Good morning and welcome to the Increase Your Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 1,935.

Today, we are talking about keeping the main thing, the main thing. It's so easy to get distracted by things outside of our control, things that don't matter, even if they're within our control.

And the story comes from the year 1988. outside of our control, things that don't matter, even if they're within our control.

And the story comes from the year 1988, and it was the Olympics men's 200-meter backstroke race.

It was a race between Sergei Zavolotov and Paul Kingsman.

Obviously, there were many in the race, but it was really coming down to these two because with less than five meters to go, less than five meters, it's about the length of a

medium-sized car, Sergey was in the bronze medal position. He was in third place. He wanted to win

so bad he made a vital, not a vital mistake,

but a costly mistake. He looked twice to his right at the person who was right behind him,

which was Paul Kingsman, who was in lane one. Before those two split-second distractions, Sergei was actually in the lead.

He was in a lead by a head's length.

But Kingsman goes on to say this.

He said that Sergey was more focused on looking at him than finishing the race,

that it cost himself for one- one hundredths of a second.

Kingsman actually touched the wall for one hundredths of a second before Sergei.

And he is the one that took home the medal.

He, Kingsman took hold on the medal because Sergey was thinking so much about

how he wanted it that he didn't end up winning at all. What I love about this story is it leads to a

common principle. Winners, losers focus on winning. Losers focus on winners and winners

focus on winning. And we've seen this over and over again. You're so consumed by your opponent,

so consumed in taking the temperature of what's going on around you. How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing? And you lose track of the task at hand. You lose track of what matters most that all of a

sudden it distracts you and you don't end up performing at your best. We can learn a powerful lesson from

...