 through 1931, he batted .354, averaging 50 home runs a year and 155 runs batted in. Robert Creamer, his biographer, says, “Ruth put on the finest display of sustained hitting that baseball has ever seen.… From the ashes of 1925, Babe Ruth rose like a rocket.” Through discipline.

He also loved to practice. In fact, when he joined the Boston Red Sox, the veterans resented him for wanting to take batting practice every day. He wasn’t just a rookie; he was a rookie pitcher. Who did he think he was, trying to take batting practice? One time, later in his career, he was disciplined and was banned from a game. Thas one thing. But they wouldn’t let him practice, either, and that really

hurt.

Ty Cobb argued that being a pitcher helped Ruth develop his hitting. Why would being a pitcher help his batting? “He could experiment at the plate,” Cobb said. “No one cares much if a pitcher strikes out or looks bad at bat, so Ruth could take that big swing. If he missed, it didn’t matter.… As time went on, he learned more and more about how to control that big swing and put the wood on the ball. By the time he became a fulltime outfielder, he was ready.”

Yet we cling fast to what Stephen Jay Gould calls “the common view that ballplayers are hunks of meat, naturally and effortlessly displaying the talents that nature provided.”

The Fastest Women on Earth

What about Wilma Rudolph, hailed as the fastest woman on earth after she won three gold medals for sprints and relay in the 1960 Rome Olympics? She was far from a physical wonder as a youngster. She was a premature baby, the twentieth of twenty-two children born to her parents, and a constantly sick child. At four years of age, she nearly died of a long struggle with double pneumonia, scarlet fever, and polio(!), emerging with a mostly paralyzed left leg. Doctors gave her little hope of ever using it again. For eight years, she vigorously pursued physical therapy, until at age twelve she shed her leg brace and began to walk normally.

If this wasn’t a lesson that physical skills could be developed, what was? She immediately went and applied that lesson to basketball and track, although she lost every race she entered in her first official track meet. After her incredible career, she said, “I just want to be remembered as a hardworking lady.”