How Champions Think: In Sports and in Life

How Champions Think uses examples and anecdotes primarily from the sports of golf and basketball to provide evidence of the psychological hardiness that championship athletes must display in order to get to the top and stay at the top.

Each chapter of the book outlines a different element of the mental game - beliefs about yourself and about your approach to your craft that you should seek to adopt in order to reach your greatest levels of potential and experience the greatest amounts of success. The overarching theme of the book is clear and it's a good one - Rotella repeatedly emphasizes the importance of adherence to process, while paying less regard to results. If we can evaluate ourselves based on how strictly we adhere to our preparation process and our performance process, without paying attention to how our opponents are doing or to other factors beyond our control, we're well on track to thinking like a champion. If we can do this, as Rotella explains, we overcome our fear of failure because our satisfaction is achieved through that adherence to the processes, and thus we can feel satisfied with our effort regardless of "scoreboard failure". More often than not, when we follow this approach, the scoreboard takes care of itself and wins come as a byproduct of focusing on the process.

Much of Dr. Rotella's advice makes sense and I would agree that the topics he covers are very important components of a championship mindset, however, the book is focused almost entirely on providing evidence or proof of why those components are important, with little dedication to helping the reader adopt or display those mindsets. I read most of the book feeling entertained by the stories and examples, but I was left with not much practical advice that I could use in order to develop as strong of a mental game as the athletes he mentions in his book. It's great to identify the strengths of the exceptional people you've worked with, but without practical tools to help me get there, the anecdotes will be quickly forgotten and nothing about my life or mental game will change. For this reason, I would say the book is only good, but not more.