Jack Bowen, a past Double-Goal Coach® award winner, is an author, water polo coach and philosophy teacher at Menlo School in California. To see him in action and to hear what his players say about him, see this video, made when he won the PCA Double-Goal Coach award.

One conversation Bowen has with his athletes, which he shares in this video, is about the value of working hard when you don’t want to. When you’re feeling energetic and rested and enthusiastic about working hard, it’s easier to put in the effort. The true payoff comes from working hard when you don’t want to, which adds an extra dimension of learning and growth for an athlete.

He adds a life lesson by likening the work ethic needed for athletic success to the demands on a parent: Getting up in the middle of the night to feed a baby, for example, is not easy or something you want to do in the moment, but the payoff is tremendous, and worth the sacrifice of working hard when you don’t feel like it.