I was watching this Kylian Mbappe documentary on the BBC and Arsene Wenger said something that stayed with me.
He said: “(To succeed) you first have to think I belong to this world”.
As simple as those words are, it’s the reason many people fail at anything they do. They don’t see themselves good enough. They don’t see themselves capable. They don’t deem themselves worthy or deserving of the opportunities they have.
He concluded that statement with “(you must think)it’s natural of me to express my talent and make a difference.”
Imagine living everyday like that, going into the world with the full knowledge that you have a place in it, and everything you do to show yourself, and your qualities to the world is natural and you’re expressing yourself to make a difference.
I think that’s powerful.
I always recommend watching, listening to, and reading the stories of elite athletes. There’s always a difference.
It’s talent, it’s strength, it’s some bit of luck, it’s strategy, it’s the environment.
No matter how good you may be, if you don’t have parents or coaches who see that talent early, and carefully make important decisions for you, you’ll not become as big as your promise foretells.
It’s why I’ll always respect Victor Osimhen and his story. Becoming what he became almost against all odds isn’t what many do, as we can see from the many footballers who never lived up to their levels.
Each time I watch sportsmen, elite sportsmen and the roles coaching and their parents play in what they become, I’m convinced any Nigerian footballer born in Nigeria who makes it big on a global scale is an outlier.
And it’s mentality. Some people can’t hear can’t.
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Me llamó la atención saber que libro está leyendo Javier Aguirre:
El Código de la Cultura es un libro de liderazgo escrito por Daniel Coyle que revela las tres habilidades clave que utilizan los equipos más exitosos del mundo.
Monterrey built its World Cup stadium out of steel because the city got rich on steel. Then they shaped it like a brewing still, a nod to the breweries the city was also built on.
Start with the roof. It reaches 55 meters out over the seats, about the length of an Olympic pool, and holds itself up with no columns underneath. The whole roof rests on a three-legged steel frame, so nothing blocks the view from a single seat.
That roof is not even on both sides, and the lopsided shape was on purpose. The architects at Populous, the firm behind Wembley and Tottenham's stadium, dropped the height from about 46 meters on one side down to 32 on the other. The low side opens a clear view of Cerro de la Silla, the saddle-shaped mountain that sits behind the city. They angled the whole bowl around keeping that peak in view during the game.
Inside, the stands are tilted at 34 degrees, one of the steepest angles in Mexican football. The front row sits 9 meters from the grass. At the club's old ground, fans were stuck 27 meters back, so the new design cut that gap by roughly two-thirds and dropped 53,500 people right on top of the action.
Monterrey hits 40 degrees Celsius in summer, around 104 Fahrenheit, and the building cools itself with barely any air conditioning. The steel facade has angled slots cut into it that fans nicknamed gills. They catch the breeze and push it through the bowl while hot air rises and slips out the top. More than a third of the surrounding land is left as green space that soaks up rainwater and filters it back into the groundwater under the city. It became the first football stadium in North America to earn LEED Silver, a green-building rating that scores energy and water efficiency.
The whole thing cost around 200 million dollars and ran entirely on private money. FEMSA, the beverage company that owns the club, paid for all of it with no public funding, which made it the most expensive stadium ever built in Mexico at the time. Ground broke in 2011, the doors opened in 2015, and the sheer scale of the metal earned a nickname that stuck: El Gigante de Acero, the Steel Giant.
Most stadiums close themselves off from what is around them. Monterrey did the reverse, and the result is a mountain framed in the open end of the bowl, in plain view above the stands while a World Cup match plays out below.