Getty Image / Heuler Andrey / Eurasia Sport Images
Formula One racer Lewis Hamilton had an uncharacteristic off-year in the 2022 racing season. He finished 6th in the standings with 9 podiums and 0 wins.
Those results don’t reflect his incredible racing achievements where he is tied with Michael Schumacher for the most World Drivers’ Championship titles at 7. In his career, Lewis Hamilton has 103 wins and 191 podiums over 310 stars.
Lewis holds the F1 record for Most Wins, pole positions, and podiums. He has been named amongst the most influential people globally and the highest-paid athletes on earth.
But he recently joined the Jay Shetty Podcast to discuss his life before stardom and how school was the ‘most traumatizing period of his life.’ Lewis opened up about how he’d been bullied starting at the age of just 6 years old.
How School Became Traumatizing For Lewis Hamilton
Hamilton told Jay Shetty “I was already being bullied at the age of six. I think at the time of that particular school, I was probably one of three kids of color and just bigger and stronger bullying kids were throwing me around a lot of the time.”
Adding “I was always the last picked, you know, when you’re standing at the playground, and you’re in the line of when they’re picking teams for football, I was always the last one chosen, or not even chosen, even if I was better than somebody else.” He then opens up about the racial abuse he suffered through at a young age.
The discussion about school comes at the 4:49 mark in the video but there are other portions of the interview that are 100% worth listening to.
At the 18:04 mark, Lewis Hamilton discusses ‘how success is really short-lived’:
The next segment is how we as a society often live in constant fear of what other people think about us:
As the interview progressed, Lewis discussed the drive to be better every day and what that’s like for him. He is arguably the greatest Formula One racer of all time so it’s an interesting perspective on self-improvement:
The 2023 Formula One racing circuit begins with testing on February 23-25 in Sakhir. That is followed by the first Grand Prix of the season on March 3-5 in Bahrain. Shortly after, Formula One will head to Saudi Arabia from March 17-19 before heading to Australia from March 31st to April 2nd.