A Journey Towards Happiness and Personal Development
What The Greatest Coach In History Can Teach Us About Success
Why we should forget the competition, embrace losing, and focus on improving ourselves
John Wooden, arguably the greatest coach of all time, was famous for never mentioning winning or losing to his teams. Yet his teams at UCLA won ten NCAA Basketball Championships and completed four undefeated seasons. How is it that a coach could have such success without emphasizing winning at all?
Coach Wooden knew that worrying about winning or losing and being better than our competitors is often a recipe for ultimate failure. We have absolutely no control over our competition. They are born with different genetics, live a different lifestyle, have different strengths and weaknesses, and have a different practice regimen than we do. If we put any of our attention on our competition, we have already lost, because we are not focusing on the one thing that we can control: doing everything we can do to improve ourselves on a moment-to-moment, day-to-day, and year-to-year basis.
Wooden understood that the fastest path to personal and team growth was through competition against one’s self. Are we better than we were yesterday? Is today’s version of us drastically better than last year’s version? These are the only questions we should ask, and these questions create an upward spiral of growth and improvement.
Competitive Outcomes Are Not The Best Measure Of Success
There are extenuating circumstances in a competition that we cannot control. Our competition could be so much better than us that we have no chance of winning, but is it a failure if I lose to a competitor who is objectively better than I am? Not if I prepared to the best of my ability, executed my plan, and put my best foot forward.
We must frame success and failure in a different light than simply winning or losing. Whether we win or lose is a rather obvious outcome in any arena. Did I leave the building with the trophy or championship belt? Did I sign the deal? Did I leave the party with the mate of my choosing? Winning and losing is usually cut and dry, but whether our actions were a success or failure is not as easy to define.
A famous example of this principle is the first Rocky movie. Rocky Balboa gives a heroic effort but he loses to Apollo Creed. He objectively loses the match, and yet everyone who watches the movie knows that Rocky is a great success. He is a success because of who he becomes through his hard work and determination, and this success sets him up for victory in the near future (Rocky beats Creed in Rocky II). We all want the victory that Rocky eventually achieves, but we continually try to skip the part where we have to lose in order to get better.
Instead of worrying about wins and losses, Coach Wooden framed success and failure around how well his basketball teams played in comparison to what they were capable of. Sometimes this success and failure manifested itself before the game had ever been played. Had his team been loafing at practice in the days leading up to the game or had they gone all out in preparation? During the game, had they played with focus, energy, and unselfishness?
If Wooden’s UCLA Bruins lost but had performed to the best of their abilities, they were a success and he praised his team as such. If his team won, but they had lacked hustle, grit, or cohesion on the court, the game was viewed as a failure. In Wooden’s world, his team could win by 30, but if they should have won by 50, they had failed, but they could also lose by 20 to a superior opponent and be viewed as the ultimate success.
Losing Is Often The Best Way To Improve
There is another reason not to judge our wins and losses as successes and failures. If we want to improve quickly in any area, we should search for what James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, calls the “Goldilocks Zone”. The Goldilocks zone is found when we are faced with a challenge that is not too hard and not too easy, but just right for our skill level. When we are faced with a Goldilocks challenge, we have a high likelihood of achieving a flow state, which is the holy grail of performance.
Flow, a mental state of deep focus, is often described and simplified as “being in the zone.” Most of us have been in a flow state before but top performers in any field reach the flow state regularly. No matter if you are reaching flow through athletics, coding, or writing, the hallmarks of flow are the same: time is transformed (either sped up or slowed down), we are completely focused on the task at hand, and the experience is deeply rewarding. Needless to say, immense growth happens in the flow state and we should all strive to have more flow in our lives.
According to Clear, scientists have demonstrated that in order to achieve flow, a task must be roughly 4% beyond our current ability, thus we must find challenges that are just out of reach for our current abilities. The scoreboard in these scenarios will have us losing more than winning, but we will be succeeding by growing in a huge way.
A more extreme form of using losses as a tool for improvement can be found by studying many world-class performers. This tactic is admittedly not for the faint of heart and calls for directly competing with those who are superior in every way: experience, talent, strength, etc… Josh Waitzkin, the inspiration behind the movie “Searching For Bobby Fisher,” utilized this tactic when becoming an International Chess Master and also when he changed directions and became a World Champion martial artist.
As a novice, Josh trained daily against world-class martial artists whom he had no chance of beating. He was pummeled over and over, day after day, but working with the best put him on a very steep growth curve that ultimately led him to a World Championship in Taiji Push Hands and a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. This tactic should be reserved for moments when motivation is in high reserve and the ego has been put on the back-burner. It isn’t for everyone but it shows what is possible when we stop focusing on winning and start focusing on improving.
“It’s very interesting to observe who the top competitors pick out when they’re five rounds into the sparring sessions and they’re completely gassed. The ones who are on the steepest growth curve look for the hardest guy there; the one who will beat them up, or who might beat them up. While others will look for someone they can take a break on. And so there is that constant search for exposure[…]This is a way, as a competitor, to constantly put yourself into the fire.”
— Josh Waitzkin, International Chess Master; 2004 World Champion — Taiji Push Hands; black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
How Do We Know When We’ve Given Our All?
Here is an uncomfortable truth. Nobody has ever given their absolute all to anything. If the maximum possible effort is 100% and no effort is 0%, we would be lucky to get to 85% effort. Our family, our friends, and our hobbies are just a few things that take away at least a few percentage points here and there. I don’t even need to mention the bad habits we all have that take us away from our crafts, ambitions, and dreams.
Coach Wooden was quick to interject when he heard other coaches mention their players “giving 120%”, as can be heard around locker rooms and board rooms throughout the world. It is physically impossible to give more than 100% to anything, so we can begin to figure out what we can give by removing the kind of fantastical thinking that contemplates “giving 120%”. Let’s start by realizing that giving 85% of our life, focus, and effort to any one thing in life is a herculean effort. It is up to us how much we give, but we should be honest about how much we are putting forth.
This judging of how much we are giving takes a level of self-awareness that not all people have, and not all people want to have. Can we look at ourselves with clear eyes and judge whether we could have given more to our pursuit? Did we show up every day to practice our craft? Did we push ourselves during practice? Did we feed our body with the proper nutrients, sleep, and inspiration? Did we sabotage the work we put in during practice with alcohol or drugs at night?
Champions look at everything from the smallest detail to the largest to see how they can improve. Coach Wooden was well known for beginning each new season by showing his new players how to put on their socks properly in order to avoid blisters. This is the level of detail that it takes to be a great champion and we can seek the same level of attention to detail in our own crafts and ambitions.
If we want to be great, we have to go through the struggle of looking into the mirror and being honest with ourselves about how much we are putting into our craft, our ambitions, and our dreams. It is essential that we improve at being honest with ourselves every day.
As we begin our personal journeys to greatness, here are a few things we can focus on:
- We must learn to see ourselves as we truly are, and embrace all the improvements that we will need to make in order to get where we want to go.
- From time to time, we will have to discipline ourselves just like a coach would do. If we can’t do this, we should seek a personal coach or an accountability partner to help us.
- We must strive to give 85% to our craft and stop framing our successes and failures based on the competition that we face.
- We will have to become more comfortable with losing and begin to frame our losses as a vehicle to improving at breakneck speed.
- We will need to find challenges that are just beyond our current abilities so we can enter the flow state, and gain from all of its benefits, as often as possible.
- Most of all, we will need to take a page out of John Wooden’s book, forget the competition, and get to work on improving ourselves every day.
I would love to hear how you go about improving yourself on a daily basis or how I could have improved this post. Drop me a line in the comments and let’s start a conversation. I’m excited to see what we discover together. If you would like to receive an email when I publish a new article, click here.
