Book Breakdown: Relentless by Tim Grover
Breaking down the most valuable books that rewired my mind and improved my life
It was 10 p.m. when a black Suburban pulled up to the gates of Attack Athletics, a training facility on the West Side of Chicago. Inside, one man was alone in the gym. His team did not know he was there.
Neither did the press, or his own family. They were all 2,000 miles away, because it was the middle of an NBA playoff series, and the night before, the whole world had watched him limp off the floor.
He had not flown home to fix his body. A team trainer could have iced a knee. He crossed the country in secret to see one person, and to hear two words.
He flew two thousand miles to hear these two words: Don’t think.
— Tim Grover
The man waiting for him was Tim Grover. For 15 years he was Michael Jordan’s personal trainer. He worked with Kobe Bryant, with Dwyane Wade, with dozens of others who kept permanent lockers in that gym.
He is not a psychologist. He never spent decades in a lecture hall studying motivation. What he had instead was something almost nobody else on earth had, which was unlimited, close-up access to the most driven people alive, watching what they actually did when the cameras were off.
Grover never tells us the player’s name, and he keeps it that way on purpose. That secrecy is itself one of the lessons in the book. What we do know is the gym. Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Dwyane Wade all kept lockers there, so whoever flew in that night was breaking down beside the most relentless athletes who have ever lived.
Relentless is the book he wrote about what he saw. I have read it more than once, and parts of it changed how I think about work and what “good enough” really means. A lot of it is uncomfortable. But I have never read a more honest description of how the top 1% of any field actually operate.
This is a long breakdown, and I built it that way on purpose. I want you to finish it understanding the book, not just hearing about it. So I am going to lean on Grover’s own words a lot, and take the ideas one at a time.
Here is what is coming:
The 3 levels of performance
Why thinking is the thing standing between you and your best work
The claim that you were born relentless and slowly taught to stop
Why comfort is the enemy, and how the best make discomfort their normal
The argument that every emotion, even the good ones, makes you weaker
Your dark side, and why hiding it costs more than using it
Why “clutch” is an insult, not a compliment
The two words Grover’s father burned into him: figure it out
Why you should stop competing and start attacking
Why inner drive is worthless and the result is everything
Why being feared beats being liked, and why you should trust almost no one
Why failure is a decision, and why the finish line keeps moving on you
I – Cooler, Closer, Cleaner
Grover sorts every high performer into 3 types. The Cooler, the Closer, and the Cleaner. Good, then great, and past that, unstoppable.
A Cooler is good. He is steady and reliable, but when the moment gets heavy, he looks to someone else to take the last shot. A Closer is great.
Hand him a clear situation and he finishes it, every time. Most ambitious people spend their entire lives trying to become a dependable Closer, and they assume that is the summit.
It is not.
There is one more level above it, and the gap between the second rung and the third is the whole reason the book exists.
The Closer can win the game if given the opportunity, but the Cleaner creates the opportunity.
— Tim Grover
A Closer waits for the situation to arrive. A Cleaner builds it. He does not pray that the ball lands in his hands in the final seconds. He builds the entire game so it ends up there, and he made that decision hours before anyone else even felt the pressure.
You might be thinking this is just basketball talk, the kind of line that sounds great about Jordan and means nothing for a normal job. I thought the same thing the first time I read it. But Grover is careful to say the Cleaner is a posture. He points to a building custodian who runs the whole place from the background.
In his own way, he’s the most powerful guy in the building: He has unlimited access, he knows where everything is and how it all works.
— Tim Grover
So what actually makes someone a Cleaner, if it is not talent or fame? Two things. Total ownership, and the refusal to ever feel finished.
A Cleaner’s attitude can be summed up in three words: I own this. He walks in with confidence and leaves with results.
— Tim Grover
The engine underneath it is not love of the work. Grover is blunt that the popular advice to “love what you do” is wrong for the people at the very top, because love implies you are content, and contentment is the one thing a Cleaner cannot afford.
He’s addicted to the exquisite rush of success. His lust for it is so powerful, the craving is so intense, that he’ll alter his entire life to get it. And it’s still never enough.
— Tim Grover
That word, addicted, is not decoration. (Hold onto it, because later it turns out to be the same force that wrecks the people who have it.)
And you cannot be a Cleaner in everything.
Cleaners sacrifice the rest to get what they want the most. Most people stress about that. A Cleaner never does.
— Tim Grover
That sacrifice is the mechanism itself. Cleaners do not agonize over what they give up, because giving it up is the whole strategy.
This is why Grover loves pointing out that the richest person in the room is often the worst-dressed, and that Warren Buffett still lives in the house he bought in 1958 for $31,500. Buffett poured everything into one game and stopped keeping score in all the others.
The book is built around a list Grover calls the Relentless 13. Thirteen traits of the unstoppable. He numbers every single one of them “#1,” on purpose, because the moment you rank a list, people obey the top item and stop caring after the third. On his list nothing is optional, the way a torn knee does not care which rehab step you decided to skip.
Here they are, because they are also the map for the rest of this breakdown:
You keep pushing yourself harder when everyone else has had enough
You get into the Zone and control the uncontrollable
You know exactly who you are
You have a dark side that refuses to be taught to be good
You’re not intimidated by pressure, you thrive on it
When everyone hits the “In Case of Emergency” button, they are all looking for you
You don’t compete, you find your opponent’s weakness and you attack
You make decisions, not suggestions
You don’t have to love the work, but you’re addicted to the results
You’d rather be feared than liked
You trust very few people, and they had better never let you down
You don’t recognize failure
You don’t celebrate, because you always want more
We are going to walk through these one at a time. Before we do, the question that actually matters is not whether Grover is right about Jordan.
“In which part of my life am I actually a Cleaner, and where have I been calling myself great while playing it safe?”
II – Don’t Think
