“Pressure is healthy. It can lead to improvement. Stress is unhealthy. It can lead to mistakes.”
– John Wooden (1910 – 2010), legendary basketball coach at UCLA, from his book “The Essential Wooden” (co-authored with Steve Jamison)
The “Wizard of Westwood” goes on to say, “I wanted our team members to feel pressure so that their opponents would feel stress.”
And, there, with a tidy little ribbon around it, we have a solid commentary on competition. When we’re so well prepared that the people we’re competing with make mistakes because they’re worried about competing with us, we’ll win. A bunch. Like Coach Wooden did.
Coach Wooden talks about “precise and concise instruction and demonstration,” as keys to practice, and practice, as we all know, is the key to success on our chosen playing field or marketplace.
One of the coolest takeaways from Coach Wooden’s approach is that it was almost entirely internally focused. He didn’t coach one way against USC and another way against Notre Dame, he coached the game the way he believed it should be played. And he won. A bunch. Seven national championships in a row and ten in one twelve-year stretch. At one point UCLA won 88 games in a row. By relentlessly executing on what his teams set out to do.
What did they set out to do?
Get better every day.
And, it’s not that Coach was against change, either. He began his coaching career in 1949 and retired in 1975 after more than 820 games, having coached the winning team in 80% of those games. His approach evolved regularly, and he adapted to changes in rules, talent, size and speed of players. The reason the change didn’t stand out more was that he did it every day, a little at a time, by creating and relishing in the pressure that leads to improvement, at the expense of the stress that leads to mistakes. He never compromised on discipline, though, or his “team first” approach to outcomes.
Coach Wooden won. A bunch. And, he did it by intentionally creating the kind of pressure that made his team get better. Every day.
Leave a Reply