Author's background:

"Dominated" the table tennis world for 8 consecutive years, won 4 Olympic champions, 18-time world champions; PhD in Economics from Cambridge University

Author's statement: The biggest reward that sports has brought me is not these medals, but the mental quality that I have had as steel.

Theme: Stabilize your mentality, improve efficiency, and build strong stress resistance and willpower to achieve success.

1. Stable mentality

When doing anything or participating in various exams and competitions, think of possible situations in advance and think of strategies to deal with them. When an accident occurs, you can Tell yourself: "I am very well prepared. No matter what difficulties I encounter, I am not afraid." Give yourself the correct self-motivation. When encountering difficulties, having a plan to deal with them will make you feel more at ease, and the problems will be solved easily.

For example, the book says: How to deal with being ahead in the game, and how to deal with being behind. When the game is not going well, you must not be anxious and must control the rhythm. Deng Yaping’s tips for playing games:

When you feel particularly good and your skills and tactics are clear, play quickly. Don't wait there slowly and leisurely. No, hurry up and get a few more points, and then maintain a relatively leading advantage.

When things go wrong, you really need to slow down and control the rhythm, and then think of more ways to reverse the unfavorable situation. This is the ability to control the field.

Deng Yaping’s method of regulating her anxiety during the competition is to tap the table three times, feel the feedback, slowly focus the mind, shift the focus of thinking, and return to mindfulness.

2. Improve efficiency

Find better and more suitable solutions to your own shortcomings, make up for your shortcomings through deliberate practice, and break through your shortcomings. Then, you will be one step closer to success.

When Deng Yaping was 9 years old, she was persuaded to quit by her coach: "You are short and not suitable for playing table tennis." She was not convinced. Why can't she play table tennis if she is short? What's wrong with being short? Because she was not convinced, she wanted to prove that she could do it!

So, she began to practice playing table tennis hard. Because she is short, she is not discouraged and trains herself more firmly, training her running speed, training her playing speed and finding a playing style that suits her.

Weighing just over 60 kilograms, she tied a 30 kilogram sandbag on her legs and wore a sandsuit and began to practice running and playing ball. After practicing hard like this for a while, she was able to catch the ball on the court as light as a bird. In terms of playing ball, in addition to playing steadily and steadily, she also pondered and explored her own playing style. In addition to "playing fast", she also had to "play hard" and "play strangely". Eventually she stood out.

3. Strong resistance to stress and willpower

Remove the burden of winning and losing, gains and losses, return everything to zero, start learning knowledge from today, and it is never too late to do anything from now on.

When Deng Yaping falls behind in a game, she will abandon the previous scoring ratio and restart the game with a zero-to-zero mentality, relaxing her burdens and performing normally. Discover your own strengths, encourage yourself with confidence, and achieve every goal with a positive attitude.

She was the worst student when she was studying at Tsinghua University, but she used her own experience, competition scenes, and exposure to many places across the country to compare with other people’s knowledge to magnify her own advantages. Thereby finding confidence.

Deng Yaping started learning English from scratch. By chance, she found a method of learning English that suited her and became interested and confident. I no longer brought an interpreter with me like I did when I attended the International Olympic Committee for the first time, but I spoke in English throughout the whole process.

"If I can do something in this life, why should I wait for the next life?" I dared to think and do it, and finally entered Cambridge to study for a PhD. After five years of hard work, I successfully obtained a PhD from Cambridge.

People often ask me: "Are you afraid of transformation?" I say: "What is there to be afraid of? Because you know nothing from birth, don't you learn and grow little by little?" Today's success does not mean tomorrow's success, but tomorrow's failure does not mean that you cannot succeed the day after tomorrow! In such an experience, although it was very difficult and difficult, I still seemed to have a little confidence and felt that I was not that stupid. If you are smarter and I work harder, maybe we can even out.

But in the end, can you still be smarter than me? That's not necessarily the case, because hard work pays off. (Quoted from 16 Talking about Learning English from Scratch/P 115)

Only by facing problems and difficulties head-on can we truly overcome them.

After reading this book, I found out how to go further on the road of "reading and writing" and how to deal with various problems encountered in the process of "reading and writing". .

No one in this world is born a loser or a born winner. Ability can be trained, and mental strength can also be trained.