Khabib Nurmagomedov: commitment

Transcript context

…When it comes to you, I see that everyone here just loves you. Even early on in your career, millions of people loved you. That is also a tough thing to deal with because maybe you start believing it. And you can lose yourself in all of it. So is it all in the mind? I mean, what actually goes on in a champion’s head? In yours when you sat alone thinking about your life, “Who am I really, and what do I do to keep being a champion or to become one?” Well, first of all, from the very beginning, if you realize that what you’re chasing isn’t the most important thing in life, then it gets easier for you. And then, you know, there are some people whose, let’s say, ultimate goal is to be successful, powerful, and to make it big. At the end of the day, after all, we are not really such big, important people. And, like, I believe it’s wrong to just crown yourself king because, to put it bluntly, if we’re being honest here, we can’t even control the basic need to go to the restroom. Maybe to some… Yeah. To some people this will probably seem a bit crude, but we all go to the restroom, excuse my language. If we can’t control even this, so what can we actually control in this life? Look how many people we know, how many great people have left this earth. It doesn’t really matter how, like, big, strong, or famous you are, how wealthy you are, champion or no champion. Either way, they put us all in the exact same grave, you know, two meters down or, like, a meter or a meter and a half. Different confessions, different religions, they bury people in different ways. So I actually believe that every single person should have this realization that we are just not some kind of big, important people here who just decide and get to control everything. We don’t get to do that. In my case, I was raised under the guidance of my father. My father was a coach, and my goal was always to become… To prove to my father that out of everyone, even though he trains many other people, he trains everyone, I mean, I’m also here. I can show him. He doesn’t have to look very far. I’m right there, and under his guidance, I can become a champion. I looked up to him and followed his example, trained hard, and it was like, you know, a kind of a challenge to prove to him that, “Look, I am right here, Father, and everything you teach, I will take it all in zealously, worthily. I’ll follow your program, do it right, and I will become a champion.” And that was exactly the kind of goal I had, to prove it first and foremost to my father and secondly to the entire world that I can become the best wrestler or fighter. But I never thought of being crowned king after I became a champion. I was never going to walk around like, “Look how cool I am.” That was never in my head, and I’m really glad that the Almighty protected me from all of that because many people end up in a bad place if they act like that. This is a profound wisdom, not thinking about being crowned. But even if you don’t, a fire should burn within you, driving you to become a champion, right? As you said, hundreds of thousands, millions of people want to be a champion, but only one can be.…

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