Rob Fraser: Mission, Mindset, and Mastery [The Knowledge Project Ep. #205]

Shane Parrish: You’ve been successful against the odds in both professional sports and business. Talk to me about the mindset required to do that.

Rob Fraser: The mindset really comes down to a personal mission. If you think about doing both of those things, whether it’s sports or anything hard, having some intrinsic reason or some motivation or some personal drive to accomplish something really pushes you forward and pulls you into that goal. A lot of people talk about building a resilient mindset or building a stronger mindset, and I think that maybe there’s some benefit to trying to teach that or learn it, but I really think it’s something that you can only learn by going through it. And you go through those tough times and push through those things because you care about something, so [you have] that personal mission. So when it was with sport, it was this goal to become a competitive cyclist, a professional cyclist, and reach different goals that I had. So whether it was coming back from injury or coming back from setbacks, the goal was so much larger than the pain I was dealing with or the stress. And the idea of not pushing forward wasn’t even there.