INSIDE THE MIND OF LIONEL MESSI

I am not a big fan of Messi, pardon my bias. But no sane person argues with results and I wouldn’t be an exception. Come to think of it. In just twenty-five years of existence this PRIDE OF ARGENTINA has become the world greatest football legend alive. I would have loved to disagree like you probably do, but the justification is too compelling to logically say otherwise, as Messi won the fourth Ballon d'Or four years in a row; the first person ever to do so. Read this and see if you still disagree.

‘Because the award is a merger of the old European Footballer of the Year and the FIFA World Player of the Year which was inaugurated only in 1991, Diego Maradona never won it and nor did Pelé but it is doubtful if they would have matched Messi's achievement. Marco van Basten won the European award three times in five years, Johan Cruyff three in four and Platini three years in a row. Alfredo Di Stéfano won it twice. Messi has superseded all of them.’ End of argument.

However, this post is not really about convincing you that Lionel Messi is the greatest football legend of our time. You have the liberty to continue to debate that while this football prodigy continues to break records that were set decades before he was born, and setting new ones that will be hard for the generations coming after to break. My critical goal here is to try to x-ray the mindset of a winner like Messi, with a view to picking out one or two lessons for the rest of us who like to win battles, not on the pitch of play like Messi, but in our respective areas of human endeavour. What is the secret behind the success of this never-in-the-history-of-man achiever who many soccer pundits say must have come from a planet called FOOTBALL? There may not be a one-size-fits-all answer, but I am of the opinion that it all boils down to two main strategies.

 HIS GOALS ARE SCALABLE

Anybody who earns a living by playing football dreams of one day he will be crowned FIFA World Player of the Year. This must have been a tall dream for Lionel Messi prior to four years ago when he started winning the award and has remained consistent ever since. However, as every classic winner does, he must have realised the hurdle could only be surmounted by scaling down the dream of being the world player of the year to being the player of the day for every match day he features. So he sets himself to be a consistent net shaker on a daily basis; a bad dream for any goal-keeper even on a very good day, with an amazing capacity to force the likes of the ‘world best goalkeeper’ according to recent FIFA ranking’, Casillas, to pick the ball from the back of the net, an assignment every goalkeeper loves to hate. For a midfielder, whose job description does not fit into the goal-scoring category, he must have also realised that winning is not just about how many dribbles you can complete round your target, nor how many passes you can string past your opponents, but about how many times you hit your desired target with clinical precision.

HE IS HIS OWN TASK MASTER

When you win such an award the first time, the thrill of victory naturally propels you to try to win it again. When you win it the second time, you probably will not be as excited about winning as you were the first time, though you will still be happy to do so. Your motivation now becomes how to measure up to the record of those who have won the award for greater number of times before you. That must have been Lionel Messi’s desire before he won it the third time, as that was then the highest number of times any footballer, living or dead, had won the FIFA world player of the year. When that title was delivered in January of 2012, Messi had to look inwards for motivation. He had done that which all mortals before him had done, so what next? His desire became to accomplish that which no mortal had in the history of football. So he set out to task himself. His focus still was on the daily goal-setting of consistently hitting the net on a daily basis in the hope that the cumulative goals scored by the end of the calendar year might make a difference like never before. Well, you and I now know that the goals did. Messi, in the calendar year 2012, scored more goals than anyone in a calendar year (the last man to hold the record, Gerd Müller, scored 85 goals and did not win the Ballon d'Or. Messi finished as the Champions League's top scorer for a fourth year in a row, netting 91 goals.
He constantly raises the bar of performance on himself on a daily basis, setting himself up as his own task master. It was in the light of this that he started to do the one thing that everyone agreed he still had pending: perform brilliantly, consistently, for Argentina: his 12 international goals included a hat-trick against Brazil.

Hate him, or like him, two things will always stand:

1.     Breaking Lionel Messi’s record will be a herculean task for generations yet unborn. Let us not forget that this prodigy is only twenty-five, with the zeal to excel waxing stronger by the day. This is a man who eats football, sleeps football, and practically lives football. No one has an idea how many records he would have set by the end of his football career. We can only wait and go with the flow.

2.     Lessons from his success will always be there for the rest of mankind to draw inspiration from, whether you are seven, or seventy years. What is that great goal you think is unachievable? Scale it down into daily goals. Do you see yourself as a peak performer in your chosen career? Your breath is proof that there is more to conquer. That is the mindset of a true winner.