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

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

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.

Anyone can start something; very few people can finish.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Mental dominance is what ultimately makes you unstoppable

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

You don’t wait to be told, you don’t waver from your goal. When it’s time to act, you act, instinctively and without hesitation. As you will read in these pages: Done. Next.

Working through physical challenges that would put others on the bench just so you can taste the sweetness of winning one more time—that is what separates the good and great from the unstoppable.

Home surrounds you with comfort and security. Home is for calm and warmth. The dark side has no place at the family table

I don't want to join you, I want to beat you

Everything you do in the gym becomes easier when you stop expecting it to be easy.

Most people have too many options, and they rarely choose the tougher one.

Bottom line if you want success of any kind: you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Winning will use every dirty trick in the book—and make up new ones just to entertain itself—to keep you in hell. It’s too hard, it whispers … you’ll never get there… your parents don’t believe in you… your friends think you’re crazy… look at you, you’re already a failure. Which, by no coincidence, is exactly what you were already thinking. So you stay there, waiting. Waiting to feel different, waiting to be told what to do, waiting for an answer that never comes. And meanwhile, the flames are getting hotter and hotter, until you can’t take it. You have to take action, or you burn out. But instead of being propelled by the heat, you can become frozen where you are.

It is not to be without emotion or feeling but to be one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked.” It is not to deny or bury or go around your feelings or your thoughts about those feelings. It is to feel them, acknowledge them, and work with them—to understand what they are trying to tell you about you, about the situation—to let them show you where there is more work to be done without letting them overwhelm, unbalance, or trap you. They have information for you. Take the information, say thank you, and keep going.

Winning ignites a self-conscious awareness that others are watching. It’s a lot easier to move under the radar when no one knows you and no one is paying attention. You can mess up and be rough and get dirty because no one even knows you’re there. But as soon as you start to win, and others start to notice, you’re suddenly aware that you’re being observed. You’re being judged. You worry that others will discover your flaws and weaknesses, and you start hiding your true personality.

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

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

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.

We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.” You embrace it. You trust yourself to handle whatever you’re dealing with, and don’t allow your fear to escalate into uncontrollable doubt. If you ever see me at a game, you’ll see no emotion from me.

I am on a path of understanding more and more about myself every day and shifting my perspective just like my father did. I’m becoming more conscious about what I’m ignoring or denying, and my learning process has become faster, my struggles fewer and less intense.

Because if you’re comfortable with sacrifice and pressure and criticism and pain, if you can learn to focus on the result instead of always focusing on the difficulty… you can chase Winning, fight for it, and defend your right to catch it.

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.

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

Winning ignites a self-conscious awareness that others are watching. It’s a lot easier to move under the radar when no one knows you and no one is paying attention. You can mess up and be rough and get dirty because no one even knows you’re there. But as soon as you start to win, and others start to notice, you’re suddenly aware that you’re being observed. You’re being judged. You worry that others will discover your flaws and weaknesses, and you start hiding your true personality, so you can be a good role model and good citizen and a leader that others can respect. There is nothing wrong with that. But if you do it at the expense of being who you really are, making decisions that please others instead of pleasing yourself, you’re not going to be in that position very long.

We’re all flawed. Confident people don’t hide their flaws; they laugh at them, because they don’t care what you think. Those flaws work for them. They don’t have to work for you.

Confidence lets you hear the voices around you and in your own head, without responding or reacting. You can hear them without listening to a single word.

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

Strength comes in many disguises. Yes, it means being relentless and resilient, and holding up others when you can barely hold up yourself. But there’s more to it than showing power and control. It means having the ability to laugh at yourself and see your own flaws. It’s the confidence to walk away when it’s time, and not look back at what you left behind. It’s showing emotion when you feel it, and not faking it when you don’t. It’s sharing your wins with those who rode along with you, who never left your side and never will.

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.

We break down our day and laugh about which of us fucked up the worst. There is no greater superpower than the ability to say “This is who I am.” Most people push that away, because they don’t want to be judged. Winners don’t care. They judge themselves, and live with the verdict. Think about how much energy and time go into trying to be someone or something you’re not. How much further along would you be if you put that same effort into being yourself?

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.