Lindsay Vonn is a monster on skis.
With four World Cup championships and as the first American woman to win an Olympic Gold medal in downhill, she has become the face of U.S. alpine racing.
As a world-class athlete, you readily surmise that she has built herself to win. Any top athlete must begin with the right genetics, she came out of the factory that way, but so did millions of other people.
She must have been gifted with opportunity. She needed to start training young enough and be lucky enough to have the right environment, parents, and coaches to foster her development and train her skills.
That might get you a long way, but what sets apart a champion is still something different.
It isn’t that she is out there training six days a week, six hours a day in the off-season!
Or that she is constantly training her technique for speed and efficiency.
Or that she fuels her body and trains her mind for winning.
Or even that she risks her life and limb skiing to exceed her limits.
The secret to her success is still something different.
It is, like hand-building a Ferrari piston-by-piston, stitch-by-stitch, Lindsay Vonn has dedicated her life to building herself to be the fastest woman on skis.
While it is obvious that building yourself into the person who can be win is an essential component to competing at the highest levels in sports, it is also the same for all success.
In my career books, I call this Starting With You. This means, before you focus on what you must to do get what you want, instead start by focusing on who you must become.
This I call people building. It is building you into the monster you need to become to get what you want.