You should know about GGG. If you don’t, there’s a lot you can learn from him, even if you’re not a boxing fan. In case you’re not familiar with him, Gennady Golovkin, also known as GGG or Triple G, is the current middleweight champion and one of the best boxers in the world.
He didn’t get there by accident. It was on purpose with a very deliberate regimen of training coupled with a lifestyle that didn’t leave out everything else. If you want to take your life or business to the next level, consider the Triple G way of doing things.
Dress for the role you play.
When he’s working, GGG wears a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants, even when it’s over 100 degrees in the gym. When he’s boxing, he wears trunks made to maximize his movement while protecting his midsection and holding a cup (I’ll state from personal experience fighting that this is very important).
How do you dress for your role? Do you dress for comfort or the way your audience and clients need to see you dressed? Or even worse, do you give any thought whatsoever to the way you dress?
Make it a focus. Design your wardrobe on purpose, not by accident. You know how Johnny Cash emphasized his role as the Man in Black? It wasn’t by accident.
Did you know Triple G’s forearms are so big that the lower sleeve of his dress shirts needs to be fitted specially for this?
Pay attention to the little things.
Triple G does chin pushups. That’s right, freakin’ chin pushups. I didn’t even know what that looked like until I checked it out. He is well known for conditioning each individual part of his body to withstand pain, absorb punches, and last as long as needed in the ring.
Want to know how he works his neck? Blind, weighted, hanging neck crunches on a contraption his trainer calls ‘The Machine’.
And you thought getting out of bed some mornings was rough.
I’m not saying you need to kill yourself with all the details and minutiae. What I am saying is that there are certain little things that need to be handled. Finances and physical fitness are two areas that I find the most neglected with my clients.
Work the long game.
Triple G has trained rigorously for decades and now he’s at the top of his game. Even though there are certain parts of the process you can hack through Rapid Skill Development processes, you need to plan for the long game with your life and business.
Put yourself on the right stage.
For years Triple G could only land fights with unqualified opponents. It’s not that they weren’t any good. It’s that he was so much better. Better boxers and title champions wouldn’t fight him because he didn’t have a name yet, and they didn’t want to lose to a nobody and damage their reputation.
It took quite a few well-placed fights to hit the right stage. Now, the tables have turned. It’s getting harder and harder to find fighters qualified to challenge him.
To quote an ESPN magazine article about him, “Finally, the stage matches his skill and reputation.”
That’s where you need to be. Fight your way to the top of your game. Then be the best one there. As far as the ‘right stage’ goes, there may be a time you need to just step out and create your own stage.
Fail upward.
Failures hurt. They’ll piss you off, make you want to quit, and even make you consider quitting or suicide at times. Ronda Rousey considered killing herself when she lost her women’s MMA title. Triple G considered retirement after a controversial Olympic loss.
She didn’t kill herself. She’s still fighting and examining other areas of success in her life, like acting.
He didn’t retire. Look where he is now.
You need to build a life with margin so that you can absorb failures, even critical, huge, life-changing ones. Without that margin you can’t fail upward or learn from your mistakes so that you can improve and come back bigger, harder, and faster.
Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, lived out of his car for a time with his wife. Now he’s a bazillionaire with a huge empire of books and products.
Recently, I got kicked out of my apartment with my wife and 5 kids because we had too many people for the size of the place. We were one step away from being homeless. Now we’re living in a cool place less than a mile from the beach and making more money than we were before.
Burn your bridges and boats behind you.
Everyone always says the opposite, and sure there are some bridges you need to keep, but I guarantee that if you burn almost all your bridges, it will help move you forward in ways you could never imagine. You’ve got to quit relying on what was behind you so much.
Many moons ago I was a paramedic. I let that certification drop as I moved further away from my prehospital medical career. I didn’t want that former job to be there as a backup. It would’ve been too easy to fall back and take the old job working 24 hour shifts for minimum wage pay. I burned that bridge.
When Triple G came to the U.S. to train, he showed up with one bag and nothing else.
Focus.
When Triple G showed up at the airport in Los Angeles with one bag, the trainer who picked him up questioned it.
He merely shrugged and said, “I came to train. Not to party.”
Find your path. Find your niche. Focus on that and eliminate all the other distractions. Don’t jump at every chance you come across to make money unless it fits into your plan and moves you forward.
In the gym when he trains, the TV is always playing old fights. It helps Triple G focus on his path. He’s not in there playing cat videos on Youtube, watching Star Trek on Netflix, or digital farming on his smartphone.
On working in a spartan training camp in California, Triple G said, “I can’t have a regular life. I have to be 100 percent focused on boxing.”
His trainer talked about a silence that comes upon them during their prefight routine, “I can see the transformation. I can see he’s already concentrating.”
Make time for your family.
Triple G is well known for keeping his family and work separated. That way, when he’s at work, he’s…you know…working. When he’s not training, he’s actively with his wife and son.
His mother has never attended any of his 400 plus fights. His father only attended one. His wife and son do not watch his fights.
I want you to go all out when you’re at work, but I also want you to make sure to plan quality time with your family. If you don’t, you’ll lose them, and no work is worth that.
I have sacrificed a lot of income over the years to be with my kids more. We homeschool them, and that takes a tremendous amount of time, but it’s worth it. I’d rather have fewer things, an older car, and way more experiences that we’ll never forget.
Don’t walk away from a fight.
There will always come a time in life and business where you need to fight. It may be physical, a lawsuit, a client that needs to be dropped, or a commitment that you need to say no to. When that time comes, put on your gloves and beat the crap out of it.
We had a saying in one of the military units I served in-
Triple G grew up in an area and time in Kazakhstan where he had to physically fight for every little thing, even food and clothing. I’m talking bare knuckle, in a back alley somewhere, with real consequences kind of fights. The really interesting thing is that this is how Triple G was discovered. He got into a fight with a bunch of older kids at a soccer game, and a local boxing coach saw him. A little training and a lot of discipline later, and he was soon after the best boxer in the area.
Launch your plan.
Don’t wait until everything is perfect before you launch. At some point you have to overcome your fear, create margin to allow for mistakes, and jump.
Software companies call it iterative processing. It’s the system where they develop a product until they can’t continue working on it. The product needs to be released in a less than perfect state so that other people can start using it and find the bugs for them. It’s not slacking for a company to do that. It’s not the easy way out. It’s a necessary part of developing the best product possible. That’s why you might find a bug or glitch in a new program and the next thing you know, there’s an update and a software patch you can download to fix it.
Do the same in your own life and business.
My good friend Ryan McRae at ADHD Nerd does this with some of his coaching programs and classes. In that respect he calls it ‘Beta Testing’. Sometimes he’ll offer a Beta version of a new class cheaper for a select few early adopters so that he can refine the final version for a launch.
The important thing is that you launch.
A recent article on Triple G ended with these words…
“It’s time to fight. It’s time for GGG.”
“I’m ready”, he says.
Are you ready?
This message was written by a team of geeks, nerds, gamers, and Dr. David Powers. You can always find us at www.callsignredbeard.com. Thanks for reading!
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