- π He has won 715 matches out of 741 fights. (96.5%)
- π He won the gold medal at theΒ 1984 OlympicsΒ in πΊπΈΒ Los Angeles
- π Still to this day the youngest to win any wrestling gold at the Olympics (being only 19 years of age at theΒ Los Angeles Olympics)
- π He participated in 42 tournaments in the world winning 30 gold medals, the remainder being silver and bronze.
β Albanian former freestyle wrestler – Shaban TΓ«rstena. Father of my close friend and business partner Ilir TΓ«rstena. We asked him what was his formula of success:
Learnings:
βΎοΈ Discipline with no excuses: Hard work means he would train any place, any day, any time. Even during his flight from Ex-Yugoslavia to the US, he would train in the airplane while people were shaking their heads.
βΎοΈ Fear: At that time Russians, Iranians and Turks were the best in his discipline, so he focused all his energy to learn from the best and went with 16/17 to live and train in Kiev with Russians and beat his fear of fighting against them.
βΎοΈ Focus: He focused all his energy only on the best of the best, learning everything, studying them and analysing every move.
What I learned from his approach
βΎοΈ Imagination and Manifestation: In the nights before the fights he would imagine the whole fight and how he beats the opponents. He would think of all ways and tactics and how to react on those moves to be fully prepared.
Hard work and Discipline – Face Your Fears – Focus – Imagination.
That’s how someone like Shaban TΓ«rstena wrote history.
Becoming the best out of billions of people on the globe in something.
That Champion-DNA is rare, but I’m lucky and feel inspired to learn from a real Champion.
In my own training, the question of standards became concrete in preparing for HYROX and practising the repetition that counts.
Related reading and sources: consistency I value in work and life
