The quality of your practice sets up the caliber of your performance. And so if you look at a championship team, and this is such an important point I want you to really embrace, if you look at a championship team, you go, “Wow, did you see how they played under the pressure of the final moments of the championship game? They must have really brought it together. They must have really amped up their commitment to win the trophy or the world championship.” If you look at a boxer,” Wow, look at how he or she ended the final rounds. Amazing. They must be geniuses.”Here is an incredibly important insight I suggest to you: it’s not what they did in the final moments that made them great, it’s what they did in the silent, lonely hours of practice over and over and over that allowed them to show up the way they did in the final moments of the championship game. You see, if you do something in practice over and over, maybe it’s jump shots, maybe it’s the same martial arts move, maybe it’s the same tennis move, I don’t know, but if you practice it over and over and over to the point of subconscious automaticity, then when you’re in the fire of the last moment of the championship game, you go into default world-class and you just make the move that wins the game without even thinking about it.
