Brant Phillips Show 12: Reps Lead To Results

[powerpress]

My friends, welcome to the show. Today we’re going to talk about how your reps leads to results, how your reps lead to results. Look, I heard a story the other day about this baseball player that you’ve probably seen before but you most likely don’t know his name or who he really is or anything else about him. He’s a baseball player who played in the 1950s.

I’m going to get a little bit Wikipedia here for just a minute and tell you a little about this man. His name was George Shotgun Shuba, his nickname which I’m going to come back to was Shotgun was of course. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit. He was a baseball player and played seven seasons for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Played in a few World Series including their championship season in 1955, first national player to hit a pinch homerun in a World Series game. Those are just a few of his stats.

However, what Shuba’s most remembered for was if you remember whenever Jackie Robinson came into the major leagues and I believe he hit a homerun in his first game. If you remember the man who came out and shook his hand at home plate, that was George Shuba. He’s remembered for helping break down some of the color barriers in baseball at the time because of that photograph that was taken. It became a very well-known photo. It was titled “A Handshake for the Century,” because it was the first interracial handshake during a professional game. A lot of just positive energy and things like that came out of that situation.

Let’s get back into the purpose of this podcast. How does any of that? What does any of that have to do with results? What are we talking about here? What I want to do is talk a little bit, go a little bit Paul Harvey and say now you know the rest of the story behind Shuba’s career and talk a little bit more about this man.

In the 1970s, a book was written about the Brooklyn Dodgers during the ‘50s. Shuba’s career was one of the chapters of the book. He was featured. The book was called The Boys of Summer if you want to look this up. The author wrote something a little bit interesting about George Shotgun Shuba. Here’s what he wrote. I’m just going to quote this. He said, “Shotgun was spraying line drives with a swing so compact that it appeared as natural as a smile.” He said that it appeared as natural as a smile.

Here’s what the author didn’t know about George Shuba. During the off-seasons while working a job because pro athletes didn’t make that much money back then, they barely made anything. He worked a job, full-time job when he wasn’t playing baseball. Every single day, every single day while working this job in the offs and during the winter George Shuba would come home and practice for hours and hours and hours.

What he would do specifically every day he had this rope tied to a ceiling with a knot at the end about where the strike zone would be and with a weighted bat, a 44 ounce bat which if you’ve ever played baseball or swung a bat before a 44 ounce bat is extremely heavy. He would swing the bat 600 times a day, 600 times a day. What he would do is whenever he would come home, he would do reps of 60. He would take 60 swings and mark down an X. He would not lay his head down to rest to go to sleep every day until he had taken 600 swings.

While the author said that the swing was so compact that it appeared as natural as a smile, that was really just the result of his consistent daily reps, 600 reps every single day during the offseason. There was a story told that during the interview with Kahn, Roger Kahn the author whenever he mentioned that, Shuba laughed at him. He laughed at the way that he described him. He walked over to a filing cabinet. They were at his house. That’s where he explained to him about how he’d take the 60 swings, mark it with an X and then now only after he did 10 rounds of 60, 600 reps that he would go to bed. He did this for 15 years. He responded something like, he was like, “You call that natural? I swung a 44 ounce bat 600 times a night, 4,200 times a week, 47,200 times every single winter. There was nothing natural about that.”

In my opinion, nothing comes easy that is really worth having. Nothing comes easy that is really worth having. Yeah, I get it. Some are more gifted than others but if there isn’t practice and work put in, you’re not going to realize the results that you’re seeking. You’re just going to have a waste of potential if you’re one of these ones that are so called the gifted.

One of my mentors who’s been extremely, extremely successful in business and life for that matter, he’s about 65 now. He just made millions upon millions, upon millions. There’s a couple of things that always sticks out to me when we talk. One is he talks about discipline. Just how success is really tied to your discipline, just to get up and do the work over and over and over again, to do those little things over and over and over again. He talks about this really has to be a labor of love, how this really has to be ingrained inside of you to have that drive and that fortitude to just keep going each and every day.

Talking to this man now who is 65, you talk to him and he’s still wired looking for deals. When I say looking for deals, he’s just a private lender now. He has more money than he’ll ever need, than his children will ever, ever need for generations to come, extremely, extremely wealthy but it’s in his DNA. This is who is. It’s how he is wired now.

Another thing that he said to me one time that has always stuck with me and it’s very similar to this message is that he was sharing this to me and a group of my students at a Mastermind one time. He was going through his history of just his business experience and what he’s done over the years, he was going through decade, through decade kind of walkthrough of what he’s done. He said something that stuck out to me. He said, “It takes 10 years just to learn how to make money.” He said, “It takes 10 years just to learn how to make money.” He said, “At least real money.”

What he meant by that, doesn’t mean that you can’t go out and be profitable year one. You can. He’s talking about the 600 reps a day. He’s talking about what you may have heard referred to as the Michael Jordan rule, the 10,000 hour rule. It’s like to really become great at something, to really master something and just to excel at it and exceed at it to where it becomes just natural and in your DNA, you’ve got to put in the reps. You’ve got to do the work.

If you’re one of those who are thinking that you can just get rich quick and you don’t have to go through this process and do all this work, you’re fooling yourself. You’re fooling yourself. Sure, I’ve seen people come in to real estate or business and hit on something right away. A lot of times they’ll go through the sophomore slump because they really haven’t done enough reps. Then unfortunately, the sad cases a lot of people come in and they immediately flop because they haven’t done the reps.

If you’re committed to creating a successful life and a successful business, you’ve just got to put in the reps. You’ve got to put in the reps in your relationships. You’ve got to put in the reps in your health and your fitness. You’ve got to put in the reps with your business. You’ve got to put in the reps with your marketing. You’ve got to put in your reps with your networking, with cultivating relationships. You got to put in your reps with your lenders to raise capital. In everything that you need to do, how to analyze deals, how to build teams, how to build systems, everything that you’re going to do that you want to create results in, you have to simply just put in the reps. Put in the reps my friend. Just like my man George the Shotgun Shuba put in 600 reps a day, every single day of the offseason with a weighted bat. That my friends is how he got results.

I encourage each and every one of you, put in your reps every damn day my friends. Do it. That’s all I got for today. I just want to say I love and appreciate each and every one of you. I thank you for listening to this show. Until next time, I look forward to helping you create results in your life and in your business.