Cristiano Ronaldo: Don't Compromise The Craft

There's one truth professionals know that amateurs don't: they don't compromise their craft. They don't endanger the thing they love, the thing that makes them great. 

Cristiano Ronaldo dominated the sport of football for nearly two decades. Did he have god-given talents? Without a doubt. But talent was supplemented with an unwavering dedication to his craft, not just on the field but in every aspect of his life.

There's a great passage in the War of Art by Stephen Pressfield,

The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work. The working artist banishes from her world all sources of trouble. She harnesses the urge for trouble and transforms it in her work.

The artist—the professional—doesn't negotiate with anything, doesn't even flirt with the slightest thing that will hurt their work. Ronaldo understood that to be the best, to win trophies, and to get where he wanted to go, he couldn't compromise.

His strength coach at Manchester United said on a young Ronaldo,

Cristiano, only eighteen, had looked at what everybody else was doing and then said, ‘I’ve got to do more, I’ve got to do it better and I’ve got to do it more often’ and that was his philosophy. 

But doing the craft is the easy part.

The writer loves to write.

The artist loves to create.

The athlete loves to train.

What's hard, what gets most people, is what's required outside traditional working hours. The sacrifices. The discipline. The cost.

Ronaldo does everything, and I mean everything, to improve his craft.

Daily two-hour naps.

Alternates between hot and cold showers. 

Gets ten hours of sleep every night.

Tracks every calorie he eats.

Only drinks water.

Trains every day.

His fitness coach at Real Madrid said,

We’ve never seen him touch a drop of alcohol, he hates fatty food, he measures the number of calories he consumes and bases everything on the mediterranean diet. He doesn’t indulge.

Doing the craft is the fun part. Not compromising it while you're not doing it is the hard part.

Going to bed when you need to.

Avoiding toxic relationships in your life.

Not getting involved with the wrong crowd.

Taking care of yourself.

Maintaining harmony in your life.

Great work requires work away from the work.

You can still go out.

You can still live life.

You can still have fun.

But in the end, the professional doesn't do anything that compromises the craft. Because the moment things turn south outside of the work, the work itself—what makes you great—spirals out of control.

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