While speaking to Fightful for a new interview, Swerve Strickland spoke about his mindset regarding wins in his pro wrestling matches.
The top AEW wrestler noted that he tries to reinvest them and turn them into something bigger for himself. He said,
“To me, thinking about that, calling it validation without having it is like me slowing up before I cross the finish line. I need to burst through. I need to run through the line and still add in another twenty years of just full on sprint. That’s how my work ethic has always been. To even get to here I have to constantly overachieve. I have to exceed expectations. Again, like you said, it was my breakout year. I feel like I’ve had about seven breakout moments in my career. They were saying that since Lucha Underground, MLW, NXT winning the North American title, ‘Oh, this is his breakout year.’ I’m like, ‘Alright, cool.’ Then win the tag titles, ‘Oh, this is his breakout year.’ ‘Alright, cool.’ So it’s always going to keep going because the bar is going to constantly be raised and the expectations is always going to be moved side by side. People have been saying, ‘Cool, he had the tag titles, now what?’ That wasn’t easy to get. That was pretty hard. Then they’re like, ‘Okay, he’s never had any singles titles.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s another expectation I’m going to have to exceed.’ Or, ‘We see him here, we don’t see him there.’ So I’m like, ‘Well, I see myself here. So none of that discussion even matters.’ It’s just constantly always trying to figure out where do I take this and go with it. Once I harness that and I get that, I finally got it, what do I do with that now? Now I gotta take it an invest it again. It’s almost like stock markets. No matter how much money you make, you have to take that and reinvest it to go even higher. Too many people cash out early, then they’re like, ‘Ah, you could have had this.’ That’s how I feel like my career is.”
He continued, “If I cash out too early, I’m gonna miss out on all this extra stuff that I could be, all that exceeding expectations feels like I’m not going to exceed it, I’m going to meet it and then like, ‘Ah, man, he was here, but he could have been here.’ So that’s why I’m never like just resting on that kind of stuff. I’m always trying to take my wins, my every type of win, take it, reinvest it, add it to something else and then blow that up bigger. Now I’m taking that same energy and adding it into music and I’m adding it to acting and I’m adding it my podcast. Now I figured out how to make that work on a national scale. Now let’s try to use that here and use that here, and bring in someone that knows how to do it over there. Let’s bring in someone here that knows how to do that here.”
