Find Your Masochist
How champions transform adversity into evidence
Pete Sampras is one of tennis’s all-time greats, stood on the court down in a match that should have buried him. Most players in that position search for willpower, grit, some way to push harder.
Sampras did something different.
He stopped fighting the moment and started mining his past. “You reflect on your past experiences, being able to get through it,” he said later.
The match turned around.
This is what separates elite performers from everyone else. It’s not their ability to endure pain, but their skill at transforming what pain means.
The mental anchor
Champions don’t crumble because they’ve built something most people never construct: mental anchors.
These aren’t motivational mantras or visualization tricks. They’re cognitive reframes that turn adversity into evidence.
Sampras anchored himself in past comebacks. The pain of being down became proof he’d climbed back before.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee entered the 1996 Atlanta Olympics at 34, hamstring torn, forced to withdraw from the heptathlon where she’d claimed two golds.
In the long jump, she sat in sixth place with one jump remaining. “This is it, Jackie, this is it,” she told herself, then launched 22 feet, 11¾ inches to win bronze by a single inch. That became one of the most emotionally significant moments of her career.
Tiger Woods created an imaginary twelve-year-old rival “out there somewhere” and made practice enjoyable by competing against this ghost. Each anchor worked differently, but the mechanism was identical: transform the meaning of the struggle.
The pattern behind the pattern
Mark Manson named what these athletes discovered intuitively an “inner masochist.” Athletes find theirs in testing physical thresholds. Scientists find theirs in obsessively analyzing data. Soldiers find theirs in putting themselves in harm’s way for others.
The anchor reframes pain as the price of something worth having.
This matters because most people try to overcome adversity by denying it hurts or pretending they’re stronger than they are.
Champions do the opposite.
They lean into the pain and ask what it’s in service of. When you know why you’re suffering, the how becomes bearable.
Building your own anchor
The question isn’t whether you’ll face defeat. You will. The question is what you’ll reach for when it arrives.
Your adversity anchor lives in one of three places:
Past evidence (like Sampras)
Collected experience (like Joyner-Kersee)
Constructed meaning (like Woods)
Find yours before you need it. Identify what you’ve endured before. Name what you’re collecting now. Build the narrative.
Makes the pain make sense.
Because the difference between crumbling and coming back isn’t about having more strength. It’s about having a place to stand when everything else is shifting.
The champions already know this. They built their anchors in the quiet moments, long before the crucial match. Now they have something to hold onto when the ground starts moving.
What are you building yours from?