Michael Phelps has won the most Olympic medals of anyone in history. With 28 medals, he’s even won more medals more medals than entire countries put together. And he’s described the incredible obsession — and hard work — that it takes to get there.
Phelps says that he didn’t miss a single day of practice for 7 straight years when he was training for his Olympics performances. That meant swimming on weekends, holidays, and even on days when he wasn’t feeling particularly well. “(From) 1999 to 2006, basically straight without missing a single day, 365 days a year,” Phelps said on how much he’d practiced. “During that time, we were averaging about 10 workouts a week, seven days a week,” he added.
Phelps said that he was averaging 6 hours per day in the pool during that time. “And we would go from 5 am to 7 am, 9 am to 11 am, and 3 pm to 5 pm, all in the pool, and then have a weight session afterwards. So we’re having four workouts a day,” he said.
This grueling schedule meant that all Phelps essentially did for seven years was eat, sleep, swim and lift. “Over 24 days, we’re probably working out with weights 75 times,” he said. “Basically all we did was eat, sleep, swim, and lift. That’s all I did. I saw myself improving so much because we weren’t taking a day off. In the sport of swimming, if you miss one day, it takes you two days to get back to where you were,” Phelps said.
Phelps isn’t the only top-tier sportsperson that’s shown such dedication to achieving his goals. Chess World Number 1 Magnus Carlsen has said that he lives and breathes chess. “I think about (chess) all the time,” he confessed. “I’m thinking about the game while I’m sitting on this chair. I’m still analyzing a game that I played today. It never goes completely out of my mind,” Carlsen says.
And it’s this intensity and dedication that seems to translate into business success as well. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says that he works from 5 am to 9 pm every day, and is so obsessed with his work that he’s even thinking of it when he’s watching movies. Elon Musk famously has spent nights sleeping on factory floors, and says he’s working all the time he’s awake. There’s always place for strategy and talent, but outsized outcomes, both in business and sport, seem to result from maniacal, obsessive hard work.