Hi, I’m Rick Sessinghaus. Here I have one of my prized possessions, a signed basketball by legendary coach John Wooden. Now, John Wooden, as many of you know, has won the most national championship in college history, 10 at UCLA. What I love about his teachings is that it wasn’t about the winning that actually made them win. He’s very famous for creating something called the Pyramid of Success. Now, I’m not going to go over all of the steps, but what I’ve learned from reading his books and understanding some of his philosophies is that, to really be successful, it actually had very little to do with the winning and the outcome. It has to do, how are you going to show up on a day-to-day basis a little bit better than yesterday? What are the details that you’re going to now pay attention to that maybe you didn’t yesterday?
When you’re being better today, you’re actually embracing the process instead of always thinking about the outcome. What’s interesting is that he never actually prepared for other teams, because he goes, “If we do our process, we’ll be fine.” So he wasn’t concerned about the competition, he was only concerned about competing against themselves, the team, the individual, to make them better and better every single day.
The other part that I really got form is that he wanted you to be more concerned about your character than anything else. Now, that’s not talked about a lot in success literature, is it? Sometimes it’s, “Achievement, go go go, cutthroat,” all that kind of stuff, but he was more about the foundation of character, and one bad behavior, one bad day, could ruin your character. That’s what I got from it, is that I need to still be aware of how I’m going to show up on a daily basis, how I’m going to treat people. My integrity. How am I going to come across to people? That’s my character, and I have to embrace my own process. What can I do on a day to day basis, and not be as concerned with the outcome? Because the outcome will come.
Now, every day we’re building that character. Every day you’re building to preform, and we need to be a little better every single day. So, John Wooden even though he won the most, it wasn’t about the winning, it was about winning every day, to be a better person, to build on the fundamentals so you could preform for success.