EDITORIAL FEATURE
Fueling Your
Desire to Win
By four-time Olympian, Ruben Gonzalez
T
here are many facets to success. You
have to have a dream about something you’re shooting for. You have
to believe in yourself. You have to
take massive immediate action with an
attitude that you are willing to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes. Then
and only then is success realistic.
More than anything else, your desire
will determine if you will make it. How
badly do you want it? Is your dream
about something you would like to do?
Is it something that would be nice to do?
Or is it something that you are obsessed
about?
If your dream is not an obsession,
as soon as you come across obstacles,
you’ll quit. As soon as the challenge of
reaching your dream becomes an inconvenience, you’ll give up. Burning desire
allows a person with average ability to
successfully compete with those who
have far more ability. Desire allows you
to give it everything you’ve got. It helps
you reach your full potential. Intense
desire allows people to win against overwhelming odds.
Success is not convenient. Trust me.
In order to succeed, you will need to inconvenience yourself in a big way and for
a long time. That’s why it’s so important
to be driven, excited, and passionate
about your dream. If your “why” is big
enough, the “how” will take care of itself.
When I first took up the sport of luge,
we trained in the summer on wheeled
sleds. We would slide down the Lake
Placid bobsled track from the half mile
point on a concrete track at speeds of
about 50 MPH. We wore tennis shoes,
shorts, and a t-shirt. If we crashed, it was
straight to the hospital. That’s the weeding-out process in the sport of the luge.
When we got to the bottom, they did not
even give us a ride back to the top. We
had to carry our sleds back up the mountain. The coaches made it hard on purpose. They wanted to know right away
how badly we wanted it. They didn’t
want to waste any time with anyone who
was not serious.
If you’ve ever played football, you know
exactly what I mean. The first couple of
weeks of football practice each season
are brutal. The coach works the players
to death because he wants to find out
who his real team will be. He wants to
cull out all the “wannabes”.
To succeed, you need to know how to
feed your desire. The more you feed your
desire, the harder it is to quit. Most of the
mental training we do is designed to do
two things, to strengthen our belief level
and to fuel our desire. You have to get
yourself to the point that no matter what
your circumstances are, you are 100 percent focused on your dream. You want
to become so determined to reach your
goal that you convince yourself that you
will have it.
How do you do that? How do you turn
your dream into a magnificent obsession? You surround yourself with the
dream. You put pictures of your dream
all around you. The walls in my office are
completely covered with Olympic memorabilia. One day, I counted how many
sets of Olympic rings were staring at me
all day long. There were over 30 sets of
them! By surrounding myself with the
dream all day long, I’m bombarding my
28 SMALL BUSINESS TODAY MAGAZINE [ AUGUST 2015 ]
If you’ve ever played football, you
know exactly what I mean.
The first couple of weeks of football
practice each season are brutal.
The coach works the players to death
because he wants to find out who
his real team will be.
mind with where I want to go. If I daydream, I daydream Olympics.
I read about the Olympics all the time.
I watch Olympic videos all the time. I
have over 200 hours of Olympic videos.
Most importantly, I allow m \