Want to know something interesting? When you read what the most successful coaches tell their teams about how to win, you’ll hear the same basic things over and over again ad nauseam. Sure, maybe one of them will toss in a funny anecdote and another one will phrase it slightly differently, but if you want to know what the best coaches tell the best athletes about how they become champions, what you are about to read is it.
Now, you may not want to be a Super Bowl Champion or win a World Series, but everybody has things they want to be good at. Listen to what these coaches are saying and follow their advice, and you will go further than you ever thought you could.
1) “If you want to win, do the ordinary things better than anyone else does them day in and day out.” — George Allen (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who led the Rams and Redskins, never had a losing season, and was twice named NFL Coach of the Year.)
2) “Adversity is inevitable, but it’s how you respond that defines your character.” -- Dusty Baker (Three-time Manager of the Year who won more than 2,000 games and led the Astros to the 2022 World Series championship.)
3) “Don’t let a bad play become a bad day!” -- Bill Belichick (Six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach of the New England Patriots and the winningest playoff coach in NFL history.)
4) “Discipline to me is sacrifice; it’s willingness to give up something you want to do, so you can better yourself.” -- Bobby Bowden (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won two national championships and 12 ACC titles at Florida State.)
5) “A whiner is almost always wrong. A winner never whines.” -- Paul Brown (Pro Football Hall of Fame innovator who won seven professional championships and helped found both the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals.)
6) “If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes real good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you.” -- Bear Bryant (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won six national championships and 14 SEC titles at Alabama.)
7) “If I were playing third base and my mother were rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I’d trip her. Oh, I’d pick her up and brush her off and say, ‘Sorry, Mom,’ but nobody beats me.” -- Leo Durocher (Baseball Hall of Fame manager who won more than 2,000 games, three National League pennants, and the 1954 World Series.)
8) “The will to win is meaningless without the will to prepare!” -- Joe Gibbs (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who won three Super Bowls with three different starting quarterbacks.)
9) “You might reduce Lombardi’s coaching philosophy to a single sentence: In any game, you do the things you do best, and you do them over and over and over.” -- George Halas (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach, cofounder of the NFL, and longtime Bears leader who won six NFL championships.)
10) “Nothing that comes easy in this world is worth a damn.” -- Woody Hayes (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won five national championships and 13 Big Ten titles at Ohio State.)
11) “It’s like most anything. If you want to be a loser, there’s always a way to dwell on the negative. If you want to win, there’s always a way to think positively.” -- Tony La Russa (Baseball Hall of Fame manager who won three World Series championships, six league pennants, and more than 2,900 games.)
12) “Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” -- Tom Landry (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who led the Cowboys to two Super Bowl titles and 20 consecutive winning seasons.)
13) “Lads, you’re not to miss practice unless your parents died or you died.” -- Frank Leahy (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won four national championships at Notre Dame and produced six undefeated seasons.)
14) “The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.” -- Vince Lombardi (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who won five NFL championships in seven years, including the first two Super Bowls.)
15) “Everybody hears, but few listen.” -- Bobby Knight (Basketball Hall of Fame coach who won three NCAA championships at Indiana, including an undefeated 1976 season.)
16) “Too many rules get in the way of leadership. They just put you in a box. People set rules to keep from making decisions.” -- Mike Krzyzewski (Basketball Hall of Fame coach who won five NCAA championships at Duke and three Olympic gold medals as head coach of Team USA.)
17) “Trust is earned through your behavior, not granted by your position. And it is earned through repeated behavior over time.” -- Urban Meyer (Three-time national championship coach who won titles at Florida and Ohio State.)
18) “Pressure is what you feel when you don’t know what’s going on.” -- Chuck Noll (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who led the Pittsburgh Steelers to four Super Bowl championships in six seasons.)
19) “The odds are always against you no matter what your previous history is. You have to overcome the tendency to relax.” -- Tom Osborne (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won three national championships, 13 conference titles, and 255 games at Nebraska.)
20) “You have to learn how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” -- Lou Piniella (Three-time Manager of the Year who led the Cincinnati Reds to the 1990 World Series championship.)
21) “Lying makes a problem part of the future; truth makes a problem part of the past.” -- Rick Pitino (Basketball Hall of Fame coach who guided Kentucky to the 1996 national championship and became the first coach to take three schools to the Final Four.)
22) “The measure of who we are is how we react to something that doesn’t go our way.” -- Gregg Popovich (Five-time NBA champion and three-time NBA Coach of the Year who built the San Antonio Spurs into one of basketball’s most successful franchises.)
23) “Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.” -- Pat Riley (Basketball Hall of Fame coach who won five NBA championships as a head coach and nine overall as a player, coach, and executive.)
24) “Do the right thing. It’s that simple. Do the right thing when the right thing is not popular. Do the right thing when no one else is around. Do the right thing when temptation tells you otherwise. Do the right thing all the time.” -- Nick Saban (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won a record seven national championships, six of them at Alabama.)
25) “The superior man blames himself. The inferior man blames others.” -- Don Shula (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach, two-time Super Bowl champion, and NFL career leader with 347 victories, including the league’s only perfect season.)
26) “What to do with a mistake: recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it.” -- Dean Smith (Basketball Hall of Fame coach who won two NCAA championships, reached 11 Final Fours, and recorded 879 victories at North Carolina.)
27) “It never changes. Football is a game of repetition, mental and physical. You may try to articulate it a little differently, but it’s the same thing: Get better players, make fewer mistakes, and drill the fundamentals into your players’ heads. The rest of it is a joke. Teams aren’t winning because of what they had for breakfast or what some coach said in the locker room.” -- Barry Switzer (College Football Hall of Fame coach who won three national championships at Oklahoma and a Super Bowl with the Dallas Cowboys.)
28) “For me, the starting point for everything—before strategy, tactics, theories, managing, organizing, philosophy, methodology, talent, or experience—is work ethic.” -- Bill Walsh (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who won three Super Bowls with the 49ers and popularized the West Coast offense.)
29) “The man who tried his best and failed is superior to the man who never tried.” -- Bud Wilkinson — College Football Hall of Fame coach who won three national championships and produced an NCAA-record 47-game winning streak at Oklahoma.
30) “If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.” -- John Wooden — Basketball Hall of Fame coach who won 10 NCAA championships in 12 seasons at UCLA, including seven consecutively.
I especially liked #21 and #30.
#21 is so apt for our national situation in politics and in culture at large. Telling the truth about the past is about a past problem and it does create a problem for the future. The control they exert over education and media allows our pathological misrulers to stay in control. As Orwell said, "He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future." (I may have the quote wrong but as stated it does show what's going on.)
#30 is right. Too many people allow fear of failure to inhibit their growth. I am indebted to Louise Hay (yes, you don't have to tell me, she was a certifiable kook in many ways but she got a lot of things right too) for the observation that no human being has ever learned to walk without falling down.
If babies were as fearful of making mistakes and looking foolish as many adults are, no one would ever learn to walk.
Here's my take on #31 which ought to be #1:
Another person over and above the kooky Louise Hay to whom I am indebted is Brian (Bryan?) Tracy. His lectures and books are lamps unto our feet. Especially the early ones. As he grew older the salt lost some of its savor and he became somewhat platitudinous.
But his earlier works were on point and made no obeisance to liberal thought control.
I heard one of his lectures in which Tracy asked the audience what was the most important thing determining success.
A couple of people suggested intelligence and hard work as the right answers. Tracy said that intelligence and hard work were certainly important but they weren't the most important factor in determining success.
His opinion?
He said that LONG RANGE PLANNING/THINKING is the most important factor. After pondering this for some time, I suspect that Brian Tracy was absolutely on target.
Tracy gave examples that were already dangerous to say back then. Nowadays, anyone citing such examples would be torn to pieces and banished from polite society forever.
He said that the British aristocracy made plans as to what prep school their kid would attend before the kid was even born. These people were the product of generations of success. Their vision was several decades out.
In contrast, he said, people in the housing projects only think about the next meal of fried chicken. Their vision is only about 10 minutes out. As a result, they are spectacular failures.
I am much more radical than John Hawkins. I am less tactful. I am old - almost 80. I don't have to worry about putting things in attractive, winsome, acceptable terms. Hawkins is more relevant than I am. He is playing to a large audience and actually wants to get things accomplished.
There is much chatter nowadays about "generational wealth" which is the latest panacea for correcting housing project type people. The average Black family has only 1/6th of the net worth as the average White family.
This figure holds true regardless of income level of the families. A rational mind would recognize that the fact that the 1/6th figure is true regardless of income level disproves the liberals' notion that inherited wealth causes the undeserved larger net worth of the average White family but liberals live in a "fact-free" world, are incapable of reexamining their thinking (which consists of a grab-bag of what the French call "idees fixes") and of introspection so the fact that the net worth figure exists regardless of income level has zero impact on what liberals think.
The real reason for the net worth disparity IMO is that Blacks and Whites have different hard wiring on long range planning.
Being more radical than Hawkins, I think the different approach to time is an inborn, genetic feature, an idea that enrages modern people even more than Tracy's upsetting example of people in housing projects thinking only about their next dinner.
THE FACT REMAINS: LONG RANGE PLANNING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN DETERMINING IF SOMEONE WILL SUCCEED OR FAIL.
Unfortunately, long range thinking is not politically possible in a universal suffrage democracy in which the voters are only concerned about next month's price of gasoline and not on what the country needs long range.
Only a monarchy or an aristocracy (or, less to our tastes, a dictatorship) can think and work long term. That's why America will go on as it has in the last 5 or so decades lurching into a catastrophic future.
In closing, I should say that these ideas are mine. They are not John Hawkins'.
Before the "watchdog" thought police in groups like the SPLC engage in their usual wide brush guilt by association smear on Hawkins, I need to point out the obvious:
The fact that I like Hawkins' ideas and writings means just and only that. I like him.
It does not mean that he shares what I think.
Sam Dickson