It's Hard to be the Favorites, but It's Worth It, So DO YOUR BEST EVERY YEAR

"It can happen to anybody. It’s a lot tougher to take it if you’re the favorite but as long as you work hard and you give your best and you don’t have any regrets after the season, its fine. Anybody can get hot for two weeks and everybody can beat everybody. But the hardest thing is knowing you didn’t give 100 percent because you have to live with through the summer and wait for next year. And you don’t know what’s going to happen  next year. Once you get that opportunity, you’ve got to grab it … or least play the best hockey you can play."  -Jaromir Jagr, 2013

Translation:  It’s really hard to win the Stanley Cup, and no matter how good you are, bad things can happen, but you have to do as much as possible.  Because the chance to play with great players like this doesn’t come around often, and even if you do all of that I said, you’re probably not going to win because it’s really, really hard to win.  But, at least if you do all that stuff, you’re actually putting yourself in the best spot to win.   And you haven’t put yourself in the best shot to win unless you really do all that stuff I mentioned.  

Takeaways:  Accept it's hard to be favored to win the Stanley Cup every year.  Accept that realistically high expectations are a good kind of hard, to which you should give your best, because the opportunity will be gone before you know it.  

Action Items:    Do everything I just said. Don't let it take you as long to it took me to learn it, and don't make the same mistakes you made thinking me and Mario could do it all.