[00:00] What are you even chasing? What do you even want? Like what does success even look like for you? That’s where you start having that clear vision for what success looks like. It’s obvious in sports. It’s not obvious once you get out of that world into the real world. Welcome to another episode of Success for the Athletic Minded Man.

[00:22] Real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus. In business in life, this is your host, Jim Harshaw, Jr. And today I’m bringing you a solo episode. We’re talking about why seeds don’t matter. I just had my mind blown along with 19,000 other people inside the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, and it was a crazy event that I want to tell you about.

[00:46] Donald Trump was there, president Trump, Elon Musk, and I hesitate to share that because I know those are polarizing figures, but it just shows you the magnitude of this event. And what went down was insane. So let me first share with you my story and how that relates to what happened here. To set the stage, first I’m gonna give credit to Dave Sini, one of my longtime clients.

[01:07] We call them Pathfinders. He’s a very successful financial advisor based in Rochester, New York, and he’s the host of the Great Wealth Transfer Podcast, which is a great podcast and highly recommended. So we’ll have the link to that in the action plan jimharshawjr.com/action. Those of you who are already subscribed to the email list, you’re getting this in your, your inbox on Mondays.

[01:27] So a little backstory about before I get into what happened there at the Wells Fargo Center, my goal in high school as a wrestler was to win the Pennsylvania State Championship. Not only did I not win the state championship, I didn’t even get on the podium. I felt so far short of my goal. I didn’t even get close and.

[01:42] In my TEDx talk, if you’ve ever watched that, we’ll have a link to that in the action plan. You can just Google my name, Jim Harshaw and Ted Talk and you’ll, you’ll find it on YouTube. But it was called Why I Teach My Children To Fail, and it was largely about, I. My experience in college as a college wrestler, and that was also largely failure.

[02:01] My goal was to become an All American, all Americans top eight at the NCAA Championships. And first, you, in order to be an All American, you first, you have to qualify for the national championships, and I qualified my freshman year. Uh, I failed to achieve my goal, qualified again my sophomore year. Again, I failed.

[02:18] Uh, you have to win four matches, essentially at the National Championships to be an All American and my junior year, pretty much a repeat of the prior two years, qualified again for the National Championships. And again, but again, I, I found myself, you know, sitting in the locker room with my face buried in a towel in tears, wondering why I can’t do this.

[02:35] And, you know, I work as hard as I possibly can, but you know, why am I not seeing results? And I decided to dedicate my entire off season to figuring out what went, what am I doing wrong? What am I missing? I competed for 16 years in the sport. I started wrestling when I was six years old, and I had one season left my senior year in college.

[02:57] And I dedicated my off season to figure out what am I missing, right? Do I get a lift more, do I get to get in better condition? Do I gotta learn new techniques? Like what, what is it that I’m missing? And trained all summer worked as a camp counselor and wrestling camps, bouncing around every college I could, who would take me in as a camp counselor, just so I could be around the Olympians and championship coaches they brought in just to be in their orbit and, and, and learn and pick their brain.

[03:19] Well, the next season, the my senior season rolls around and I found myself. Sitting in the hotel room in Morgantown, West Virginia, the night before the opening tournament of the season, it was the West Virginia Open. Realizing that I never figured it out. I never figured out what I’m missing. And so I decided in that moment to give up, to give up on the outcome.

[03:39] I gave it to God and just said, I’m, I’m done here. I, I, I did everything I can. I’m doing all I possibly can. I’m working as hard as I possibly can, and if I get on the podium at the end of the year, great. You know, my goal is to be a national champion at that time. If I get on the podium or the top of the podium, great.

[03:54] If not, I have to be able to okay with that because there’s nothing else I can do. I can’t possibly run more miles or lift more weights or watch more film. There’s not enough hours in the day to do more. I. And so I gave up, woke up the next morning, competed in the West Virginia, open, went five and oh, dominated.

[04:09] Everybody had so much fun wrestling, and it was this entirely different perspective and mindset that I wrestled with of pure freedom. And I went throughout the entire season, had a great season, got to the National Championships again. I’d won three matches and I had to win one more to be an All American.

[04:25] I had to wrestle the fourth ranked wrestler in the country from the number one ranked team in the country, which at the time was University of Minnesota, and I won. I’d never beaten anybody in the top five before, but I finally did. I won the match and I became an All American I. And I’m gonna use that as a segue into what happened in the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.

[04:48] And it was a wrestler from University of Minnesota. This was the NCAA Wrestling Championships. It was a three day event and this was the NCAA finals, the championship finals, which is Saturday Night Live on ESPN. It was amazing. 19,000 people packed into this arena and the one of the highest rated audiences for the event in years.

[05:08] And it comes down the, the final match is the heavyweights Gable Stevenson. You wrestler from University of Minnesota Olympic gold medalist and two time NCAA champion, and he is wrestling Wyatt Hendrickson from Oklahoma State University and Wyatt Hendrickson had been third in the NCAA twice and. Now he’s, he’s gotta wrestle the, you know, says this is a David versus Goliath.

[05:32] This is nobody in the arena save Wyatt Hendrickson himself. And maybe his coach thought he had a shot. So the match is close. It’s, uh, a close match the whole way through. Gable Stevenson gets an early takedown and there’s like a minute left and the wrestler from. Minnesota is winning Gable Stevenson, the Olympic gold medalist, and they’re on their feet.

[05:54] Wyatt Hendrickson from Oklahoma State, takes a shot, gets the take down, and if you haven’t heard the call, I. From this, I, I’m, I’m gonna grab the, I’ll grab the tweet and I’m gonna put it in the action plan. So make sure you grab the action plan. I’ll grab the tweet. The call is absolutely amazing. It’s Daniel Cormier, who was a, also wrestled for Oklahoma State and went on to be an Olympian, was a UFC champion, and he does a lot of UFC events now too, as a broadcaster, but he brought, he was a broadcaster.

[06:21] Jordan Burrows, uh, I was with him who’s a goat of American wrestling, uh, seven time world and Olympic champion. And also my friend Rock Harrison, who was my teammate at UVA. He was literally locker mate. We were beside each other in lockers Haw Harrison. So, you know, alphabetically, we were right beside each other.

[06:37] Good, great friend. And these three guys are on the call and it is absolutely bonkers. And so I’ll put the tweet, I’ll put on grab tweet and I’ll put it in the, uh, action plan so you can hear it. It is just nuts. He gets the win. White Hendrickson holds on for the win. His coaches just. Swarm them, and it, it, the place goes crazy.

[06:56] I was there, I mean, the, the, the roof just blew off the entire place. And, and there’s actually this other funny tweet where these two co, the coaches are like in the background after the takedown happens and the matches, you know, the clock’s kicking, kicking down. You’re like, can he hold on? Can you continue to control him?

[07:10] And when the match, and, and they’re like punching each other, pushing each other, and they’re just like outta their minds and he wins. And then if that’s not enough, you know, like I said, Donald Trump’s there. Elon Musk is there, you know, again, for better or for worse, depending on, on what side of the aisle you’re on, but you know, the, the place was just electric and, and then white Hendrickson gets up and he walks over to the crowd and he puts his arms out and he looks up and he yells something.

[07:37] And then he yells it again a couple seconds later. I’m like, what did he say? I’m looking at my buddies. I’m sitting with him like, what did he say? What did he say? And we couldn’t tell what he said, but I knew, I was like, he said something like, what did he say? And a few days later, I come across this tweet again and I find that he said a quote from the movie, Troy, where Achilles slays.

[07:55] This, his opponent in front of the two armies and the, the know these two armies are watching across the battlefield and just those two are facing each other. And Achilles charges this guy, and you’ve probably seen the clip where he stabs the guy in the neck. And I’ll, again, I’ll put this clip in the action plan.

[08:11] I’ll grab the, the tweet there and he looks up the crowd and he says, and it turns out what he said was the same thing that, that, that Achilles says in the movie, which is Brad Pitt. And he says, is there no one else? Is there no one else. He says it twice. It was like, it was just amazing. And he turns around and he salutes Trump and it was just, the whole thing was just like cinematic it.

[08:32] It was bonkers. And so I’ve seen this kind of upset before. Unfortunately, the University of Virginia basketball team was the first. Team first, number one, seed overall, number one in the end, NCAA league March madness to lose to a 16 seed. So that was a absolutely painful. Thankfully, the next year they redeem, redeem themselves, come back and win the whole freaking thing, and won the national championship the next year.

[08:54] So it was this amazing, you know, failure to success story. And I’ve also seen these kinds of stories in business and you know, I have a friend who grew up in a trailer park, a very poor, small town. Small town, Virginia, and he started his first business and sold that for, I forget, in the tens of millions, sold another one.

[09:15] Same thing. Basically sold four businesses in the tens of millions of dollars each. Like this guy is just. Rags to riches underdog story, but he, he had to find a way he believed, and at some level, he believed that seeds don’t matter. Just like UMBC, university of Maryland, Baltimore County believed that seeds don’t matter.

[09:40] Like when they played UVA basketball, just like when W Hendrickson upset the number one seed, the Olympic gold medalist, he believed that seeds don’t matter. Just like whenever I stepped on the mat with a number four seed in the country. And I was the 11, which was the highest I’d been ranked in my entire career.

[09:55] And I believe that seeds don’t matter. So how can you put yourself
[10:00] in this situation to win when you are the underdog? Whatever it is you’re trying to achieve that you’ve not yet achieved, you’re the underdog, whether you think it or not. Whether you like it or those, you’re the underdog, right? You’ve not achieved it yet.

[10:13] If it’s a big enough goal, big enough, exciting enough, compelling enough. You are the underdog, but you can do it. And how do you go about doing it? Here’s the process, here’s the recipe, here’s the formula. Here are the ingredients that are necessary for you to get from here, where you’re at, to there, despite what you’re seeded, right?

[10:32] If it were a tournament, what would you be seeded? So here we go. Here are the four ingredients that you need. Number one, you’ve gotta have a clear vision for what success looks like. Like in sports, we have that, right? It’s standing on the top of the podium, it’s slaying the giant, it’s winning the match.

[10:46] It’s getting your hand raised. It’s winning the basketball game, right? We have that in sports. Do you have that in your life? Do you have a clear vision for like, what are you even chasing? What do you even want? Like what does success even look like for you? That’s where you start having that clear vision for what success looks like.

[11:06] It’s obvious in sports, it’s not obvious once you get out of that world into the real world, and that’s the first step in our program. It’s literally what we do. There’s a worksheet that we do and there’s a whole coaching session for an hour where you get coached on how to clarify this vision for success for you.

[11:23] And then the second part. Is having aligned goals. Goals that align with that vision, goals that are tethered to that vision and not, you know, not just any goals, like actually compelling goals. Because a lot of people just set goals. They don’t set the right goals, they’re not confident that they have the right goals, and if you don’t guess what, you’re not going to move as quickly as possible.

[11:43] You’re not gonna succeed, right? You’re not gonna find that level of success that is actually possible for you unless you have compelling goals that you’re confident in. When you have that level of clarity, you can execute. Right? Most of you listening, you know, you’re, you’re listening to this podcast, so you’re, you’re interested in, in personal development, you’re interested in getting better, but you have these clearly defined goals.

[12:05] And listen, they can change, they can edit. You can massage them and edit, edit them and update them over time. But you have them, you have to start with them, you know? And, and, and then we have something we call micro goals in our program. Which are the monthly goals. You know, in business you might call them KPIs, key performance indicators or OKRs, objectives and key results.

[12:24] Um, this stuff is, it’s there in sports, the NFL combine. These guys know what their bench is, they know what their 40 time is. They’re measuring it, they’re tracking it, they’re improving it. It’s very clear these short term goals are based on longer term goals of, you know, getting drafted, make it in the NFL, which is part of their vision of what success looks like for them being an NFL player, professional football player.

[12:48] You’ve gotta have these, so you’ve gotta have the clear vision, which takes work. You gotta have clear goals that are aligned with the vision, clear micro goals that are aligned to the the goals. And then you’ve, here’s the third part. You gotta have an environment of excellence. You gotta be around people.

[13:03] Why at Hendrickson went from, he was at the Air Force Academy. And he was a two time all American there. He got third place twice at the Air Force Academy. Great wrestler. I think the one year he was the pins lead, national pins leader. And he graduated in the Air Force in the academies. You can’t, uh, you can’t compete as a graduate.

[13:20] So he transferred to Oklahoma State, got into the WCAP program, world class athlete program, WCAP, world Class Athlete Program in the military, and got to transfer to Oklahoma State and got to be around an even better environment of excellence. He got to be around a guy named David Taylor, who is a World Olympic champion, a wrestler, uh, NCAA champion.

[13:42] And he got to be around him. And it is fascinating. So, so in this environment of excellence, what we coach our guys to, to think about and the steps are, um, one of them is, is people. Like, who are the people in your sphere? Who are the people in your environment? And, and so Wyatt Hendrickson gets this guy, David Taylor, this amazing coach David Taylor, first year coach at Oklahoma State gets to be in his.

[14:03] Sphere right of influence. And there’s actually a great quote of David Taylor. Talking about this guy who’s a two time third, play third in the country twice. So he is an amazing wrestler. I was already, he’s already a two time All-American when he shows up, he’s a very high level wrestler, U 23, world champion.

[14:21] And, and so this guy shows up and he is, he is obviously really good. And David Taylor’s saying like, yeah, you know, you know, he was sloppy and we had to clean things up and talk about how sloppy he was like, oh my gosh, this guy’s like elite. Or he’s talking about how sloppy he is. Well, that’s what happens when you get around the right people.

[14:38] When you have the right coach in your corner. I. When you have people who can help you, who can guide you, who can unlock your potential, they’re gonna challenge you to do things differently than you’re doing right now. I talk to so many guys, so many guys, maybe it’s you with a listener who, you know, they, they hear about what I do and what we do and my company coaching and they think, ah, coaching.

[14:57] I don’t need coaching. Look what I’m doing. You know, I was emailing with a guy a couple days ago who’s like. Yeah, my life is good and I spend a lot of time with my kids and I do this and that. It’s like, awesome, great. Like is there another level? Are you playing to, to the highest level of your capacity?

[15:14] And if you don’t have a coach in your corner, I guarantee you’re not. Period. Full stop. You’ve got to have that person in your corner who holds you accountable, makes you hit the pause button. We talk about the productive pause. Which I define as a short period of focused reflection around specific questions that leads to clarity of action and peace of mind.

[15:33] We all get better by doing that. I’ve got some really, really elite performers in my coaching program and these guys are like, I mean, these guys are crushing it at a, a much higher level than a lot of people who, who don’t sign up for my program. And think, ah, I’m too good for that. Ah, I don’t need that.

[15:50] It’s like, and then there’s these guys who are performing at a, you know, a 10 x higher level of than them and saying like, no, I need this. Like, I need this to get even better, to squeeze more juice outta my life. Have bigger impact, be a better father, be a better husband, be fitter, be more money, grow my impact.

[16:07] So back to the environment of excellence. Part of it’s people, part of it is media. And I talked about this movie, Troy, right when Achilles slays his opponent in front of the two armies. He says, is there no one else? Like apparently Wyatt Hendrickson was watching this kind of stuff, man. He like, he saw himself as Achilles.

[16:27] He saw himself as the guy who slayed the other warrior who looked tougher, bigger, meaner, stronger, all of that. He saw himself as the guy winning despite the odds. I’ll share, like I said, I’ll share that link in the action plan of that movie clip. And it also includes White Hendrickson sharing this. And by the way, I do wanna mention this.

[16:50] Dave Gable Stevenson was interviewed a couple days later on the Pat McAfee show, as was White Hendrickson actually. But when Gable Stevenson was interviewed, man, he had such a great attitude, like I have, I have much more respect for him after this loss because of how he handled the loss. He didn’t say, ah, man, you know, ref screwed me or whatever.

[17:07] Like, he wasn’t like pouting about it. He was like, man, he’s like, the sun came up today. I got food on my team. I got people who love me. He got all these things that he’s grateful for. Of course he didn’t want, you know, it sucks still. But what are you saying? What are you saying? When you lose, when you fail, what are you saying before your opportunity to succeed or fail your language.

[17:27] This is the other part of the environment of excellence is, is your language, like, what are you saying? After Wyatt Hendrickson won, he walked back. There’s a clip of him walking back to his teammates and he is like, I told you boys, I told you he was telling them, he said this. He literally was apparently saying, I’m gonna win guys.

[17:48] I’m gonna go slay the giant. What are you saying? Uh, woe is me. Yeah, but I can’t because. Do you wanna approach life like seeds don’t matter, or you wanna approach it like seeds matter, I’m the 16th seed, then I’m playing the one seed, I’m never going to win. How are you gonna approach it? It’s a choice. You know?

[18:06] Listen, you don’t really need me to point out other stories, but I’m going to. Anyway. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, the company that he started, and what do you think he was seeded after that he starts the company, you know, in terms of the, if there were a seed for bracket is for brackets for becoming the one of the most influential entrepreneurs in the history of the world.

[18:29] What was he seated in that moment? He won the one seed. He won the high seed. I can tell you that, but guess what? He came back. Seeds didn’t matter. A Lincoln failed seven times. His first seven attempts at running for office. What was he seated? And for Becoming president of the United States and arguably one of the greatest leaders in American history, what was he seated?

[18:50] Seats didn’t matter. Entertainment, I’ve talked about sports, I’ve talked about business, talked about politics, talked about entertainment. Sylvester Stallone, have you ever heard his story? He was so poor and so broke when he was trying to sell his script for Rocky, that he sold his dog, his dog’s name’s Buttkiss.

[19:08] He sold his dog for 40 bucks outside of a seven 11 ’cause he had to pay the bills. That’s how broke he was. That’s how committed to his dream. He, what was he seated? What was he seated in? Becoming a superstar. A name known around the world, Rocky, a, a, a movie series that will live on for generations and generations.

[19:26] Sold the script, goes back, buys his dog back for $15,000. Fascinating story if you’ve never read it or heard it. But it’s a fascinating story. He didn’t care about seeds. He was nowhere close to the top seed, but he won. I’ve got clients who are experienced the same thing. A guy named Ryan Ey, he founded Hero Gear.

[19:46] If you go to shop hero gear.com, that’s his, his business. He got an order from the UFC for his weighted compression suit. Fascinating story, this guy, I mean, he’s, he’s a force of nature.
[20:00] He doesn’t care about seeds. He got an order from the UFC, first order. Big one, UFC. I mean, beg, this is big time. Like he didn’t care about seeds.

[20:09] Dr. Mark McLaughlin, he’s, despite being a busy neurosurgeon, founded a practice, four kids running his own nonprofit. He had a dream of writing a book. Guy doesn’t have any time, he’s not gonna write a book. He wrote an amazing book. Despite the seeds, he didn’t care about the seeds. He wrote the book Anyway.

[20:26] It’s called cognitive dominance. A brain surgeon’s quest to outthink fear. Fascinating book I can tell you about a client of ours named Johnny had a goal of retiring by age 50, and he did it. He didn’t care what he was seated. He did it. Now it’s your turn. Go to jimharshawjr.com/apply. Take action. Good luck.

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