Lesson 1:

It’s Not About You

THE SURPRISING TRUTH ABOUT BECOMING A WINNER

This article is part of a collection dedicated to sharing the lessons from a series of talks with a football coach who was dying from cancer.

You can follow the story from the start here.

When I began the project of sitting with a dying coach to talk about sport & life, it appeared like my motive was a little selfish now that I look back at the first question I asked.

Dean Bailey, or ‘Bails’ as everyone on the team knew him, was one of the most respected coaches at the Adelaide Crows. He’d been a player at one of the powerhouse teams of the 80’s, and a coach at two separate premiership teams in modern times.

Knowing how he would tackle the treatment, I thought talking to Bails during his chemo treatment would produce some great nuggets of motivation for the team. Something inspiring, perhaps about giving everything, or leaving no stone unturned in a fight against the odds.

And that’s where I was aiming with my first real question. Once the normal locker-room banter was done, and a silence settled on his hospital room, I took a deep breath and threw out the first question about what it’s like being stuck in hospital.

“What do you miss the most?” I asked him. What I thought he would miss was the competition, the strategy, leading in the cut and thrust of battle, and the constant striving to be your best.

I checked the dictaphone to be sure it would capture the impending words of wisdom about hard work and the pursuit of excellence. Bails fiddled with his oxygen tube as he thought for a moment, cleared his throat, and replied:

“You miss being at the club. The people. Even the drive to work, knowing what you’re going to see that day. Who you’ll have a joke with…

It’s the people.”

What? I blinked, then nodded as if I was expecting that answer so I could buy time and consider what I’d just heard. Shouldn’t it be the competition? The wins? The lights? The show? I came here to inspire the guys, not get some puff piece about friends.

I firmly believed — because I’d seen it play out with my own eyes — that to get ahead you needed to park relationships. The best performers can’t give themselves to anyone else until they’ve carried out the essentially “selfish” task of perfecting their craft.

As Bails fiddled with his oxygen tube again, I was left to ponder: Can you be a people person AND have the ultimate success?

My eyes fell on a couple of books by Bails bed. They were the typical hybrid of pop psychology and sports that we used to love talking about when we first met, and I wondered if there was any research from sport that might back up what Bails was saying.

“It’s the same in any walk of life,” Bails added as an afterthought to his earlier bombshell, bringing me back from my thoughts into the sterile hospital room.

As it turns out, one of those books contained an answer that had already been discovered in other walks of life. And some of the world’s best performers over the last century were living proof that Bails was right.

Answers From A Lifetime Ago

Ben Bradlee was known by those closest to him as one of the happiest men alive. After graduating from college and serving with the army during World War II, he moved on to a job as a reporter for a small paper.

People who worked with him agreed he was the nicest guy ever. His knack for charm and influence only seemed to strengthen as he grew older, and he had people devoted to following him. Warm relationships were his thing.

For those who didn’t know him though, he appeared from a distance to be a hard man of principle. Not only that, when placed in charge of the group he had worked for in the late 1960’s, his ambition and drive were legendary.

In his time at the helm of the Washington Post, Bradlee took the paper to levels previously unimaginable. Thanks to their role in standing firm against government pressure and publishing the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals, the Post’s levels of circulation almost doubled under his watch, as did the size of his newsroom. Not only that, but a paper that had previously had only 4 Pulitzer Prize winners, and only one for reporting, was awarded 17 under his command.

He brought the best out in everyone, and had a barrel of fun doing it. But was Ben Bradlee an exception, or is it possible to make it to the top in a cut-throat industry and still be a nice guy?

Turns out that a study where Bradlee was recruited as a sophomore to be a participant, along with a future US President nicknamed JFK and 266 other men, found some surprising results about what really leads to success in life.

Finding Superman

Beginning in 1939, researchers from Harvard Medical School began an attempt to harness the medical and psychological sciences in order to understand what determines good health rather than illness. They hoped that the research would help the US, who were headed toward involvement in World War II, better select officer candidates.

They wanted to know the answer to a simple question: What predicted the best performers in life, when selecting from an already stellar field?

At the time, the study barely made a splash, because what they thought would predict success was dead wrong. After they couldn’t find any links between the ‘obvious’ predictors and success, the main source of funding was withdrawn in 1947.

The study sputtered along for the next 20 years, dying a slow death. Then in 1966, a 32 year-old psychiatrist named George Vaillant was put in charge of the study, and it became his lifework.

For the next 4 decades, Vaillant and his team followed the same men, checking in at least every two years.

The study now had data on them through college, to their first jobs, to deployment in WWII, to resettling, to marriage, to raising a family, to retirement.

Along the way there were kids born, parents passing, addictions and corrections, conversions and divorces. Now 7o years later, their findings make a bold claim: what matters most in life is relationships.

“The results were as clear-cut as they were startling,” Vaillant says.

As they had found early on in the study, the things we all think predict success showed very little predictive power. Socioeconomic status had no significant correlation at all with later success. And there was no difference between the success of those with high IQs (110–115) and those considered gifted (150).

But when it came to relationships, the results were crystal clear. Vaillant’s certainty in the results allows him to makes a bold claim:

Relationships Are The Real Superpower.

“The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people. Success in relationships was very highly correlated with both economic success and strong mental & physical health.”

He points to the numbers to bolster his argument, and they tell an amazing tale. Not only were those with positive relationships and good people skills more likely to have higher life satisfaction and better mental health, they were more successful.

The 58 men with the best scores for relationships over the course of their lives made an average of $243,000 a year; in contrast, the 31 men with the worst scores for relationships earned an average maximum salary of $102,000 a year.

The high scorers were also 3-times more likely to have professional success worthy of inclusion in Who’s Who — in industries as cut-throat as publishing, medicine, war, and politics.

Score vs Rapport

In the super competitive world of professional sports, I had thought it was different. It seemed that those who were the best performers had to be focused, on their own, almost selfish.

Then this old coach suggested it was something else that was one of the most important things he drew strength from every day.

Not the battles. Not the jousting. Not the successes.

The people.

Bails himself was a living example of this. For a guy of ‘average talent’ (his words!), he had eeked more out of a career in football than 90% of the industry. Granted, he had a great tactical brain, and was as competitive as the next guy. But above all he stood out for his dry wit, and the warm, authentic relationships he built with those he led.

I’d experienced his people-focused approach first hand when we had moved to Adelaide to join the staff of the Crows at the same time. Before we had even met, he offered to have me live with him indefinitely until I found a place. It struck me as strange at the time, but now it made so much sense.

When I left Bails in his hospital room after that first talk, I had an inkling these chats would be even more valuable than what I had first imagined.

In one visit — filled with jokes, stories about leadership, and even tears as he spoke about his boys — he had already opened my eyes. Bails helped me see that rather than directing people, a leader should focus on connecting with people.

Little did I know that on my next visit, he would also show me how.

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