The Competitor’s Brain Loren Foxx

I was on Instagram (boo) watching Mookie Betts talk to himself during a round of BP. There were two things that happened in the video (thanks @sweetspothitting for posting it). 
1. He sort of dictates the outcome before he takes the swing. Of course, this is hard to do, and we're talking about a guy who's hit as high as .346 during a season. But you can do the same thing off a tee.
2. He's kind to himself. He talks to himself like he would a friend. Most players I coach don't do this. They don't get the desired result and beat themselves up. So there's a coaching point for me there: when I hear a player using negative self-talk in the cage, I need to step in and correct it. 
Thanks for listening, as always.

Well, it's three minutes and 30 seconds. But it's a collection of things I wish I'd heard when I was 18. Or maybe it's a collection of things I wish I'd listened to when I was 18. I probably heard them but I thought I knew everything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

I recorded this in one take, which is ironic. 
Nick Saban says "Don't practice until you can't get it right, practice until you can't get it wrong."
And it's often said that you don't rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your training.
So if you practice to a point you can't get it wrong, what happens when the occasion happens? And what do you get out of it? 

I saw a quote that my colleague Kara LaMarche posted to Instagram: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so I can do laundry and dishes."
We have handed many uniquely human things over to AI. Designing, making art, making music, writing. 
If you hand those things over to a machine, what is left of you? 
Nothing. 

I've seen bits of the same quote from Daniel Chambliss about excellence in Olympic swimmers. I saw it in Billy Oppenheimer's Sunday email back in September, and James Clear had it in his last Thursday... so now you get it too.
Excellence is created by doing the little things, one on top of the other. The little things that are going to make a ball fly 10' farther, add 3 mph of velo to your fastball, make you swim .01 faster. 
I do reference two swimmers who tied in the 1984 Olympics. This is the background on it. I am definitely not disparaging them in any way, merely making a point about whether a hundredth of a second could have been gained anywhere else to make either of them the solo gold medalist. (In retrospect, I think it's pretty cool they tied. I still remember that, 40 years hence. I still remembered their last names, but not their first names, so I used neither.)

In this episode, I talk about how Marcus Aurelius' response to circumstances (ie what happens) isn't terribly unlike what Mike Damone's advice to his friend Rat is in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Probably the first time that sentence has ever been typed. Probably also the last time.