Lewis Hamilton: The drive to succeed

If you know me, you'll know that I love Formula 1. The last race of the season will be taking place this weekend in Abu Dhabi. The first practice session's already over in fact (sniff sniff). You might be wondering what this has to do with anything, and rightly so. Well, I'd like to share something with you about my favourite driver, Lewis Hamilton. I stumbled on an article that, I think, speaks volumes on the kind of message we try to get across here at Databank Foundation. Here's an edited excerpt:

When Lewis Hamilton first met Ron Dennis, then the team principal of the McLaren Formula One team, he told him, "I want to race for you one day. I want to race for McLaren." Dennis was so impressed with the young man he gave him his telephone number and said, "Call me."

This wasn't in 2007, just before Hamilton joined the hugely successful F1 team. It was in December 1995, when Hamilton was just 10 years old.

"I guess I knew what I wanted early on," he says during a telephone interview from Sao Paulo, where he was racing in the Brazilian Grand Prix before flying to Abu Dhabi this week for the capital's Formula One event, which closes out the season. Hamilton finished fourth in Brazil, and has an outside chance of winning the F1 title this year.

His career as a racing driver began with remote-control cars.

"My dad thought that I had such good hand-to-eye coordination that he thought I might be able to race properly. So he bought me a kart for Christmas when I was eight years old."

Hamilton's desire to drive for McLaren was, he admits, more down to the look of the team than anything else. "Young kids are generally attracted to colours first," he says. "They don't know the people's names or the teams' names... Then I got to know more about them and started following Ayrton Senna."

He names Senna - a Brazilian Formula One driver who died in a crash in 1994 and is considered to be one of the greatest drivers of all time - as one of his role models; Nelson Mandela, whom he refers to as a "kind of friend," is another.


"He [Mandela] has been a huge inspiration to me, I read about him so much, and to finally meet him was probably one of the most fantastic moments of my life outside of racing," he says.

Obviously, the most fantastic moment in his racing career came in 2008, when, at the age of 23, he became the youngest ever (and the first black) driver to be crowned F1 World Champion. He won the title ahead of the Brazilian driver Felipe Massa by a single point. [He also missed out on becoming the first person to be crowned World Champion in their first year by one point in 2007.]

"It's very surreal, I have to say," he says. "... I don't walk around thinking I'm some kind of superstar, I walk around generally the same person as I was growing up and I know that if I don't do a good enough job at what I'm doing I'm going to lose my job. It's exactly like anyone else, that's the way I approach my work, and I work my backside off."

Hamilton loves music, and often travels with a guitar. He is also trying to read more.

"I go and look in a bookstore and don't know what on earth to pick up," he says. "But I like to learn something when I read rather than just reading a story. The last book I read was A Thousand Splendid Suns, I thought it was a beautiful story."

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Not all of us are fortunate enough to know exactly what we want to do from a young age. But if you do (and even of you don't), I'd like to encourage you to go for it with everything you have. Never let anyone tell you what you can or can't do. With determination and hard work, half the battle has already been won - so go ahead and believe in yourself!

You can read the article in full here - part one, part two.