Podbit · The Mel Robbins Podcast
When you're obsessing over what everyone else is doing, you're not helping yourself — you're helping them. Shelly-Ann describes reaching the line as becoming an assassin: fully locked in, zero attention given to any other lane. That singular focus isn't arrogance, it's the only strategy that works.
Where this was said
At 35:55 · chapter starts 35:50
Mel opens this chapter by asking how to use someone else's success as fuel without falling into toxic comparison, and Shelly-Ann offers two distinct frameworks. First: eat the meat, leave the bone. Take whatever is genuinely useful from those you admire, and discard the rest. If someone has a quality you want, absorb it without resentment — jealousy is just misidentified admiration of a useful trait. But then she pivots to the starting line, where the calculus is entirely different: when you're competing, focusing on what's happening in other lanes is not curiosity, it's a transfer of power [1] — Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce "When you're obsessing over what everyone else is doing, you're not helping yourself — you're helping them. Shelly-Ann describes reaching th…" 35:55 . You are giving your mental energy — energy that should be propelling you forward — to the very person you're trying to beat. Her image is vivid and final: 'If I'm carrying somebody else's baggage, how am I getting to the plane?' You don't go left, you don't go right. You go forward. She has never seen anyone win going backwards.
Thomas's wife deferred her CrossFit career — she's in the global top 1% of athletes — to put him through law school debt-free. He wants her to chase the dream now; she wants the emergency fund and house down payment first. On a $200K lawyer income with no debt, the opportunity cost is just a few months of slower saving.
In 2007, Shelly-Ann was the 6th reserve at the World Championships in Osaka — so low on the depth chart she cried when they asked her to run. A year later, she was Olympic champion. The turning point wasn't a new coach or a new body. It was a single decision: she wanted to win or lose for herself alone.
Shelly-Ann fractured the sesamoid bones under her big toe before the 2016 Rio Olympics — the exact bones responsible for the explosive power sprinters need in the blocks. She couldn't train normally for weeks. Instead of quitting, she found another way: pool work, gym, rehab. She won bronze. Then came back and won the world title in 2019 and 2022.
In track and field, 28 is considered old for a woman. At 35, Shelly-Ann lined up against 20-year-olds at the World Championships and won. She didn't hear the commentators saying no man or woman had ever done this — she was locked in on her cues, her work, and her past wins. Age is irrelevant at the line.
Shelly-Ann was scheduled for surgery in January 2018 to remove the fractured sesamoid bones from her toe — bones essential for block power. Then she found out she was pregnant. The surgery was cancelled. Rest during pregnancy healed the toe. She went on to win two more world titles. Her son didn't end her career. He saved it.
New UFC fighters sign for $10,000 to show and $10,000 to win — after taxes and management fees, a loss nets maybe $7,000–$8,000. Strickland slept in his coach's gym and rode a bike to training. He was making $1,000 per fight before getting UFC-signed, with no GED, no car, and no social skills. The UFC, he argues, is predatory — but for guys from Brazilian favelas or Dagestan, that money still changes lives.
Strickland describes sneaking into a UFC Fan Expo, quickly being recognized, and finding himself at the center of a wall of fans closing in. He realized in real time how crowd crush deaths happen — one person can't move because the crowd behind them is a wall. He jumped in the octagon just to survive. US Marshals had to physically fight fans back. He credits them with saving at least one life that day.
At 14–15, Strickland walked into a gym and got beaten bloody by men 5 years older. It was the first time in his life he felt something other than hate. The gym gave him community, identity, and a channel for violence that wasn't going to land him in prison. Without it, he says, his path was a serial killer's: one horrific act, institutionalization, release, another act, repeat.
Strickland was not White House-cleared for UFC 314 at America's 250th celebration — and the UFC also denied him security or fan expo passes. He can't blame either: he admits he would have grabbed a microphone and started calling out pedophiles in the Epstein files. He credits the US Marshals who controlled the crowd that day with saving at least his own life.
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