252. The Champion’s Mindset: Grant Hackett on Success in Sport and Business

We all have our moments, don't worry.

GDG. GDG, Generation Development Group, the parent of Generation Life, which a lot of my clients actually invested in as well.

Absolutely. It's funny, all the athletes that people see as the most talented, funnily enough, are the most hardworking as well. So, absolutely. You know, I've been lucky enough to train with Michael Phelps. You know, watching those guys and their application towards what they do. Sure, they're big, they're flexible, you know, they were doing it from a very young age, but it was unequivocal. It was the hard work and focus and visions that they had for their careers that actually drove them to the levels that they achieved. Where most people would look at them and say, 'Oh, they're just so talented, aren't they?' And often enough, when someone's been doing something for long enough and is exceptionally good at it, they do make it look easy. It's like watching Usain Bolt run. But the amount of times that guy would have thrown up during a training session would be unheard of. So it's more the hard work. And I think I don't think I was probably even as talented as those athletes.

When both your lungs were working, yeah. So I was probably lucky I had a bit of extra capacity for that race. But yeah, it's... I know it's the discipline, the hard work, the consistency, and the boring stuff that actually creates any sort of greatness or any good result. So I've definitely just applied that in my business career. So that's probably the one skill that I've learned and I truly understand it as well. I know when I'm kidding myself and I think I'm applying myself and I'm really not, or I know when I'm truly dedicated and executing well. So that's probably the unique insight that I have, given that I got to that level in sport.

It can be. Yeah. It can be annoying to a lot of other people that want to be good and you give them a reality check. They don't like it. Yeah. So I know it's... to my two sons who are 28 and 26, there's been the odd occasion where they said, 'Dad, I'm just not interested.'

Older brother.

I think I was always pretty competitive. So I'm quite a relaxed individual, so it doesn't come across like that, but my mindset is highly, highly competitive and I will do whatever I can within my power to get the result that I'm looking for. And I'm not a person who gives up very easily. I think I don't even know when to give up, to be honest, sometimes, perhaps when I should. But for me, my brother and I... my mom had cancer in between us, so it was almost a seven-year gap. So I was born on the Gold Coast. Dad was a detective, so he got moved around Queensland quite a bit. So we started swimming in far north Queensland up in Innisfail. It's because my brother actually got beaten by two girls in a surf race and he wanted to do swimming lessons, and mom and dad hadn't even thought of aquatics before that. So he started doing the surf life saving bit and he was swimming for that. Within six months he was state surf champion, funnily enough. And I was kind of going up and down the public lane. Eventually, dad got transferred back to Brisbane and we lived on the Gold Coast, and then I really started swimming probably seriously from the age of five or six, just because that was a sport that we were doing within the family. And from there, I think, you know, playing a couple of other sports, doing the surf life saving bit, which I loved, and the Uncle Toby's Super Series was just so big in the '90s. Those guys were real rock stars. Guy Leech is actually a good mate of mine and he was one of the big rock stars through that period, along with, you know, Trevor Hendy. And as he always tells you, you know, it was good to be great, but he said it was great to be good-looking too.

Yeah, he's phenomenal. So he's always been so extremely fit. But yeah, so I was doing that sport and then rugby league. I was playing that, being up in Queensland, and there was a critical moment in '93 where one Antonio Samaranch read out Sydney, Sydney. And I thought to myself, geez, I'd love to go to a home Olympics. You know, I always admired the Olympics. I was 13, and it was funny. I made a decision at that very point that I didn't want to just go to the Olympics in 2000. I wanted to win. And I did a fair bit about that. I researched Kieran Perkins's times, who was... the event I was doing was the 1500-meter freestyle, and the rich history I really loved in Australia. And it was actually the most gold-medal race in Olympic history across any sport, male or female. So I still remember reading about Murray Rose, Andrew 'Boy' Charlton. They wonder why the ABC in Sydney... why is it named that? He's a 1500-meter swimmer. You had John Konrads, you had Stephen Holland, you had Glenn Housman, Daniel Kowalski. So you had all these amazing athletes over the last century in that race. And so for me, that was something that really intrigued me. And also it was like the four-minute mile, but it was almost harder than the four-minute mile was the 15-minute barrier for the 1500-meter freestyle, because a guy named Vladimir Salnikov broke that in 1980. I think he went 14 minutes 53.3. Eventually got that record down to... but by the time I got to breaking 15 minutes, only four people before me, almost over 20 years, had been able to do it. Yeah. And three of those were Australian, actually, might have been five, I think three of those were Australian, with Kowalski, Housman, Perkins, Vladimir Salnikov, and I think there was a French swimmer as well, if my memory serves me correct. So yeah, that was kind of the big milestone in the race. But I think for me, 13 was really that critical moment where I don't think I ever knew I could win or not win, or go to the Olympics or not go to the Olympics. I didn't think about the failure part of it. I just thought about what I wanted to do, and then I didn't kid myself. I knew it was going to be very difficult, and I just put everything in place to do it. I didn't ever think I would fail at it. I know that sounds weird, don't get me wrong. When I got there, and when I'd been going through the years before it, when you actually are at that level, of course you question yourself, probably more at that point in time, because you recognize the things that can go wrong. But as a young kid, I just thought to myself, well, I've just got to train really hard and I'll get there and I'll do it.

I think when you come from a nation that can really dominate, like the US, it's easy to have that mindset. When you come from a small country like Australia and we don't necessarily have the plethora of gold medals that you see from the US, I think you are the underdog, and I think we carry that probably a little bit too much, where we should maybe, you know, think...

No. And we aren't in many other...

So it's correct, correct. And so for me, I think one of the reasons that there was a strong sense of self-belief is because I saw Kieran Perkins do it the year before and dominate as well. Not only did he win, he won by a huge margin. Glenn Housman, another Australian, got second. So we got first and second, and then he broke the world record.

Glenn Housman in 1991, Kieran was 16. Glenn Housman won that in 14 minutes 55. Kieran broke 15 minutes though as a 16-year-old and went 14:58, which was incredible. Like, so that was quite a remarkable result.

Yeah, correct. And then it was always going to be Glenn Housman's opportunity in '92, but then Kieran came along. Then the following year they had the World Championships in between the games and the Olympics, and he finished second, broke the world record but finished second. A guy named Hoffman, a big German guy, was about 6'8", massive guy, beat him. Since then he said that he was on drugs in the sport to beat Kieran, and then it came down to a sprint the last lap. And then the next year, I think Kieran broke the world record two times that year. Yeah, like he was hungry to beat him. He went 14 minutes 48 at the Olympic trials and then went to the Olympics and went 14 minutes 43.44 to be exact, and won by about 25 meters. And I think Glenn Housman finished second in 14 minutes 55. Yeah, as you can see, I study everything because I believe the only way you can achieve your goals is if you really break it down.

It's about 10 meters. Yeah, correct. So, you know, in any sport, you know, the margins of error, the more you get to the top, become smaller and smaller. I mean, I have three Olympic silver medals, I think over a distance of about 24 minutes of swimming, that are by about one second or less. So those three silvers could be three gold. So I could be sitting here with a, you know, extra second, a point one, a point two, literally here as a six-time gold medalist doing distance events, which obviously you don't get as many opportunities as a Phelps or a Thorpe to be able to do all the relays and stuff like that. So I think for me, through those formative years, seeing Kieran do so well did give me a sense of self-belief that as an Aussie, well, we can do it. And then I looked at the rich history in the race. So it's really important that we have great athletes because no one did a survey on me and said, oh, who's inspired by that or not, you know, like, but that was hugely inspiring and also, you know, creates that sense of belief that from this country you can do that.

It's funny. I remember, I can think of it right now, just sort of 25 meters to go. I was next to Kieran Perkins. So here's my hero turned my rival, and I had a fair gap on him by about five seconds. And I remember actually sitting up and sitting on the yellow touch pad, and it came in, touched the wall. And if you probably look at the footage, you can see me. I actually look at the diving scoreboard, not the main scoreboard of the pool, because I had this thought as I touched where I thought, what happens if there's someone in lane eight I didn't see? So I was like, saw my name, lane three, Grant Hackett, won. Okay. And then, you know, I sort of turned around and just, you know, celebrated. So yeah, it was an amazing moment. The funniest thing too, like there was a sea of about 20,000 people around a little 50-meter pool, and I spotted my mom and dad straight away. So that, as I turned around, like it was a bit bizarre. So whether it was because they were probably going more nuts than anybody else. But it was such a nice moment because then Kieran came in second. Kieran wasn't overly friendly with me for the four years before that we were on the team together because I was undefeated for four years straight coming into the Olympics. And he leant over the lane rope after finishing second, fastest time he'd actually swam since he broke the world record. So it was his fastest swim in six years, and said, 'You deserve this.' So I never forgot that, like, because the guy literally, I think he said more to me, or probably doubled the amount of words that he'd ever exchanged to me in four years, just in that moment. So that was really nice, and, you know, subsequently we're good friends now. He's also a CEO, incredibly bright guy, and was an amazing athlete. I don't think people did really appreciate at the time how good he was, but he was the trailblazer in Australian swimming that put us back on the map again.

Yeah, it was, yeah, I just turned 20, and here I was, you know, in the village. There's Muhammad Ali that walks past, but you haven't been partying. You know, we're all meant to be partying at that age and not remembering what we did the night before. Completely focused. Yeah, no, barely would drink and do anything like that. So for me, I think, you know, you train for many years to be able to control your emotions at that moment. So I think it's like, it's almost like being in the SAS or an ABC, like you literally spend so many hours each day, like I've been training over six hours per day, and I've been doing that from a very young age for that moment. So I knew what I needed to do. It's whether you have the composure to be able to have the discipline to do it. So for me, you know, before that race in particular, I should have medaled in the 200, 400, world record in the 200 the year before. I was a finalist but not a medalist in those races in Sydney. And, you know, we won a gold in the relay, but I wanted my individual gold. That was the big one. And for me, I think I remember just having probably three things I was saying to myself. You know, 'you can do it, you want to do it, go out and do it.' And I just, I would repeat sort of mantras like that in my head. So as soon as your mind starts deviating, I think the difference between a good or a great athlete can be when things go a little bit sideways, do you know how to control yourself and bring yourself back to the middle and center yourself, or do you get too much in your head? And so I think I always had that ability. I saw, you know, it was funny, rarely saw things get to him. You know, he was the sort of guy when he would compete wouldn't shut up. Like, I need a bit of time to focus, but he would be in the marshaling tent just talking. I'm like, we're about to swim an Olympic final or a world championship. Like, can you just be quiet? I don't want to talk. And it was funny. I remember we sat next to each other on the bus on the way down for the men's 200 freestyle just a few nights before this race, and he wasn't saying anything, and I was really worried. And the night before, Pieter van den Hoogenband had broken the world record in semifinal number one. Then in semifinal number two, he went to break it, but he equaled it. They actually equaled the world record. And so that rattled him. He's only a 17-year-old kid, let's not forget. And I remember sitting on the bus and I was like, 'Oh, this is not good.' And you watch Ian's race there, he goes out way too hard. He's got these amazing, this amazing kick, these amazing legs. Went out way too hard. You see it by overkicking. And Peter beat him in the last lap. Now Ian didn't forget that. So he went to the World Championships the following year. This was nine months later. And they turned on the last wall together. And Ian came home faster in the men's 200-meter freestyle than anybody did in the 100-meter freestyle. Wow. Broke that world record by 1.3 seconds that was done at the Olympics. I think Gary Hall got a smack on that 4x100.

So it is funny, you know, different people have different ways of centering themselves. So whilst one person doesn't need to talk or might use music or whatever it might be, another person might love a chat. So, and I've always tried to pick that up against people that I've seen be great at stuff and seen them in great moments. And that's why I remember these things so candidly because I thought to myself, what works for me? And I'm still refining that. What works for me in good times, bad times, pivotal moments, high-pressure moments, and I'm pretty good at it, but I'm still curious as to what more I could do to improve.

It's funny, that exact behavior. We, you know, in our team, and I probably, I'm very fortunate because I've been trained to do this, is I had to swim so many events. So I would swim up to six events at a competition, which was a lot, particularly for, you know, 1500-meter, butterfly or anything like that. I just did the two, the four, the eight, the 15, sometimes the 4x2, and occasionally qualifying for the final, semis, all that sort of stuff. So you could have a bad race in there somewhere. You could have one where it just didn't go well, and, you know, we would always have the, 'Okay, that was yesterday, now we've got to focus.' So as soon as that bad race would happen, if you had more events, you had to just reset yourself and refocus very, very quickly. And I learned to do that at many international competitions over many, many years because you would have your ups and downs throughout the course of the week, or, you know, even breaking a world record one night, then you've got a media conference, a drug test, a cool down, a massage, physio, you get back after midnight, but you've got to wake up for heats the next morning and another pretty major race probably for you. So, you know, even in the bigger moments where things are going well, to be able to have that sense of control and focus. So I always see that in people like Djokovic when you watch him play tennis, you know, particularly when he was at his best, you think, geez, he's not looking good. He's not looking good. Then all of a sudden, it just turns a corner and you're like, wow, he's just won the next, you know, sort of five games in a row. And you see that in all the great athletes when they go down, they don't stay there for too long because everyone goes down. Like in life, everyone goes down. Everyone goes on the bottom part of that. But they have this uncanny ability to be able to shift their focus onto the things that they need to do in order to get back up. And so their transition time from being down, not executing well, to getting back to executing well is much shorter than what probably most people is. I think that's their real ability around their greatness.

And actually, you know, what you start doing is not focusing on what outcome you want, but the next step in the process. So for me, even when I would walk out behind the blocks, people go, 'What do you think about behind the blocks?' I'm like, 'Gun, gun, gun, gun.' That is literally just going over my head because I just want to get a good start. Yep. So I'm just waiting for the gun to go and that's my focus. Like, I know my race plan, I know what I need to do. Doesn't always play out the way you want to. So there's areas where you've got to adjust and not get too rattled and then, you know, again, focus and execute. But I think, yeah, that time to being down to getting yourself back into where you need to be, it is micro steps and you've got to focus just on the next micro step and then just move yourself away from that very quickly.

Yeah, no, it was a very tough situation that one because at the start of the year I was training so well and not only do I write...

Yeah. Not only do I write down my times, but I wrote down my behaviors that I want to achieve for the year. So for me it was about winning three gold medals at that Olympics. I was going to do everything right, you know, bed on time, not miss a training session, you know, all that sort of stuff. No drinking, no, you know, nothing that would get in the way of trying to, you know, get those three gold medals. And so very early on in the year, I ended up getting a bit sick, but I didn't miss a training session. And I kept doing, you know, this sort of 15, 16k a day, six days a week that I was doing. And that infection went to pneumonia and very, very bad pneumonia. That put me in hospital for five days, just a few weeks out from the Olympic trials. So for me, the doctor after five days in there when I was getting discharged said, you know, the specialist said, 'Look, you've got two choices here. I'll give you medication to suppress the infection, but you need probably, you know, four to eight weeks off and you might not have scar tissue there,' because I was covered, like if you looked at my x-ray, I was covered in mucus on my lungs. And he goes, 'But even though you're young, I'm not sure you'll fully heal around that.' So I was like, 'Okay.' And I've trained myself into a really bad corner here. Anyway, I said, 'Well, can you just give me my antibiotics so I can go training?' And so I literally left the hospital and went to the pool. I didn't even go home. So because I've been out for five days, I had the Olympic trials next month. So for me, I got to the Olympic trials, I qualified for all my races. I still didn't miss any training sessions. I still trained very hard and very well. I went through 17 courses of antibiotics from the Olympic trials to the Olympics. I was coughing up each day a Styrofoam cup of yellow mucus when my physio would express my lungs and whack the sort of side of my chest and around my ribs. So it was a very hard preparation. And I got to the Olympics and, you know, won a silver medal.

It does. It does. But you don't have a choice. This is the thing, like people love to have excuses in life. And the Olympics, you don't have an excuse. No one cares. It's once every four years. You can't ring them and say, 'Can you just put it back a couple of months?'

That's right. Yeah. But yeah, it's a totally ex... you know, there's no excuse that matters. There's no excuse that matters. You get one day every four years. If you aren't there or something goes wrong or something bad happens in your life, you're not healthy, whatever it might be, there's eight years in between opportunities. Now, careers in professional sport come and go mostly in an eight-year period. So for me, I didn't have a choice. That race was on that day in that year and I either had to make a choice of missing it or doing it sick. That was my two choices. So I was definitely going to choose to do it sick. So when I got to the Olympics, I did the 400-meter freestyle. I lost by 0.1 behind Ian. It was, I left my run a little bit late. It was a very narrow race. We lost the men's 4x200 freestyle relay, first time in six years, world record holders, by 0.1 in that. So two silver medals. They felt like serious failures for me. And then I got to the men's 1500-meter freestyle and I qualified third fastest. For the first time in eight years, I got beaten in a heat. Never been beaten at all, but I got beaten in a heat. I couldn't swim over the top of...

So I'd won everything. So I didn't lose for 11 years straight, finals, but that was the first actual race that I lost. And so for me that was tough because I couldn't swim over the top of him at the end. This guy named Yuri Prilukov. And I thought it was over. Like I actually didn't think I had a chance after that heat swim because I just felt sick. I was back on antibiotics. And anyway, you know, within the next sort of few hours, I actually pulled my head in and thought to myself, you haven't spent eight years of your life in the last four years getting here just to give up on this opportunity. So I thought to myself, every time I have one of these negative thoughts that I was having, I was going to... I just said to myself, 'Whatever it takes, whatever it takes, whatever it takes.' And that's exactly what I...

said to myself probably three, maybe 4,000 times in the next 24 hours in between that point and the final, which was the following evening. And in lane six, I had a guy named Lson Jensen, who was a serious rival of mine and finished second a lot to me, saying he was going to beat me as an American. This guy's, this is a serious guy. Like, this guy's this very accomplished athlete. Got an email from him one day. It's not often you see an email signature the chief and commander of SEAL Team 5. That's what he became after being a two-time multiple Olympic medalist. Um, he was the, the chief and commander of SEAL Team 5. So he was a Navy SEAL for five or six years. Um, now is a very successful businessman, you know, studied, I think it was at USC and, and Berkeley and did his, um, MBA at, at Stanford or Wharton or one of those sort of places. So, he's a very, very high achiever. He's breaking the American record that day by 11 seconds. He's having, okay, he's doing his best time, having his best race ever. I'm, I'm hanging on by a very thin thread.