“A winner never quits and quitters never win,” Mike Tyson said in the prime of his boxing years. He lived by these words even after his retirement, when he had apparently lost everything. Because of boxing, Tyson was able to establish a $400 million empire, but due to his heavy expenditures on cars, mansions, three tigers, and his hedonist lifestyle, he declared bankruptcy in 2006. But this didn’t stop Mike Tyson, he stood back on his feet and revived his quality of life yet again.
He started doing cameos for different movies, moreover, Tyson started his own cannabis line, Tyson 2.0 in 2021. He also started his own podcast on YouTube, Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson. So he generated his wealth again, and he’s much wiser than he was before. His recent guest was quite curious about Tyson’s never-say-die attitude, and how he really stops himself from giving up.
Mike Tyson dwells on the art of being competitive with oneself
In the recent episode of Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson, Grant Cardone talked about the ongoing drama between two big investment companies, Blackstone and BlackRock. Through this conversation, Mike Tyson stated that it’s great because both act as a competitor to one another. This intrigues Cardone about Tyson, and he instantly asks, “How do you do that, not quit?”
Mike Tyson replied, “Because in all actuality you have to want to be up more than anybody in the world who wants you to be down. It’s competition, competing with yourself. This just what it’s about, that’s what we all do, we can’t compete with other people, we can only compete with ourselves. Because we’re the genus of ourselves, that’s just what it is.” ‘Iron’ Mike believes in keeping self-worth higher than anything else. In another conversation, he even commended the same attitude of Muhammad Ali.
According to Tyson, if anybody dedicates themselves to a cause, and keeps getting better on a personal level, they’ll eventually become the best at their work. Even during his early days, Tyson never believed in a thing like talent.
Tyson will always choose hard work over talent
At the tender age of 16, Tyson understood something really important that a lot of fighters today aren’t able to decipher. He stated that at a biological level, everybody’s a fighter, but not everybody has the heart to wake up in the early morning for a run or have the discipline to go to the gym every day.
He said, “Everybody don’t have enough discipline to wait in the locker room for two hours or three hours, then go in the ring and do what they’ve been taught all those years in the gym.” Besides this, he was asked what kind of talent he thinks he is. Tyson instantly responds, “Talent? I don’t believe in talent. Well, some people, they have talent, that’s good, it helps when you have talent.”
So, it’s not the old age that taught him these important things, he always had a gist of it. That’s the reason he went on to become the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history.