Legends Report – Lewis Hamilton – From Ordinary Boy to World Champion
Recently you may have heard that Lewis Hamilton won his second Formula 1 World Drivers Championship title, becoming the only Briton to have won two titles in the last 40 years.
Discipline: The greats accepting responsibility for achieving success; maintaining and build their focus and motivation regularly.
Attitude & Beliefs: These Legends either building develop the right energy and the focus to achieve their ambitions.
Success like this doesn’t come easily and there is a plethora of news articles about how Hamilton has got to where he is. Something that stood out to me though, is the work that he does on himself to make sure he is winning and keeps on winning. F1 isn’t a sprint and you can’t win the race on the first lap, or the championship in the first race. It takes consistency and focus to keep moving forward and keep progressing towards your goal of a driver’s championship.
This progress needs to be made even in the face of odds, fears or concerns that have nothing to do with what you’re actually aiming for. For Hamilton, being the only mixed-race boy when he first started karting meant that he stood out and attracted comments and bullying from some people. However, using that negativity and overcoming it to spur him on and win in the process is an excellent example of how someone can hold themselves to a higher standard, even in the face of opposition…We can all learn a lot from this as you’ll find below…
Video courtesy of BBC Three
What Can We Learn From Lewis’ Experience?
Knowing What You Stand For & What’s Important To You Is Crucial!
By Tom Hasker, Associate Partner & Mentorship Coach, Lighthouse International
Being able to hold himself firm..as a young boy and as an adult to “…answer his critics on the track…” as Hamilton says, comes from knowing what we stand for, what we are aiming for and why we are doing it. In short he is, as some say, ‘grounded’. Another example of how grounded Hamilton is can be found in this article “Why Lewis shouldn’t worry about a popularity contest.” About how he celebrated his first championship win in 2008. He took his girlfriend out to see a Bond film in his hometown of Stevenage. This vividly reminded me that F1 drivers and celebrities are people too! They have lives out of the public eye and are in many ways just like everyone else which makes what they (and others like Elon Musk and Martin Luther King) do achieve, so much more credible and astounding. While also reminding us that we are capable of the very same things too.
It is for this reason that knowing what you’re about and what you stand for is so important because without knowing what we stand for or what we want in life, how can we ever make a decision that moves us towards that goal? The difficult thing I find with doing this is “how do I know for certain what I am about?” I’ve often thought, “Yeah, I know who I am and what I’m about,” and then someone asks me a seemingly simple question that revels so much. Like “What is most important to you? And it can’t be a person or a thing!” When I was asked that for the first time, I went completely blank; but “I know what I’m about – or do I?”
The lesson here is that without knowing what we stand for and what direction we need to go in, we don’t clearly know what choices to make and we are at the mercy of those who would taunt us for having dreams, criticise and attack us for the colour of our skin, the nation in which we were born, or tease us for trying to use an ability that we are just naturally good at.
Discover What You Stand for By Looking For it in People You Admire…
There are ways in which we can find out what we really, truly stand for in our lives (our values) so that we can make excellent choices. One way of doing so is to look at the people we admire and learn about them, notice what it is we appreciate about them and then ask how are we living those qualities in our own lives? For Hamilton, he admires and respects Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King because he relates to what they stood for and the causes they embodied. For me I appreciate Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Elon Musk as people who are, and have played a part in making the world a better place to live. I want to embody these qualities in my own life too.
Traditionally in writing articles like this, the last point is usually a ‘Call To Action’ (I’ve never been a fan of the calls to action splashed throughout the media that are inconsiderately calling you to act punting their stuff – “Buy now and save 50%!”). So instead, this is a call to urge you to take more action for yourself in your own life!
The First Call To Action That I Implore You Take Is to Appreciate Yourself
You have some amazing talents already that are perhaps a little rusty, undiscovered or under-appreciated even by you. So if Lewis’ ability to be grounded has any relevance for us, it should start with being real and appreciating what we are good at, just as Lewis’ father Anthony appreciated what his son was good at.
Secondly, Get to Intimately Know the Challenges You Will Likely Face
It’s critical to know what constraints you’ll likely face in anything you set out to achieve – whether that’s resources like money, equipment, or knowing the right people, or perhaps even personal constraints like self-belief, confidence, having the right skills and knowledge, etc. The more intimately you know these constraints the better equipped you can be to overcome them.
Practical Tip to Discover What You Stand for:
Write down what you feel the top 5 things are that you want to stand for or that you admire in someone else…Remember it can’t be a person or a thing – so it could be something like justice, trust, fairness, determination, passion, integrity, etc…