Welcome to The Vault.
Every Sunday, I send out ten pieces of winningcore—insights, lessons, and stories to help you win in business, sports, and life.
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On Leadership:
I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged, and I earned that right because my teammates who came after me didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard that I played the game, and I wasn’t gonna take anything less. Now if that meant I had to go in there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates, “The one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn’t fucking do.” When people see this, they’re gonna say, “Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy, he may have been a tyrant.” Well, that’s you. Because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well. Look, I don’t have to do this. I’m only doing it because it is who I am. That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality. If you don’t wanna play that way, don’t play that way.
— Michael Jordan
Key sentence: “I earned that right.” Great leaders push people to step up—to be more and do more than ever before. But it only works if you’re leading from the front. It always starts with you.
On Years of Effort
Maybe you’ve heard the other dumb expressions along these lines: “Rome wasn’t built in a day!” No, it wasn’t. It was built every day, for thousands and thousands of days. That’s how champions and competitors win. They deliver every day for thousands and thousands of days.
— Tim Grover, Winning
I came across this re-reading Tim Grover’s book the other day, and I f*cking love it. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, it was built every day, for thousands and thousands of days.” That one sentence perfectly encapsulates what most people don’t understand about winning. It’s not a marathon, it’s a sprint with no finish line.
On Pressure:
"Jordan would admit as much. 'I can be hard,' he acknowledged in 1998. Mostly he tested himself. It seemed that he discovered the secret quite early in his competitive life: the more pressure he heaped on himself, the greater his ability to rise to the occasion. It all added up to immense complexity."
— Michael Jordan, The Life
This is what allowed Jordan to perform at his best. For Arnold, it was having an audience—he found he could lift heavier with people watching, while the same conditions caused other lifters to buckle. Everyone is different. Find what drives you to the highest level of performance, and create those conditions as often & intensely as you can.
On Positioning:
“Vegas games were usually smaller and tough to get into because the moment a whale (rich bad player) would come in, a game immediately built around them. I tipped the floor people $100 for seating me, I gave out $500 for a heads-up that a bad player had come in, and I would tip up to five grand for doing me a favor. Casino employees became like family, and I always took care of family.”
— Dan Bilzerian, The Setup
I read this book when I was living in Costa Rica last year and couldn’t put it down. Dan’s success strategy in everything is all about engineering his environment to make getting what he wants as easy as possible. When he decided to get rich playing poker, he found a unique setup. Most players want to be the best, which means playing against the best a.k.a. the hardest possible games. Dan knew he’d never be the best, and had no ego about trying to prove his skill. He wanted to get rich, so instead of playing the best players, he leveraged his image as a “dumb trust fund kid” to play against rich guys who sucked at poker. In other words, he found the easiest games with the most money on the table.
“Like negotiations, poker, or sales, the person who cares about the money the most usually ends up with it. When it came to money and gambling, I learned a long time ago to check my ego at the door; I was okay with people thinking I was an idiot or a sucker as long as I ended up with the money.”
The Lesson = always know what you’re optimising for & tailor your strategy to getting that thing.
On Going Pro:
“That afternoon at the gym, I thought more about my loss to Frank Zane. Now that I'd stopped feeling sorry for myself, I came to harsher conclusions than those I'd reached the night before. I still felt the judging had been unfair, but I discovered this wasn't the real cause of my pain.
It was the fact that I had failed—not my body, but my vision and my drive. Losing to Chet Yorton in London in 1966 hadn't felt bad because I'd done everything I could to prepare; it was just not my year. But something different had happened here.
I was not as ripped as I could have been. I could have dieted the week before and not eaten so much fish and chips. I could have found a way to train more even without access to equipment: for instance, I could have done one thousand reps of abs or something that would have made me feel ready. I could have worked on my posing-nothing had stopped me from doing that. Never mind the judging; I hadn't done everything in my power to prepare. Instead, I'd thought my momentum from winning in London would carry me. I'd told myself I'd just won Mr. Universe and I could let go. That was nonsense.
Thinking this made me furious. "Even though you won the professional Mr. Universe contest in London, you are still a fucking amateur," I told myself. "What happened here never should have happened. It only happens to an amateur. You're an amateur, Arnold."
Staying in America, I decided, had to mean that I wouldn't be an amateur ever again. Now the real game would begin. There was a lot of work ahead.
And I had to start as a professional. I didn't ever want to go away from a bodybuilding competition like I had in Miami. If I was going to beat guys like Sergio Oliva, that could never happen again. From now on if I lost, I would be able to walk away with a big smile because I had done everything I could to prepare.”
— Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall
On Expectations:
“People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And unfortunately, resilience matters in success.”
— Jensen Huang, Nvidia Founder
Note: Lowering your expectations doesn’t mean lowering your ambition or drive—it means doing everything you can to win, and being okay with whatever results from that.
On Reinvention:
“The reinvention occurs in the micro actions that you’re taking every single day. The tiny little things that no one notices that are creating muscle memory around new behaviours. Tiny little things repeated over time is what produces dramatic change, and everyone wants to talk about the pivot moment when it goes skyward, but the truth is the real work is in the drudgery, and the anonymous work of shovelling shit everyday”
— Rich Roll, The Rich Roll Podcast
On Seizing Opportunities:
“You'll get a few windows of time as a man where the timing/vehicle/upside of the potential opportunity in front of you is monstrous & outweighs almost all previous opportunities.
When the wormhole opens is when you have to drop everything & focus ONLY on capitalizing.
The RIGHT 6-month sprint has the potential to pull more weight than 15 years of the wrong stuff”
— Grant Lannin (@retirementkeys)
On Social Circle:
“You have great ability, what you need now is refinement of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors, always climb”
— Advice given to Mark Twain
Whether you like it or not, the people you surround yourself with have a massive impact on your outcomes in life. If you’re not sure if someone is the “wrong” person to be around, ask yourself: “would I be okay becoming more like this person?”
On Doing the Work:
“It just takes work. Shit loads and shit loads of work. Every time I try and dress it up or cut a corner I get brutally reminded:
The work just needs doing.”
— Alex Hormozi (@hormozi)
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