Despite being full of interviews and anecdotes from some of the world’s leading sports men and women, this book is as much about sport as Baywatch was about lifeguard techniques and Britain’s Got Talent is about British people having talent.

It is, first and foremost a book about what human beings can do if they put their mind to it. And when I say human beings, I mean you.

This is a book about what it takes to achieve something, anything, in any walk of life and how, when you scratch the surface of any high achiever you find the same rag tail collection of anxieties, fears, insecurities and self doubt that the rest of us experience too on a daily basis.

The difference is that high achievers don’t let the negative thoughts win.

It didn’t have to be about sport, this book. It could have been about film directors and shown you how George Lucas hand-wrote the original Star Wars scripts despite struggling with his spelling and was also turned down by nearly every Hollywood movie company. Or it could have been about engineers and James Dyson failing 5127 times to invent a better hoover. It could have been about clothes designers Sir Paul Smith who left school with no qualifications and still is haunted by not being clever enough.  It could even have been about insurance salesmen and the one I used to know who fared badly at school, ended up as a brick layer but then set out not to be any old insurance salesman but to be the best insurance salesman. In the world.  Last time I saw him he had just won a place at the Million Dollar Round Table, ‘an exclusive forum for the world's most successful life insurance and financial services professionals’ according to their website. Not bad for an under-qualified bricklayer who went to the same school as Martin Johnson (as did I, but that’s another story).

The book could also be about film cameramen called Mike.

Mike is a friend and colleague whose life has included highlights such as being in a rock band, flying light airplanes, crashing racing cars at high speed and almost swimming in the Olympics. Whenever I go out long-distance running, something I have taken up in my 40s, and it starts to hurt, I think of Mike. Mike has MS. Mike is in pain a great deal of the time and his brain gets fuddled quite easily. Mike doesn’t give up. ‘The pain’s in the brain’, he says with the slightest of grimaces that he thinks he has concealed.  If Mike can get up and look into the eyes of his family on a daily basis and go out the door to make a difference despite everything, then I can run up a hill in the rain. In fact, it’s the least I can do.

So the book, isn’t about sport even though it is very much about sport. It’s about the very least you can do. If a tiny boy with a severe glandular problem that has him going to hospital twice a week can go on to score 30 goals for England then what ‘s the least you can do? If a boy who never really wanted to be a goalkeeper and let in 15 goals on his first trial can go onto to make the greatest save in the history of football – and from Pelé to boot, if you’ll pardon the pun – then what’s the least you can do?

This is a book about ordinary people like me and you who contemplated what the least they could do was and then went and did the opposite.

And if they did, you can.

Ian Gilbert
Santiago
November 2011