The Mental Game Powered by The Pazik Performance Group

"I stood before the group. “Whose fault was this?” I asked to the roomful of teammates. After a few moments of silence, the SEAL who had mistakenly engaged the Iraqi solider spoke up: “It was my fault. I should have positively identified my target.” “No,” I responded, “It wasn’t your fault. Whose fault was it?” I asked the group again. “It was my fault,” said the radioman from the sniper element....

"In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement. In many ways, however, it is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job. Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feeling motivated and energized, we can...

"We live in a world that seems increasingly beyond our control. Our livelihoods are at the whim of globalized forces. The problems that we face—economic, environmental, and so on—cannot be solved by our individual actions. Our politicians are distant and unresponsive to our desires. A natural response when people feel overwhelmed is to retreat into various forms of passivity. If we don’t try too m...

"The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character—the first transformation on the way to mastery." - Robert Greene

"The Apprenticeship Phase - The Three Steps or Modes. Step one: Deep observation - the passive mode. Step two: Skills acquisition - the practice mode. Step three: Experimentation - The active mode" - Robert Greene

"In the [appreticeship phase] you will transform yourself from someone who is impatient and scattered into someone who is disciplined and focused, with a mind that can handle complexity." - Robert Greene

"Some 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, “Become who you are by learning who you are.” What he meant is the following: You are born with a particular makeup and tendencies that mark you as a piece of fate. It is who you are to the core. Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask tha...

"Struggle is not optional—it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing— in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is living tissue."...

"Other researchers, like Dr. Fields, uncovered the mechanism by which these myelin increases happened. As he described in a 2006 paper in the journal Neuron, supporter cells called oligodendrocytes and astrocytes sense the nerve firing and respond by wrapping more myelin on the fiber that fires. The more the nerve fires, the more myelin wraps around it. The more myelin wraps around it, the faster...

"Useful Brain Science Insight Number 1: All actions are really the result of electrical impulses sent along chains of nerve fibers. Basically our brains are bundles of wires - 100 billion wires called neurons, connected to each other by synapses. Whenever you do something, your brain sends a signal through those chains of nerve fibers to your muscles. Each time you practice anything - sing a tune,...

"Q: Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement. Q: Why are passion and persistence key ingredients of talent? A: Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don't love it...

"Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful w...

"The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Here's why. Every human skill, whether it's playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit. Myelin's vita...

"Where in your life are you not taking 100 percent responsibility for the success or failure of your present condition? Write down three things you have done in the past that have messed things up. List three things you should have done but didn’t. Write out three things that happened to you but you responded poorly. Write down three things you can start doing right now to take back responsibility...

"Every professional athlete and his or her coach track each performance down to the smallest minutiae. Pitchers know their stats on every pitch in their repertoire. Golfers have even more metrics on their swings. Professional athletes know how to adjust their performances based on what they’ve tracked." - Darren Hardy

"The biggest difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not." - Darren Hardy

“The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life.” - Darren Hardy

"Because I chose to not be completely responsible for the business, in the end, I was responsible for the results." - Darren Hardy

“What percentage of shared responsibility do you have in making a relationship work?” I was a teenager, so wise in the ways of true love. Of course I had all the answers. “Fifty/fifty!” I blurted out. It was so obvious; both people must be willing to share the responsibility evenly or someone’s getting ripped off. “Fifty-one/forty-nine,” yelled someone else, arguing that you’d have to be willing t...

"...nothing happens to me; it happens because of me." - Grant Cardone

"“How do you stay motivated?” The answer? I create new reasons to keep showing up." - Grant Cardone

"An “excuse” is a justification for doing—or not doing—something. I think the dictionary implies that it's a “reason.” However, in reality, an excuse usually turns out to be something other than the real reason that motivates your actions (or lack thereof). For example, let's say that your excuse for being late to work is due to traffic. Well, that's not truly the reason you didn't make it to work...

"There can never be enough wood on your fire. You can never take too much action or accumulate too much success. There is no such thing as being talked or written about excessively, being covered too frequently, receiving too much authority, or working too much. These are simply claims that mediocre people make in order to justify their own decisions to be happy with the status quo." - Grant Cardo...

"When bad things happen to good people, I assure you that the good people had more to do with it than they take responsibility for." - Grant Cardone

"Assume control and increase responsibility by adopting the position that you make all things happen, even those things you have previously considered to not be under your control." - Grant Cardone