Jake Thompson - Compete Every Day: The Not-So-Secret Secret to Winning Your Work and Life

You are invited to join the thousands of ambitious Competitors claiming victory in their professional and personal lives in our free Facebook community at:

www.Facebook.com/groups/CompeteEveryDay

Inside this community, you will find thousands of driven leaders just like you who are making strong choices to compete every day in their work, workouts, and life.

I am excited to meet you, encourage you, and hold you accountable to achieving the important goals youve set for your career and life.

Deep down, I believe we all want to hoist a championship trophy.

Theres a yearning within us to win something a sports championship, a promotion at work, the heart of someone we are destined to love as the one, or a local fitness competition. We want to be a winner capable of achieving success.

Think about it: How emotionally driven do we get when our favorite sports team wins? Fans celebrate more than the athletes who put in the years of work for that title. They feel invested in the championship, despite having never played one snap on the field. And they will always believe that they own some small piece of this title.

We never forget where we were watching when our team won our first championship.

As fans, we believe its our trophy, too .

We do the same in the political arena. Election day every four years is a joyous or heartbreaking event on the basis of whether your party won or lost. We feel ownership in the process and ride the emotional high or low of the outcome, even though we are just 1 in 138 million votes.

Its an innate human need to be a winnerbecause winners belong.

Our ancestral history dates back to the time of the cave dwellers, when survival depended on the tribe. We needed to belong to a community in order to survive the dangers of the world. The better equipped you were to provide, the higher your status in the communityand the safer you were within the community, because no members of the community would ostracize their best providers.

We arent hunting wild game on the plains anymore, but our mentality hasnt changed much. We still see winners as the most valuable people in society. Sports winners are paid handsomely for their on-field performances. Hollywoods winners pack the box office and adorn the covers of magazines. Even your local small Texas town identifies its winners by who sits on the school board or city council and by who wears the letter jackets on Friday nights.

Winners are the ones who reap the rewards in life. If you hold the trophy, you hold the power and the status of achievement.

Many believe that life is easier for winners and that because of who they are, they dont have to struggle. Goals are handed to them. Roadblocks are opened up. We know that like sports, life has winners and losers. And if we get to be ones among the winners, then goals become easier to achieve, friends easier to make, and bank accounts easier to fill.

The only way to make life exponentially better is to be the winnerbecause, if not, then wed have to be the loser, right? At least thats what social media leads us to believe.

As kids, we believed we were going to be winners. We started to learn, as we grew older, that not everyone was going to be a winner. The simple fact of competition is that you need a loser in order to have a winner.

I had an (almost unrealistic) belief while growing up that I was going to be a winner in life. I assumed that because I had the right attitude, a decent work ethic, and good connections, winningand everything I assumed came with it (money, status, attention from the opposite sex)was just a given.

What a pile of crap that was.

Flash forward some years later; instead of being a winner, I found myself in a hole. I drank daily, changed girlfriends more often than I changed socks, and watched my bank account shrink as I outspent what I had made. I quit what I thought was my dream career and struggled to find any purpose in work I was doing. Yet I still believed that things would improve and that Id be winning one dayI just needed to find the magic tipping point that would change everything.

Do you know that feeling? You look frantically for that one book or podcast or YouTube video or relationship that will change your entire life overnight. I believed if I could just find it, Id go from struggling to succeeding in the snap of finger. That one thing would change everything.

Can you relate?

Have you ever tricked yourself into believing that if you just:

• Found the one, you would feel complete.
• Started this new diet, youd finally be in a shape that makes you happy.
• Read this one specific book, youd solve all of your business problems overnight.

The one thing about that list above is that when you read itthe one line youve told yourself probably stands out as believable, but the others? They sound ridiculous. Our excuses always sound sweet to our own ears, but to everyone else?

They sound like crap.

I was swimming in my own lies about success until I finally remembered the one truth Id known earlier in my life but had forgotten.

The beauty of sports is its meritocracy: the best player or team wins. Period. You cant talk your way into a league championship. You cant buy an MVP. You have to earn your successes on the field, one play at a time, every game and every season.

But the real way you earn your success on the field is by committing to the work off of it, throughout every day in the off-season and every practice rep.

You earn your championships in practiceyou just pick them up on game day.

Somewhere along the way, I made the mistake of believing life worked differently. I had believed that to be a winner in life, it came down to what you looked like, whom you knew, and what lucky breaks you fell into. I had made the mistake of spending my youth obsessed with being liked, with being in shape, and with waiting for a lucky break rather than following the same path I had followed in sports to be able to play quarterback for my hometown team.

I had forgotten that sports mirror life. I started to realize that what Id been missing Id known all along.

Success is earned every day. Some are born with more talent or given more opportunities, but to win, you still have to do the work before games and then to seize the moment when the chance for success comes. If I wanted to be a winner in life, it came down to what I was doing to earn championships in practice every day. This aha moment changed everything. I started obsessing over competition and winning over competitors.

• What made winners so successful?
• What did they do to get to where they are now?
• And, most important, what did they do that I can replicate to be successful in my life?

I began researching successful leaders in sports and life to answer these questions. I watched games, studied teams, and made notes. I experimented with my work and life.

I discovered that being a winnerin sports and in lifedoesnt require a very complicated formula. You dont need to have a PhD or be able to pat your head while rubbing your stomach. Winners arent hiding some magic potion from you. And to be honest, it isnt one big thing that makes a winner.

It is, actually, a lot of very small thingsmundane and seemingly unimportant choices that, when compounded, one on top of the other, create massive growth.

Its not a single interaction, extra sale, or special person that is going to create the incredible life-changing moment that transforms us forever into winners.