Winners: And How They Succeed

Winners: And How They Succeed draws on years of research and extensive interviews with a wide array of successful people to deliver a blueprint for what it takes to win in life based on strategy, leadership and team-building.

Alastair Campbell, the author of this book, has picked out three things that all winners have in hand at all times:

A realistic objective. A solid strategy. A set of tactics.

The objective is your goal. The tournament you want to win, the amount of weight you want to lose, the monthly income you want to make. It’s important that this objective is both specific and realistic. Don’t say you want to “get thinner,” say you want to “lose 15 pounds.” But not 50. Only having a realistic objective will allow you to pick a good strategy for it.

The strategy is the long-term “how” of winning. You can’t change your strategy from one day to the next, or it becomes useless. For example, if you want to exercise more and eat less, decide to stick to that mantra for the next six months. Don’t switch to sleeping more or other strategies after a week.

Lastly, subordinate to a strategy are the tactics you pick to implement your strategy. For example for exercising more, you could create a gym schedule that includes three 1-hour sessions every week and for eating less you could cap your calories at 2,000 every day. Those tactics are the small steps you take every day and week and are subject to change a lot.

As long as a tactic works for implementing your strategy in a way that gets you closer to your objective, keep doing it. But once it stops, drop it and try the next one, without changing the strategy.

Most people spend most of their lives in this preliminary stage of wanting. They say they want something, but they really just want to want it. What does this mean? It means they desire it enough to claim they want it, but they don’t want it bad enough that it hurts not to work for it. For them, the pain of doing it is still bigger than the pain of not doing it. To become a winner, you have to reach and cross this threshold of pain. In the summer of 2000, Michael Phelps was ready to compete in the Olympics. He felt ready in every way. Physically, mentally, emotionally. He even got on the team, but only started in the 200 m butterfly category, where he ended up fifth. Having missed his only shot at an Olympic medal thus far, he was terrified of not being given the chance to try again. He could…