Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: Hard Lessons
“I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
—Mark Twain (Samuel Clemons)
I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Clemons, as my classroom education made up only the tip of the iceberg of knowledge I’ve acquired (and needed) on my journey. In fact, I am still collecting information every day. I read five books at a time. I listen to speakers on YouTube. I watch documentaries weekly. I spend hours on the phone each week asking people about their “why” and their “how.” I have been fortunate enough in my career to be part of a rotating cast of hundreds and hundreds. With over 35 years in coaching, teaching, and speaking, I have found that there are certain habits and traits that led one farther down their path to success.
Of those 35 years, I have taught and coached at the high school level for 12 years, at the Junior college level for one year, at the college level for 13 years, and spent the last 9 years of my coaching career in the National Football League. I have coached from the East (Knoxville, Tennessee), the West (University of Southern California), the North (Seattle, Washington), the Midwest (Dodge, Nebraska), the Mid-South (Blytheville, Arkansas, and Subiaco, Arkansas), and the South (Athens, Texas).
While the players at each of these schools and programs called me “coach,” I would actually consider myself a professional watcher. That’s what a coach is, right? We watch people do what we ask them to do and then attempt to praise or correct them based upon their performance of said task. You know the Tom Cruise movie The Last Samurai? It’s like when he tells us that he is “surprised to learn that the term ‘samurai’ meant to serve.” To me, the term “coach” actually means “to teach.” As a teacher, I spend most of my time observing the habits and traits of each of my test subjects.
I have watched the healthy, wealthy, and wise, and I have watched the handicapped, down trodden, and academically challenged find their way along their path. Each successful step (and each misstep) earned a mental notation on their scorecard. Some of them surprised me, but those who hit their markers and created solid habits were able to make steady progress down their life’s path.
My unique study of success and failure has lasted 35 years. I can’t think of a single study that has spanned that kind of period of time, can you? But here I am, having spent an incredible amount of time in the same industry watching the subjects go from the cradle to the grave, figuratively speaking, in the game of football. I have seen a young man put on his first football helmet—although it was backward—and I have seen a grown man weep after playing his last game of football. I have been part of winless seasons and historic runs of victories.
I have worked with geniuses (tested, in case you were wondering) as well as people who could not read above a third-grade level. I have studied people who came from every economic stratum imaginable. I have watched as those who were determined to succeed and willing to work and persevere achieved their goals, while others, who seemingly had everything going their way, squandered their talents and opportunities.
I really enjoyed watching how shared experiences affect each individual differently. How an individual coped with success or failure, how they fit into a team environment, and how they responded to discipline. To winning or losing. To competition. To being told the hard truth. To accepting the value of discipline. To learning how to handle pressure. Some responded by changing their habits to increase their chances of success, while others wanted to blame the people around them for their setbacks.
Using my 35 years of “research,” I have come to an understanding of the key elements that enabled some to move smoothly down their path to significance, while others, who struggled with these tools, became stuck and were thus unable to keep moving down the line to see their hopes and dreams realized.
Over the scope of this book, I will choose the most important traits that enabled some to move on while the lack of these traits facilitated in an adverse outcome to their dreams. To begin to unpack some of these traits and habits, I want to start out by sharing three major pitfalls that I call “sticking points.” These traits can stop a person dead in their tracks. They are:
1. Arrogance
2. Ignorance
3. Inflexibility
Three bullets that have killed many a career. While any one of these three sticking points can trip a person up, the biggest obstacle in moving past them is the individual himself. No matter how much someone wants to blame others for his troubles and his lack of success, often, the true villain in each of our stories is the person that looks back at us in the mirror every day.
Sticking Point #1: Arrogance
Let’s start with the first of the terrible trio: Arrogance. Arrogance is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions.”
One of the common mistakes people make is that they confuse arrogance with confidence. Though a simple mistake, it’s a deadly one. The minute we think we know everything, we soon learn how much we really don’t know. I had to live this before I could understand it. It has taken me 35 years to understand the dangers that arrogance brings into the workplace. My first lab rat was, unfortunately, myself. I was that arrogant prick.
When I graduated from college, I felt I was as smart as any coach ever to join the profession. I could watch professional and college games on television and tell you all the ways the coach was screwing up. I could draw plays until I ran out of paper. If you can believe it, as I was looking for jobs, I wouldn’t even apply for a position as an assistant coach. In my eyes, that was below me. Why would I sit there and work for a guy who couldn’t know more than I did? So, I only applied for head coaching jobs.
During my interviews, I sold myself as a veteran coach, even though I had only coached a Little League baseball team when I was 16 years old. I had been reading biographies of coaches for years, so I had answers to their questions, and I knew football. From the time I could walk, football was part of my life. My mom was a huge Green Bay Packers fan. In the formal living room—the one with the plastic on the furniture and where we weren’t allowed to go in when we were kids—there was a table that symbolized what was important in our household. On one end sat the Bible, and on the other sat Vince Lombardi’s Run to Daylight. I had played organized football since the 3rd grade. I had collected football cards my whole life. Nate Low and I would play slow-motion football, reenacting all the plays we had watched on Monday Night Football. In this regard, no one else had my resume… or so I arrogantly thought.
As it turned out, I did get the job at the high school, which proved that I was a much better salesman than I was a football coach. I was so prideful about what I thought I knew that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I believed that if I just showed up, I would figure everything out. I was just fine in the weight room during the summer. Running plays with the kids after lifting went well.
But then the first day of practice, it was a shit show. I had no plan. But I still believed I was going to be able to bluster this thing through. I had two great assistants, Gordie Pilmore and Ken Ippenson. Both were good men, several years older than I was, and had coached longer than I had played the game. But I didn’t ask for their advice. I was too busy looking for excuses for why things weren’t going well.
The kids were great. They worked hard, and they listened. They performed what they were taught. As we sat on that bus heading home after getting beat… again… I had my first professional epiphany. It struck me like a thunderbolt.
I knew nothing about coaching the game of football.
When we have more confidence in ourselves than we do actual ability, it makes us difficult to be around. Now, don’t get me wrong: there is nothing wrong with confidence. In a couple of chapters, I will discuss how the need to trust ourselves is essential to moving up in our world. However, when the confidence isn’t backed up with the skill to prove it, you have a professional death sentence on your hands.
