Tim Grover's Secret to Success

Grover is best known as the choice personal trainer for an esteemed group of NBA players. He is also the CEO and owner of Attack Athletics, which employs trainers around the world, and his list of current and former clients include Jordan, Charles Barkley, Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade. Grover is also the author of multiple books which includes "Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable"

For those of us in the health, fitness, and strength & conditioning world...we have probably followed Grover's career and his pursuit of excellence (similar to the athletes he works with). His story is equally as motivating so I thought I would transcribe The Most Motivational Talk he did with Tom Bilyeu several years ago.

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At an early age, my mom worked the night shift as a nurse, my dad worked the day shift. They couldn't afford a babysitter. When we were off of school, guess what? I went to work with my dad. At four years old, he would hand me a bone saw and say, "Hey, get to work."

"The lesson I'm teaching you is that sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do, but you got to always provide for your family. This is how I'm providing for my family."

Lessons like that stick with you.

You have to be prepared to take any and every opportunity that's presented to you. Nothing's just going to happen. Everybody says it's all on you. It is all on you. There are other people that can educate you and help you, but you take these different experiences that you learned that stick with you. You may not remember a whole lot when you were four years old, but there's certain memories, there's certain things. You can use them to either harness you to greatness or you can use them to just keep you where you're at. Most people are just satisfied with that. There's always a next level. Your definition of greatness and what you want to achieve could be totally different then somebody else’s.

We always say, no one wants to be first, because they're afraid of the consequences that come with doing something first.

Look at Michael Jordan. When Michael Jordan took over the Charlotte team, everyone said he was a failure. How can you be the failure when you're the first professional athlete to own a majority of a franchise team? You can't be the failure. If you're the first to do something you can't be listed as a failure. I wanted to be the first to do something and that was to work with high, high-end professional athletes.

[In today’s world] we have tons of information available to us, but the difficult part is we don't have a lot of individuals who have the ability to process information at a quick rate. The ones that can excel (and we call them cleaners in the book), they're so well prepared that their task, no matter what variable or circumstance is thrown at them, they can adjust. And they can get that end result. That's taking something that an individual who was just in the playoff situation, you literally get off the plane you have an hour to figure out what's going on, how to fix it. It might only be a temporary fix, but it's going to get you the end result for that particular game. Most people, when the game ends or they sign a contract they exhale. The champions never exhale.

A cooler is a person that you give a job to and you're going to get the desired result. You're not going to get anything exceptional; you're not going to get anything outstanding. You're going to give them something to do. They're going to deliver a result that's expected.

Then we have closers. Closers are a level above that. Closers are people that you give a task to, you give an assignment to, and they're going to deliver you that end result majority of the time as long as too many variables are not thrown at them.

Back to cleaners. A cleaner is an individual, what we call a "don't think person." They're so well prepared at what they do. They spend hours and hours of time, years, of getting prepared that no matter what's thrown at them, they're going to deliver that end result over and over again. Their instincts are so dead on that no matter what variable, what problem, they can adjust on the fly and have the ability to get themselves in what we call "the zone." The problem is in order to be able to put yourself in the zone, preparation is the key.

We try so hard in our lives to fit in. We try to fit into certain groups, certain friends, certain sororities, among certain friends, yet the people we idolize the most are the ones that stand out.

But when you're prepared, there is no fear. There is no fear of failure. Because even if you've walked out of something and you feel you like you failed at it, your preparation is so strong that you're going to take that failure and turn it into the outcome and desire.

Most people stop at failure.

We've all failed at things. I'm going to continue to fail at stuff, right? It's the most powerful tool you could use, but it all depends on how you use it. We talk about it in Relentless. A scalpel in the hands of an individual it can do unbelievable damage. In the hands of a professional of a doctor, it saves lives. It's the same thing with failure, how you use it. It's that drive inside of you. It's where we talk about the dark side. The dark side is filled with failure, but it's the fuel that burns you like something that's never burned inside of you before.

I'm never the first call. I'm the last, last call the person makes because when you have to make this call there's a problem because that means they can't figure it out. Now it becomes my job to figure it out and it's my job to deliver because if I don't deliver not only will the last call not happen, that phone will not ring again because I'm only as good as the last delivery that I've done and that's how everybody needs to think. You can't talk about what you did five years ago. You can't talk about the deal that you closed last week. You can't talk about your sales for last month. Those things are expected of you. Don't expect to get a pat on the back for doing your job. You're supposed to do your job. If you're getting rewarded just for showing up, imagine what that's going to do to you later in life. Now when you do something extraordinary, it doesn't quite feel the same.

We're already working on next level stuff. I don't have a whole lot of time and a lot of words to get my message across. The truth is very concise. The words are very few, but people don't want to hear the truth because the truth hurts, but you grow from pain. You really do. You can't know how to deal with success. You can't know how to deal with failures. You can't know how to deal with the bumps in the road if you haven't had a taste of everything. Once you remember that bitter taste in your mouth you never want to feel that again. We're in physical pain, but when I blew my knee out that was actually the start unknowingly of my career as ... I don't like to consider myself, as the other words. I don't like to consider myself as a trainer. I'm not a trainer. Quest is not just a bar. There's a lot of people that are just a something. There are very few people that are "the" something.

For people to introduce myself as a trainer, I'm like, "No, I'm not a trainer, I am the trainer, there's a huge difference." That was my path into becoming the trainer. There probably isn’t a worse thing that could happen to an athlete. It was the best thing that happened to me from a developmental standpoint because now it forced me to study the body like no one had ever studied before to feel the pain and discomfort that an athlete who blows out his knee, who blows out his shoulder. Now I know what they have to deal with, not only from a physical standpoint, but from a mental standpoint. Now I knew what was going on up in here, so I could push them beyond the barriers.

[From here, the mind] starts to scatter. You got neuron patterns flying all over the place. Everyone talks about when they're doing something, when they're nervous or something, "Oh, I get butterflies. I get butterflies in my stomach."

It happens to everybody. Well, guess what? If you get the butterflies all moving in the same direction, you've won the battle. Now, from a mental standpoint if I can get all the thoughts moving in towards one direction instead of feeling sorry for myself, instead of putting the blame on other individuals, instead of feeling guilty, those are all emotions and emotions make you weak. I'm already in a weakened state, I don't need to be weaker.

Kobe Bryant blew out his Achilles. Every other individual would have been carried off the floor. He went up, shot two free throws, made them both, walked himself off the court. The process of the rehabilitation started the moment he got up. If he would've had somebody carry him off the court, if he would've not shot those free throws, he lost that battle. Even when everybody else thought he was losing he actually gained. The reckoning process, the healing process started immediately when he stood up. I'm going to go to the free throw line, I'm going to go make these two free throws. That's how a cleaner thinks.

We all have that ability. We all have next level ability. There are no other people that aren't holding you back. Your boss isn't holding you back. Your parents aren't holding you back. Those are excuses. To me, there's no such thing as luck. All luck is preparation meeting opportunity, plain and simple. You have to be ready and prepared for that situation. Everybody runs from pressure. It's easy to blame somebody else, to play armchair quarterback, to say, "Oh yeah, if they would've run this play, this would've happened."

Pressure is a privilege. If you're an employee of a company and a boss puts you into a pressure situation, that's a privilege, he believes in you. You better deliver because if you don't that situation goes to somebody else and you may never get that opportunity again. Michael used to tell people on the first day of training camp,

 “I'm going to pass you the ball one time. If you don't do anything with it, I'm not giving it to you again because I can miss a shot on my own. I can throw a pass away on my own. I can do that on my own."

He was testing the guys to see if I pass you the ball into a critical pressure situation what are you going to do with it. Are you going to fumble it? Are you going to throw it away? Are you going to pass it back to me like a scared individual? It transcends whatever you're doing. It's not a switch that you turn on and off. Cleaner's switches don't need to be turned off. There's no such thing as beast mode, they're just beasts. There is no mode.

~Tim Grover