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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Also, I just want to say I appreciate your patience with these essays. It’s been a few weeks since I last posted—I made a major life move, threw myself in the deep end & have been sprinting to stay afloat for 3 weeks straight. It’s been pure chaos and nonstop stress. But it’s paid off, and i’m about to reclaim some stability. More is on the way. Let’s go:
On Starting Before You Feel Ready
— Sam Altman
On Execution
Life got a lot better when I stopped focusing on the outcome and focused on executing a few high leverage tasks per day towards my goals.
When you’re building, it’s easy to get consumed by the outcome and before you know it months go by, you’re no closer to your goals and you realize you haven’t been present in your everyday life. You miss friends birthdays, don’t remember conversations with your parents, you’re actively tuning out reality to build in your head. You’re accomplishing nothing but isolating yourself deeper into a fantasy world that doesn’t exist. A mental illness. Happens to everyone. Only do you get closer to your goals when you don’t care. You just do what’s required expecting nothing in return. Such is life.
On Bill Gates’ Obsession
On Peak Performance
Gary Kasparov on greatness:
(H/t @kpaxs)
On Madness & Hope
— Van Gogh (h/t @dylanoa4)
On Volume
Read this entire thread. It’s incredible.
On Imperfect Action
On Effort
We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose.
— Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
On Focus
Focus is about controlling your behavior, so it becomes easier to do the right things, and harder to be distracted by the wrong things.
You didn’t have time to finish your work? Yes you did, you just didn’t have the focus to finish your work. The time was there. Your head was somewhere else.
Focus is the ultimate weapon in the war on time. While time is trying to get in your face, waving its arms and setting off alarms to remind you how late you are, focus takes you to that place where you have no idea how much time has passed, and you don’t care.
— Tim Grover, Winning
On Putting Yourself on the Line
Great ones are willing to get burned time and again as they sharpen their swords in the fire. Consider Michael Jordan. It is common knowledge that Jordan made more last-minute shots to win the game for his team than any other player in the history of the NBA. What is not so well known, is that Jordan also missed more last-minute shots to lose the game for his team than any other player in the history of the game. What made him the greatest was not perfection, but a willingness to put himself on the line as a way of life.
— Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning
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