Mistakes are part of the game. It's how well you recover from them, that's the mark of a great player.

The best players are intelligent, able to read the game, anticipate things,”

When you can't win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out. You can shortcut the need for a genetic advantage (or for years of practice) by rewriting the rules. A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.

happens everywhere all the time. Have you noticed, however, that great players and great companies don’t suddenly start hunching up, grimacing, and trying to “hit the ball harder” at a critical point? Rather, they’re in a mode, a zone in which they’re performing and depending on their “game,” which they’ve mastered over many months and years of intelligently directed hard work.

Doctors, chess grand masters and football quarterbacks share a trait: the ability to recognize patterns and learn from them. A doctor can connect symptoms to causes and use that to make a diagnosis and offer a prescription. Top quarterbacks and grand masters can sense the shape of unfolding play, and profit from that knowledge. Great managers are also skilled at pattern recognition. Every industry is reshaped by patterns of strategic change that can dramatically shift profit and power.

My idea of a real ball player is the fellow who can take the bad breaks with a grin and come up fighting is the type I mean. A slump doesn't bother Tony any. He don't like them any more than the rest of us—but when one comes he just gets sore and fights his way out of it. And that's what it takes to make a ball player. is that sort and so is . I've seen Meusel go through 10 or 12 games without a hit, and be fighting just as hard and swinging just as hard as he did from the start. And that's the spirit that wins.

The key differentiator [between being good and being great] is whether that person is following their calling, if they are doing something they believe is part of their life journey … or whether they are just doing a job, or doing something because they believe that is what they have to do. Not everyone operates from the realm of understanding that life is about choosing … about putting your will out there and spending your life making it a reality. Not everyone realises that by not choosing, life chooses for you and that is never the ideal outcome. Those who become great are deliberately creating their life path as opposed to allowing life to happen to them.

Everyone at a high level has a huge amount of chess understanding, and much of what separates the great from the very good is deep presence, relaxation of the conscious mind, which allows the unconscious to flow unhindered.

There have now been many studies of elite performers — international violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth — and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the cumulative amount of deliberate practice they’ve had. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself.

I think every player is unique, you know," says the man himself. We have got a lot of talented players in the Bundesliga. But, with all due respect, maybe I was a little bit special.

He has a lot of ability. The team depends on him. He is a star. He is going to emerge as an all-time great in the future. I see that much potential in him. It is very difficult to spot his weakness. He plays on both sides of the wicket. He plays both on the front and the back foot. He has a good temperament, technique.

I don’t see anyone better than me. No player does things that I cannot do myself, but I see things others can’t do. There’s no more complete player than me. I’m the best player in history — in the good and the bad moments.

Extraordinary individuals are distinguished less by their impressive “raw powers” than by their ability to identify their strengths and then to exploit them.

In my mind and my heart, I feel like I'm the better player. But I feel like I'm better than anybody who ever played the game, but that's just how it is, that's the only way you can succeed. And in his mind, he (Jackson) feels like he's the better player and the best player who has ever played the position. You have to have that attitude to succeed, but you can't have the ego to the point where you don't understand how him starting and me playing the role helps the team.