1-Sentence-Summary: Raise Your Game delves into the philosophy of peak performance presented by a former basketball coach who achieved success by focusing on self-awareness, discipline, and a series of virtues.
Read in: 4 minutes
Favorite quote from the author:
Peak performance, regardless of your area of improvement, can only be achieved through hard work and discipline. Being consistent and driven in your actions beats talent by far, and it can make you successful in ways that native inclinations cannot. Alan Stein knows best how the winning mentality can help anyone achieve their highest potential.
Raise Your Game by Alan Stein Jr focuses on the importance of discipline, improving your mindset constantly, eliminating performance gaps, and acknowledging the essential virtues in life. By drawing lessons from the sports industry, the book exposes the most valuable truths about success and peak performance.
Here are my three favorite lessons from the book:
- Self-awareness and discipline are the starting point of all successful endeavors.
- Comparison builds self-doubt and takes away time and confidence from us.
- When you’re facing a mountain of work, take everything step by step.
Here they are – three of the most valuable lessons of this book. While this piece of writing is packed with highly valuable ideas, we’ll talk more about these three below. Let’s start with the first one!
Lesson 1: A person that is highly self-aware and is willing to work hard consistently becomes unstoppable.
One of the main ideas of this book revolves around self-awareness. The author praises knowing thyself as the single, most important first step in your journey towards success. Without a clear starting point, there’s no way to tell what to improve. Just like with Google Maps, where you start your journey from the current location, self-awareness begins within.
To become self-aware, you’ll have to do a thorough introspection and answer the essential aspects of your life. Questions like what are your biggest strengths, what are you good at, and what’s your purpose and true desires on earth – are all excellent starting points.
Without consistency in your actions, your efforts will be in vain. Set a standard, work hard to achieve it, and even surpass it. Working on yourself is one of the highest forms of self-respect and self-love, so putting as many hours into that as possible will build your mind, body, and soul.
No one needs to know that you’ve embarked on a quest to find yourself and develop your best persona. Truthfully, that’s your journey to fulfill and it’ll take you plenty of lonely time and long hours to get there. Therefore, start by practicing self-awareness and once you’ve established an objective, work restlessly to achieve it.
Lesson 2: If you want to live a happy life, stop comparing yourself to someone else.
Comparison is the mother of doubt, and it makes us feel miserable. No matter who you are, you’ll always find someone prettier, smarter, more musculus, younger, and richer than you. And the list goes on. Even if it’s not true, our biased consciousness will never play things out in our favor, so comparing will eventually lead to self-doubt.
Embarking on that train is not a fun trip, and it sure does take away a lot of time and energy that you could put into your goals. Remember how important self-awareness is? Well, it also includes knowing where you stand and accepting it. By acknowledging that we are at a given point in life, we can start working on ourselves and be better.
However, comparing your situation with someone else’s will only slow down your goals, with no added benefit whatsoever. Self-doubt is a toxic trait of humans and it holds us back from achieving our highest potential because even if we compare, it’ll never help us become the subject of our envy. The cure? Cultivating your virtues. The first one is self-awareness, and then, there’s confidence.
Lesson 3: Taking the first step towards your goal can feel overwhelming if you don’t start gradually.
Let’s say you’ve done the introspection and you’re working to become more self-aware. Knowing where you stand from every point of view is generally a wise approach to life, yet sometimes it can put us down and kill our morale. Realizing how much work needs to be done and that your goals are far away into the future is not fun.
However, it all starts with acknowledging that everyone starts somewhere and that your situation is simply your starting point. Some may have it easier, and some may have it more difficult, but as we’ve discussed before, comparison is not something worth thinking about.
Start small, and focus on gradual steps. Your goal may look far from the present, but starting today will surely take you one step closer to achieving it. With a lot of hard work and discipline targeted towards a clearly-defined goal, there’s virtually no foreseeable way to fail.
Adopt the psychology of small, incremental steps by telling yourself that there’s just a bit to do, but you have to repeat it multiple times. Let’s say you want to get in shape by summer. You’ll want to set up a workout schedule and stick to it every single day, with no excuses. Telling yourself that you have to do ten abs ten times sounds so much better than saying you have to do 100 abs a day, right?
Raise Your Game Review
Raise Your Game comprises highly valuable information from former basketball coach Alan Stein Jr, who writes about peak performance and adopting a winning mentality. Reading this book will help you become more self-aware, set a clearly-defined goal, and stick to it by being more disciplined and ditching comparison overall. The author explores some effective ways of getting rid of toxic behaviors and finding the gaps in your performance to replace them with positive traits and strengths.
Who would I recommend the Raise Your Game summary to?
The 25-year-old who feels like they don’t know their purpose in life and want to find a direction, the 35-year-old procrastinator who wants to take charge of his life, or the 47-year-old late bloomer who wants to catch up on their peers and achieve peak performance in their life.
Last Updated on October 6, 2022
