"It's not necessarily the amount of time you spend at practice that counts; it's what you put into the practice"
About this Quote
The comforting myth of sports greatness is that it gets built in bulk: more hours, more reps, more sweat, more virtue. Eric Lindros snaps that idea in half. His line doesn’t romanticize the grind; it interrogates it. Time is the easiest metric to worship because it’s countable and public. “What you put into the practice” is private, harder to measure, and therefore more honest: attention, urgency, willingness to fail, and the discipline to fix the boring details.
The intent is practical, almost managerial. Lindros is drawing a boundary between showing up and doing the work. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to performative hustle culture in sports, where staying late can become a social signal rather than a competitive advantage. If you’re sleepwalking through drills, ten extra hours can calcify bad habits as efficiently as good ones. Quality isn’t a motivational poster here; it’s a warning about misdirected effort.
Context matters: Lindros played in an era when “toughness” and endurance were the loudest currencies, and his career was shaped by the NHL’s brutal physicality and the scrutiny that followed a player marketed as a generational talent. Coming from an athlete whose body took real punishment, the quote reads like hard-earned triage. Train smarter, not just longer, because your body has a budget and your focus is the real investment. It’s less pep talk than edge: the difference between being busy and being dangerous.
The intent is practical, almost managerial. Lindros is drawing a boundary between showing up and doing the work. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to performative hustle culture in sports, where staying late can become a social signal rather than a competitive advantage. If you’re sleepwalking through drills, ten extra hours can calcify bad habits as efficiently as good ones. Quality isn’t a motivational poster here; it’s a warning about misdirected effort.
Context matters: Lindros played in an era when “toughness” and endurance were the loudest currencies, and his career was shaped by the NHL’s brutal physicality and the scrutiny that followed a player marketed as a generational talent. Coming from an athlete whose body took real punishment, the quote reads like hard-earned triage. Train smarter, not just longer, because your body has a budget and your focus is the real investment. It’s less pep talk than edge: the difference between being busy and being dangerous.
Quote Details
| Topic | Training & Practice |
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