The star pitcher may have scouts from across Major League Baseball crowding the bleachers and fighting for space on the chain link fence. And his abilities could be so great that a team drafts him right out of high school. Now, depending on how good that team’s scouts are, that high school student may opt to sign on the dotted line and skip attending college entirely, based on the thought that he could make the show before his twenty-first birthday. However, his path to the majors, no matter how impressive he is in high school, will take a route through small town America and the minor leagues before he can experience the big leagues.

But, why is it, only the baseball player has a stop with the Montgomery Biscuits while his classmates sign letters of intent and head to college before going directly into the majors? Why is it that the high school, point guard can give one year to a college coach before making millions in the NBA before his twentieth birthday?

There is no good answer; the only reasoning is that each game is different. And it’s those differences that make each athletes path vary, at different points, along the road.

Major League Baseball

Baseball has long been an American pastime. As such, it remains popular across the country. Fans fill stadiums, from Pawtucket, Rhode Island to Peoria, Illinois, to watch future big leaguers, on their way to the majors.

As one of only two major sports leagues with a minor league system, it is MLB that most people think of when they consider an athlete’s path to the major leagues. It is the most expansive minor league system and for many players, it is the closest thing they will ever get to the majors. A typical draft pick of a MLB club will head to one of a few places, either to a Low or High Single-A affiliate or a Double-A affiliate of the team.

For instance, a draft pick of the Detroit Tigers, will typically head to Grand Rapids, Michigan and become a member of the West Michigan White Caps baseball club. From there, that player has a ladder of teams to climb through, before he may don the Olde English “D.” The trip can be from West Michigan down to Lakeland, Florida, then to Erie, Pennsylvania and on to Toledo, Ohio before making it back to Detroit.

This path is a long and arduous one where each team will attempt to mold the player into becoming a better ballplayer. The player must improve, at each stage, along the way or they risk becoming a career minor leaguer, or worse, being labeled a Quad-A player. With each MLB team drafting a large number of players each year, improvement is necessary for a player. But if they should stall in their improvement, they will be labeled as a waste of time and dumped from the farm system. But even the best players can take years to make it to the majors; they may not even remain at their position.

For instance, Washington Nationals first-round draft pick Bryce Harper was drafted as a top-tier, catching prospect. But now that he is in his second-year in the minor leagues he has been converted to a center fielder and must prove himself at this new position before making in to Washington, D.C.

National Football League

The NFL has surpassed the MLB as the most popular league in the United States. As such, there is intense scrutiny placed on the draft yearly as each player immediately joins the professional club out of college. High school football players are just as sought after as any other athlete, perhaps more so. But instead of seeing scouts from the Philadelphia Eagles or San Francisco 49ers, athletes can expect to see scouts from the University of Wisconsin or Auburn University.

Once a player has selected a school, they will be thrust directly into training camp. College coaches understand while their players may have been the best in high school; they will struggle to handle the 300 pound linebackers and increased level of skill in the college game.

These athletes step onto campus with a list of coaches, each with their own duty to improve the player, from the strength coach to the running backs coach. High school graduates go to college and more often than not, hold a clipboard for the first season while they get bigger, faster and stronger. This process goes on for four-to-five years. By the time a player from the University of Southern California enters the NFL draft, they have already been molded into the type of player that will create an immediate impact on whichever team selects them.

But doesn’t the NFL have a minor league system? It is due to inflexibility. Each off-season, there are a handful of coaches that are fired. When they are replaced, the new coach often brings, with him, a new philosophy and playing style. With that stated, firing a coach and hiring a new one would have to go the entire depth of the farm system in order for the players to become what the coach needed them to be.

The NFL experimented with a sort of minor league system with NFL Europe, but the game never really caught on with Europeans. The few teams that existed were located near American, military bases. Without business, the league folded and the only semblance of a farm system went with it.

The popularity of the game also plays a factor whether or not a minor league system is used. While the NFL may be the “king of popularity”, it may be its own, worst enemy. Who would pay the cost of an NFL ticket to see an inferior product when they can either pay the same amount and see the real Baltimore Ravens in person or wake up late on a Sunday and catch the game on television?

The National Hockey League

The NHL has its own form of a minor league system in their partnership with the American Hockey League. Draft picks of the Detroit Red Wings will not don the winged wheel right out of the box, they will first be sent over to Grand Rapids, Mich. to play for the Grand Rapids Griffins. Each team has their own partnership with an AHL team where they can send their prospects until they are either ready for the NHL or injuries necessitate their call. While the farther south one travels the less popular hockey gets, the AHL teams located in the northern United States and Canada enjoy packed houses on a regular basis. This success is not only good for the AHL franchise, but for their NHL partner as well, as it builds a fan base and revenue that follows from the minors to the majors.

National Basketball Association

Basketball is the outlier. Until recently, some players did not even attend college before taking on the likes of Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. However, some players did go to college because they did not think they were ready for the big court. Magic Johnson, for instance, grew up in Lansing, Michigan. He attended Michigan State University, under Coach Jud Heathcote. The coach took Johnson from a scrawny guy from Lansing, to a dominating force in the NCAA. Johnson used college to get bigger and faster, only returning to school for his sophomore year because of the chance to win a national championship. Once he had it, he bolted to the Los Angeles Lakers.

Now, the National Basketball League has instituted a rule that forces high school players to attend at least one year of college prior to joining the NBA. While this was created as an attempt to stop the flow of players directly out of high school, it has made the college landscape merely a stopping point on the way.

Each athlete has their own path to success. Whether that path sends them to a minor league team or straight to the big leagues; it depends as much on the popularity of the sport and their business model as it does their skill.

The scene is the Vancouver 2010 Olympic pair skating finals.  Shen Zue and Zhao Hongbo move in seamless synchrony as they hit element after element in their quest for the gold.  He grabs her waist and throws; she pirouettes through the air three times in a stunning triple salchow and lands, light as gossamer, as they capture the number one spot in Olympic pairs skating, ending almost fifty years of Soviet domination in the sport.

These superstars—and thousands of others like them—live by the number one sports success mantra: setting goals.  Day after day, month after month, they set stretch objectives in their training programs and work to exceed them.  The oldest pair skater in the Olympics, Zhao Hongbo set a goal of performing four sets of hundred ball squats just to warm up.  Manning’s training regimens are legendary.  They understand that in order to excel, they first have to set rigorous goals, and then work hard to achieve them.

There is a good deal of scientific evidence for this strategy as well.  In the book What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, author Mark McCormack tells of a study conducted with the 1979 graduating MBA class.  Each graduate was asked the question “Do you have goals for your life and a written plan for achieving them?” Ninety-seven percent said no; only three percent said yes.  Ten years later, the members of the 1979 graduating class were interviewed again. According to the study, those with written goals expressed a greater degree of happiness, better relationships, and more community involvement.  They also reported more income that the other ninety-seven percent combined! That’s a powerful testament to goal setting.

Not only that, the ability to set goals ranks above many other factors that experts formerly believed counted heavily for success—IQ for instance.  Psychologist Louis Terdiman studied gifted children for decades, adding significantly to the body of knowledge about the role that high IQ plays in success.  Turns out those two factors beat high IQ every time: persistence and the ability to set goals.

So how do you, a professional athlete, leverage this surefire success factor?  What steps can you take to insure that your athletic goals become realized? The following four steps provide the roadmap:

1. Decide exactly what you want.  Is it to play in the Final Four? Wear a Super Bowl ring? Race in the Indianapolis 500? Sail around the world? Win the Middleweight Boxing Championship? Compete in the Olympics?  Take your dream—that one that’s been haunting you since you were little—off the shelf and put a name to it.  Dreams that have hung around that long have enormous power.  They shouldn’t be ignored, because they show what we’re really capable of if we consistently do our best.
2. Visualize every aspect of the dream in living Technicolor, and do it often.  Think about how you’ll feel when you’re standing in the winner’s circle with the trophy held high above your head.  Hear the crowd going wild. Feel the wind on your face.  In the broad, untapped spaces of your imagination, live that dream.  Neurological research shows that the mind cannot distinguish in the short term between reality and what you visualize.  Give your dream shape and substance in the place that can fuel unimaginable effort: your own mind.
3. Plan every aspect of the journey that will take you to that dream, working backwards.  To figure skate in the Olympics, you need to place in the top two or three in the national championships.  To get to the national championships you need to place in the top four in sectionals.  To get to sectionals you need USFSA gold medals in freestyle and moves in the field, and a huge amount of competition experience.  To get the gold medals you need a good coach, lessons, top-of-the-line skates and access to a rink with a solid freestyle program and plenty of ice time.  To buy ice time, coaching and skates, you need money.  See how working backwards from the goal can get a clear plan in your head?
4. Assign dates to your success milestones.  A goal without dates is just a dream.  Root your goal in reality by fixing it to a timeline.

“But wait!” you object.  “If it were that simple, everyone would be a champion!”  In fact, the process is simple.  It’s just not easy.  Nothing worthwhile ever is.  There are five things you can do to give yourself better odds of success.  They are:

1. Find someone who has done what you want to do.  There’s a reason why so many professionals have accomplished athletes for parents.  The adults provide a blueprint for success.  If your family doesn’t have an older athletic superstar, find one.
2. Find out everything you can about how they succeeded—diet, training schedules, mindset, goal orientation, what they did to get back up after failure, what they did not to let success go to their heads, how they kept themselves motivated.
3. Apply those principles rigorously to your own life and schedule.
4. Notice what’s not working and change it.  Maybe you need more time to recover from injury than your mentor did.  Maybe you prefer different equipment or need longer breaks.
5. Day in, day out, give disciplined effort in the pursuit of your dream.  Don’t let anything interfere with your training schedule.  Make it sacrosanct. The dream comes first.

It’s going to take a lot of effort to stay on track.  As a professional athlete, you’re a member of an elite group of individuals who already understand far more about discipline than most people will ever know.  But to get to the top tier of professional athletics, you need more than just motivation.  You need to light the afterburners on your resolve.

Have you ever seen the movie “Rocky?”  When Rocky Balboa begins training for his match with Apollo Creed, he is slow, quickly winded, and out of shape.  But Rocky’s inner motivation won’t let him quit.  Day after day he follows the Nike mantra: Just Do It.  He holds his own feet to the fire in a brutal training regimen.  He never takes a day off.  Slowly, he improves, and the punching bags in the gym aren’t enough for him.  He goes to a local butchering warehouse and starts pummeling huge sides of beef.  Rocky’s real competition is with himself.  And he gets better and better, finally winning the match with Creed against everyone’s expectations.

Everyone’s But His Own.

Rocky set his win up in his mind before he ever entered the ring, and you can develop that commitment too.  Here are four proven ways to acquire the high-energy motivation and commitment to reach your dream:

1. Don’t be afraid of failure.  Powerhouse hitter Reggie Jackson, who has an astonishing 563 home runs in his record, is also the fourth worst strikeout hitter in baseball history.  If you’re not failing, you’re not trying.
2. Practice makes perfect only if you practice perfectly.  Most athletes don’t ever reach their true potential because they don’t keep their practice performance level up to the standard of their actual event level. This is a surefire way to watch someone else capture your title.  Practice perfectly every time. Have you ever watched a Peyton Manning practice session?  The guy is a machine, every throw perfect.   No dual standard for that famed Super Bowl MVP.
3. Feel the fear and do it anyway.  The main difference between cowards and heroes is not what they feel—it’s what they do.  Behavior trumps feelings every time.
4. Get back on the horse right away.  If you’ve just had a spectacular, televised skiing fall reminiscent of the 1960’s Wide World of Sports “Agony of Defeat” film clip, grit your teeth, get back on the ski lift and go down the hill again again.  And again.  And again.

There just may be a superstar in you.  You are a runner whose greatest races are before him.  A gymnast whose perfect scores are waiting to flash.  A swimmer who’s about to break long-standing world records.  A golfer who beats the hottest stars in the game.