A Look at Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness, by Tim Grover

The book Winning was recommended to me by a friend. Since I think of myself as a winner, at least in my most confident moments, I thought I knew most of what the book was about. I was wrong. Whatever winning I do is junior varsity stuff. The winning this book talks about is World Championships!

Tim Grover is an athletic trainer, trained in kinesiology, who, when he was 25 years old, sent letters to all the Chicago Bulls except Michael Jordan applying to be their personal trainer — an uncommon position in 1985. Jordan saw the letter in the locker room, had Grover checked out, and hired him for 30 days as a sort of tryout. 

Jordan had played one year in the NBA at that point, done really well, but was bullied by the bigger, stronger players. He knew he needed to bulk up without losing his speed, quickness, and other skills, and was willing to give Grover a chance to help him.

Grover was with Jordan for 15 years, through six world championships, and a not-so-successful two-year stint trying to be a professional baseball player. After Jordan retired, Grover helped a number of other players, including Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade, Charles Barkley, and others. Most of you know these were top basketball players of their era, and Michael Jordan is largely considered to be the GOAT – Greatest of All Time. Today Grover mostly consults with business CEOs.

This book doesn’t tell you what to do. It tells you how to think and how to approach winning. If you’re not already motivated to succeed, this book won’t help you. The book is about adding that critical extra edge to people who are already successful.

Grover lists 13 steps to winning — all of which he labels number 1 because they are all necessary. I’m not going to go through all 13, but I will mention a few.

1. Winning is not a marathon — it’s a sprint with no finish line.

1. Winning takes you through hell — and if you quit, that’s where you end up.

1. Winning makes you different, and different scares people.

1. Winning makes war on the battlefield of your mind.

1. Winning is selfish.

I could discuss what Grover says about any of these points, but I’ll just look at the last. If you’re going to win, you have to go all in. This often means lack of balance in such things as family and relationships. We’ve all heard of people who work too many hours, and their marriage suffers. Grover says that if you want to be a winner, this is par for the course. 

Grover strongly dislikes motivational cliches such as “You’ve got this!”, “You’re crushing it!”, and “Play hard until the final whistle blows!” These are junior high expressions, in his mind, and every competitor already knows these things without having them yelled at by a coach. True winning is much different.

There are lots of anecdotes in the book, especially about Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, on how their will to succeed was far beyond that of most people. But this will to succeed is what it takes to be a winner.

Grover says four things are needed to be a winner: talent, intelligence, competitiveness, and resilience — and the most important of these is resilience. This is what makes you get up and keep going after you’ve fallen on your face. 

And falling on your face is definitely going to happen. Nobody has clear sailing to championships over and over again. It’s very hard work and there are always setbacks.

Nobody wins all the time and when you do win, as soon as it’s over you start from scratch and have to work hard to make it happen again. You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect to succeed. You have to come back better because your competition will have analyzed what you have done and will make adjustments to counter what you did before.

I found this book inspiring. Perhaps I would have had more success in my life had I come across this book earlier.