Tim Grover Quotes

Fuck “try.” Trying is an open invitation to failure, just another way of saying, “If I fail, it’s not my fault, I tried.

Being relentless means demanding more of yourself than anyone else could ever demand of you, knowing that every time you stop, you can still do more. You must do more.

In order to have what you really want, you must first be who you really are.

Decide. Commit. Act. Succeed. Repeat.

Being the best means engineering your life so you never stop until you get what you want, and then you keep going until you get what’s next. And then you go for even more.

The only way you can light other people on fire is to be lit yourself, from the inside.

The drive to close the gap between near-perfect and perfect is the difference between great and unstoppable.

Do. The. Work. Every day, you have to do something you don’t want to do. Every day. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push past the apathy and laziness and fear. Otherwise, the next day you’re going to have two things you don’t want to do, then three and four and five, and pretty soon, you can’t even get back to the first thing. And then all you can do is beat yourself up for the mess you’ve created, and now you’ve got a mental barrier to go along with the physical barriers.

Here’s the key: I’m not going to tell you how to change. People don’t change. I want you to trust who you already are, and get to that Zone where you can shut out all the noise, all the negativity and fear and distractions and lies, and achieve whatever you want, in whatever you do.

In anything you do, it takes no talent to work hard. You just have to want to do it.

I’m not telling you to love it. I’m telling you to crave the result so intensely that the work is irrelevant.

Greatness makes you a legend; being the best makes you an icon. If you want to be great, deliver the unexpected. If you want to be the best, deliver a miracle.

Anyone can start something; very few people can finish.

Do. The. Work. Every day, you have to do something you don’t want to do. Every day. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push past the apathy and laziness and fear.

Talk never goes up in price, it’s always free, and you usually get what you pay for.

Relentless is about never being satisfied, always driving to be the best, and then getting even better.

I don’t care how good you think you are, or how great others think you are—you can improve, and you will. Being relentless means demanding more of yourself than anyone else could ever demand of you, knowing that every time you stop, you can still do more. You must do more. The minute your mind thinks, “Done,” your instincts say, “Next.

Make a plan that truly reflects your goals and interests, and you'll be more likely to execute. Why pretend you're going to work out every single day when you know you're only going to do it three times a week?

People who don’t pursue their own dreams probably won’t encourage you to pursue yours;

You don’t have to love it. You just have to believe it’s worth it in the end.

People who preach inner drive are dreamers with a lot of ideas and a lot of talk, and zero production.

there’s no off-season when you’re serious about being a winner.

Tell yourself what to do, and stop waiting for others to lay it all out.

The greats never stop learning. Instinct and talent without technique just makes you reckless, like a teenager driving a powerful, high-performance vehicle. Instinct is raw clay that can be shaped into a masterpiece, if you develop skills that match your talent. That can only come from learning everything there is to know about what you do.

You make decisions, not suggestions; you know the answer while everyone else is still asking questions.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable, or find another place to fail.

Don’t tell me the glass is half-full or half-empty; you either have something in that glass or you don’t.

He played a near-perfect game, but to him, not perfect enough.

You already know what you have to do, and you know how to do it. What’s stopping you?

Cleaners have a dark side, and a zone you can’t enter. They get what they want, but they pay for it in solitude. Excellence is lonely. They never stop working, physically or mentally, because it gives them too much time to think about what they’ve had to endure and sacrifice to get to the top.

Athletic success is the result of knowing what to do, the willingness to do it, and the drive to continually improve at it.

Physical dominance can make you great. Mental dominance is what ultimately makes you unstoppable.

And most people who claim to have killer instinct rarely do, because when you have that kind of power, you don’t talk about it. You don’t think about it. You just use it.

Ask yourself where you are now, and where you want to be instead. Ask yourself what you’re willing to do to get there. Then make a plan to get there. Act on it.

you can’t keep improving if you fear others will disapprove of what you’re doing.

Mental dominance is what ultimately makes you unstoppable

Figure out what you do, then do it. And do it better than anyone else.

Time tells you what you didn’t accomplish. Focus turns off the clock and directs all your energy to the result.

no trainer or coach or expert can make you good or great or unstoppable if you’re not going to do the work, if you’re waiting for someone to make it happen for you. It’s on you. And that’s why I’m telling you all of this, not because I want you to know what I do for my guys, but because I want you to know what you have to do for yourself.

If you can tolerate fear and doubt and loneliness… Winning would like a word with you.

From this point, your strategy is to make everyone else get on your level; you’re not going down to theirs. You’re not competing with anyone else, ever again. They’re going to have to compete with you. From now on, the end result is all that matters.

It’s time to stop listening to what everyone else says about you, telling you what to do, how to act, how you should feel. Let them judge you by your results, and nothing else; it’s none of their business how you get where you’re going. If you’re relentless, there is no halfway, no could or should or maybe.

Believe this: Everything you need to be great is already inside you. All your ambitions and secrets, your darkest dreams . . . they’re waiting for you to just let go.

Every accomplishment is just a stepping-stone to the next challenge; as soon as they’ve hit their target, they’re already stalking their next conquest.

If you can’t face your own truth, if you can’t deal with the darkest part of your past, you’ll never be able to change your story.

Focus is about controlling your behavior, so it becomes easier to do the right things, and harder to be distracted by the wrong things.

Control your thoughts, and you control your emotions. Control your emotions, and you control your actions. Control your actions, and you control the outcome.

Winners don’t fear reality, they don’t hide from the truth, and they’re not afraid to confront their own flaws and weaknesses.

You thrive on it. You intentionally create situations to jack-up the pressure even higher, challenging you to prove what you’re capable of. —Tim Grover

There are four components of Winning that determine how you’ll manage your fears and doubts and make that leap, or if you’ll make it at all. Talent. Intelligence. Competitiveness. Resilience.

Remember, you don’t compete with anyone, you make them compete with you. You can control what you put on yourself; you can’t control what the other guy puts on you. So you focus only on the internal pressure that drives you. Run to it, embrace it, feel it, so no one else can throw more at you than you’ve already put on yourself.

Being relentless means never being satisfied. It means creating new goals every time you reach your personal best. If you’re good, it means you don’t stop until you’re great. If you’re great, it means you fight until you’re unstoppable. It means becoming a Cleaner.

We never saw obstacles or problems, we only saw situations in need of solutions.

If you want to be great, deliver the unexpected. If you want to be the best, deliver a miracle.

they don’t just perform a job, they reinvent it. I own this.

A true Cleaner never tells you what he’s doing or what he’s planning. You find out after the job is complete

Confidence is about taking chances, and never doubting the outcome.

But I had no doubt that whatever happened, I’d be fine.

The greatest battles you will ever fight are with yourself, and you must always be your toughest opponent. Always demand more of yourself than others demand of you.

When you’re an A+ person, you want A+ people around you, and everyone has to be accountable for doing A+ work.

There is zero chance you’ll get anywhere if you allow yourself to become paralyzed by soft excuses and countless reasons why you’ll never get to where you want to be.

no trainer or coach or expert can make you good or great or unstoppable if you’re not going to do the work,

It’s not weak to recognize when it’s time to shift directions.

share their relentless drive for the end result. And let nothing stand in your way of achieving it.

If you want to go somewhere new, you have to throw out the tired, old map and stop traveling the same road to the same dead end.

Winning is an investment. It’s the result of making “selfish” choices that empower your goals, separate you from limitations and insecurities, and create distance between

When all hell breaks loose on the outside, you barely notice; you’re calm on the inside because you’re ready, prepared, and the best at what you do. You don’t tell anyone how you’re going to handle the situation, you just handle it. Everyone else is panicking and choking, and you say, ‘No problem.’ You step on the other guy’s throat, and you finish the fight.

When you’ve been knocked down, confidence gives you the patience to stay down for a minute, until you know how to get up better than you were before. Most people jump right back up because they don’t want to look weak and damaged, and then immediately get knocked down again. When you’re confident in your ability to recover, you know you’ll never be weak or damaged again.

Cleaner’s attitude can be summed up in three words: I own this. He walks in with confidence and leaves with results. A Cleaner has the guts and the vision to steer everything to his advantage.

From this point, your strategy is to make everyone else get on your level, you’re not going down to theirs. You’re not competing with anyone else, ever again. They’re going to have to compete with you.

Cleaners understand they don’t have to love the work to be successful; they just have to be relentless about achieving it, and everything else in between is a diversion and a distraction from the ultimate prize.

Cleaners are rule-breakers when they have to be; they only care about the end result. When things go wrong and everyone else starts to panic, the Cleaner is calm and unflappable, cool and steady, never too high or too low, never too happy or too depressed.

Cleaner Law: surround yourself with those who want you to succeed, who recognize what it takes to be successful. People who don’t pursue their own dreams probably won’t encourage you to pursue yours; they’ll tell you every negative thing they tell themselves.

Do you truly want to get even with everyone, or do you really want to get ahead of them? Why stand next to anyone when you can push beyond them? In the game of basketball, you get around someone so you can get past them. Play this game the same way. You go for the win, you don’t settle for a tie.

All day, every day, your mental battlefield is attacked by blasts of adrenaline and anger and fear and anxiety, and other explosives too. Stress. Insecurity. Doubt. Envy. Sometimes it’s a stranger who puts them there. Sometimes it’s someone close to you. Sometimes it’s you. Most of the time, it’s you.

Cleaners never feel external pressure; they only believe what’s inside them. You can criticize, analyze, demonize a Cleaner, but he’s still only going to feel pressure from within. He knows what he’s doing right, and what he’s doing wrong. He does not care what you think. He steps out of his comfort zone and challenges himself to get to the next level.

Success isn’t the same as talent. The world is full of incredibly talented people who never succeed at anything. They show up, do what they do, and if it doesn’t work out, they blame everyone else because they believe talent should be enough. It’s not. If you want to be truly successful, you can’t be content with “pretty good.” You need to find an extra gear.

The only way you can light other people on fire is to be lit yourself, from the inside. Professional, cool, focused. If you had a bad night and you can’t show up the next day ready to go, or you can’t show up at all, that doesn’t affect just you, it affects everyone around you. A professional doesn’t let other people down just because of personal issues. If you need to show up, you show up. You might detest every individual in the room, but if your presence makes them all feel better, if it pulls the team together, if it results in better performances, then you’ve helped yourself to get one step closer to your own goal. That’s how you get others to come up to your level: show them where it is, and set the example that allows them to get there.

Do. The. Work. Every day, you have to do something you don’t want to do. Every day. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push past the apathy and laziness and fear. Otherwise, the next day you’re going to have two things you don’t want to do, then three and four and five, and pretty soon, you can’t even get back to the first thing. And then all you can do is beat yourself up for the mess you’ve created,

People who start at the top never understand what they missed at the bottom. The guy who started by sorting the mail, or cleaning the restaurant late at night, or fixing the equipment at the gym, that’s the guy who knows how things get done. After he’s eventually worked his way up through the ranks, he knows how everything works, why it works, what to do when it stops working. That’s the guy who will have longevity and value and impact, because he knows what it took to get to the top. You can’t claim you ran a marathon if you started at the seventeenth mile.

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

He never sees problems, only situations to resolve, and when he finds the solution, he doesn’t waste time explaining it. He just says, “I got this.

When you use your body for a living, you have one job and it requires one thing: work hard to stay in peak condition. That’s it.

Cooler, Closer, Cleaner . . . good, great, unstoppable. You can be whichever you want. If you want to be unstoppable, you’ve got to make the commitment.

In real life, being relentless is a state of mind that can give you the strength to achieve, to survive, to overcome, to be strong when others are not. It means craving the end result so intensely that the work becomes irrelevant. Not just in sports, but in everything you do. The ability to be relentless is in all of us.

Just show up, work hard, and listen. That’s your part of the deal. Do the work.

So everything I do is to minimize the risk of that happening. That helps me fight the mental urge to doubt myself, to create problems that haven’t happened and overthink everything that could go wrong.

They didn’t have to know what was coming, but they were always ready. They knew when to take the shot, and when to pass to someone else. When to talk, and when to stay silent. When to speed up, and when to slow down. When to respond to criticism, and when to laugh it off.

No matter how intense and competitive and driven you may be, don’t shut out the opportunity to be in the moment, to embrace what you have, and hold on to it for as long as you can. Take time in your life for true fun and happiness and joy and laughter, wherever you can find it. It doesn’t make you weak to enjoy your life and appreciate the things that give you satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment.

I want you to have success and still have time for family and friends and relaxation and fun. I want you to be there for your kids, they need you. I want you to have a happy relationship with a partner who wants the same things you do.

Start getting rid of everything that’s dragging you down, everything you’re doing to meet other people’s expectations and demands. Those things have to go. Handle that, and you already have more time for the meaningful, important elements in your life: family, kids, health… yourself.

everything is impossible until someone does it.

Physical strength measures WHAT you can do. Mental strength measures whether you’ll actually do it” (Tim Grover)

The fact is, you can’t train your body—or excel at anything—before you train your mind. You can’t commit to excellence until your mind is ready to take you there.

We always get back to work.

A Cleaner knows when to walk away, and which direction to walk. Never running, always walking; he leaves smoothly and on his own terms.

Life can be complicated; the truth is not.

Cleaner Law: surround yourself with those who want you to succeed, who recognize what it takes to be successful

Do the work. There is no privilege greater than the pressure to excel, and no greater reward than earning the respect and fear of others who can only stand in awe of your results.

There are four components of Winning that determine how you’ll manage your fears and doubts and make that leap, or if you’ll make it at all. Talent. Intelligence. Competitiveness. Resilience. It’s possible to get a win with just three of these, and I suppose in very rare cases, you might be able to stumble into a win with just one or two, if a thousand other things are going in your favor at the same time. But to win at the highest level, over and over, in all areas of your life—career, finances, health, family, whatever else you value—you need all four. Very few people have all four.