“Head-Fake” Yourself Into Success by Streaming “The Last Dance”
How watching the ESPN-Documentary-Series leads you to discover one of the best ways to be like Mike.
Netflix contains so many fantastic shows. Although the platform and television generate arguably the largest amount of wasted potential; most at least occasionally terminate their productivity and gravitate toward “mental drifting” through streaming. When that happens to you, I advise you to watch Netflix’s and ESPN’s The Last Dance.
Viewing the series not only allowed me to witness footage of perhaps the greatest basketball team ever, but it led me to discover the success-trick Michael Jordan used from the time of his birth until he cemented himself as one of the greatest basketball players of all-time.
Almost immediately after I completed the entirety of the series, I enthralled myself into my daily self-improvement reading through an internationally bestselling classic titled Psycho-Cybernetics. While reading my habitual fifteen pages, I came across a tiny passage in the book that read as follows:
Everyone has known individuals who can be discouraged and defeated by the advice from others that “you can’t do it.” On the other hand, there are people who rise to the occasion and become more determined than ever to succeed when given the same advice. An associate of Henry J. Kaiser’s said, “If you don’t want Henry to do a thing, you had better not make the mistake of telling him it can’t be done or that he can’t do it — for he will then do it or bust.”
Upon reading those words, still infiltrated with much thought and excitement from watching The Last Dance, the pieces of information in my brain connected unveiling perhaps the most major secret to Michael Jordan’s success in life: tricking himself into believing that he needed to seek extreme vengeance on even the slightest of negatives. He aggressively turned all negatives, even ones that never transpired, into positives. In an interview in the series, Michael says the following:
“They (his parents) were hardworking people and they instilled that not just in me but in my brothers and sisters…It just became a part of my nature. I always take a negative and turn it into a positive — that all came from my parents.”
I obtained the most curiosity from how he fulfilled the change from negative to positive so deeply and consistently. To ensure that he followed through with his vendettas, he made the slightest of negatives deeply personal by using an aspect of himself that lied even deeper in his soul: competitive drive. As a child, Michael often attempted to prove to his father his worth and competed daily with his brothers and sisters. Through habit, this competitive drive held strong with him for life.
At times, Michael concocted situations in his mind of opponents saying minorly negative things to him such as “nice game” rhetorically. They never really happened, but Mike made it seem to himself and others that they did. Speaking to others about “what happened” and detailed visualization made it all true to the Hall of Famer and the media.
To create this same success trick in your own life, simply do what Mike did to create it. First, watch The Last Dance to acquire an idea of Michael’s true-personality. Second, practice bringing out your competitive drive daily by actually competing and visualizing yourself competing with others in your mind. I learned through Psycho-Cybernetics that the mind doesn’t detect the difference between happenings that occurred and ones that happened in the mind.
Also, make things personal to bring out that competitive drive in you. Get mad about what happened to you or “what happened to you.” Care to the point of obsessiveness and project extreme confidence that you will outplay your opponent in the office, at a game of chess, on the baseball diamond, in obtaining a scholarship, or in any situation where you want a positive outcome to occur. I promise this “head-fake” works and stuns all opponents if you make it as real as possible, add positive emotion behind it, and allow your subconscious to lead you toward being like Mike.
