Episode #002: Ruben Gonzales – The Courage to Succeed
  
For Ruben Gonzalez his childhood dream was to go to the Olympics, and at the tender age of 21, Ruben took up the luge and started training for the Olympics. Four years later, he was racing for the Gold against the best in the world. At 47, he was racing against 20-year-olds in the Vancouver Olympics, becoming the first person to ever compete in four Winter Olympics, each in a different decade. He is the author of The Shortcut—a business fable about finding a guide to get you where you want to go. He is also the author of The Courage to Succeed, which explains how consistently and persistently following a set of success principles will help you realize your potential. Today we will dive into those principles.
The LeadershipNow Podcast Show Notes
- “I never would have made it without coach. He always reminds me to take the eyes off the fear and put the eyes back on the dream.”
- “Fascinated by the Olympic dream, I just kept talking about it. My dad got fed up. He said look. Why don’t you read some biographies? If you study the lives of great people, you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t work in life because success leaves clues. He’s very analytical—engineer. And I started reading biographies. And I was looking for something, you know what’s one thing that all these people have in common, and it was perseverance. That’s what I kept seeing.”
- “I always had the desire right. But I never had the belief. Now I had them both. And so the courage to succeed, you need to have two types of courage to reach your dream. You have to have the courage to get started. Everything’s hard in the beginning. So you have to stay in the game long enough to learn the skills and then use the skills to reach the goal and dream. And so the courage to get started from believing it’s possible. First, to not quit that comes from your desire. You want something badly enough, ain’t nothing to make you quit.”
- “What about life balance? If you want to reach another level, a higher level, you need to get unbalanced temporarily. Okay. You gotta focus on that goal. And if you want to do it fast, you have to get even more unbalanced. And I was willing to do that. Because why? Because the desire, right? The regret of quitting would have been much more painful to me.”
- “I always had the desire, but I never had the belief. Now I had them both. You need to have two types of courage to reach your dream. You have to have the courage to get started. Everything’s hard in the beginning. So you have to stay in the game long enough to learn the skills and then use the skills to reach the goal and dream. And so the courage to get started from believing it’s possible. First, to not quit that comes from your desire. You want something badly enough, nothing to make you quit.”
- “Prepare for the worst and hope for the best, right? That gives you confidence because you get to the point where you realize, ‘Okay, I can handle whatever happens here, and so that’s what it takes.’”
- “‘Winners don’t call themselves stupid. Champions don’t call themselves idiots.’ And he says, this is what you need to do. You get yourself a rubber band—a big old thick one. Okay, and you wear it for a month. Every time you catch yourself badmouthing yourself or badmouthing somebody else, you pop yourself as hard as you can. I mean really hard, and then replace that bad word with a positive word. The mind doesn’t like a vacuum. You got to fill it with something
I've been a student success all my life. I love it. But If I had to counsel somebody and tell them you’ve got 5 seconds, and here’s my best advice for you: hang around with people who’ve already done what you want to do right because you pick up their habits. You’ll become like them, and you become like the people you hang around with.”
- “Success is a decision.”
- “The shortcut to success is to find someone whose already done what you want to do. So find your leader, follow the leader, and then you can be the leader. You can be a better leader than you were before because you could be on a different level. Then you look to the next level. Okay, who’s the next leader I need? You never stop, right? You never arrive. You’re always improving yourself.”
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