For years I’ve been saying it to my teams, “Winning is not always success and losing is not always failure!” Now this sticks right in the craw of many people who want to put trophies on mantles and points on the board. The problem is that this one metric doesn’t tell the entire story. It’s just the most obvious thing that people measure. It’s also the reason that I REALLY REALLY dislike Manchester City in the English Premier League. We need to dig a little deeper to uncover the metrics by which true success can be measured.
My statement about success and failure is usually followed up by a thought exercise. I’ll ask my high school players, “If we played Arsenal and lost 1-0, were we successful?” The answer is always a resounding “YES!” Then I ask, “If we were to play against a U8 team and won 1-0, were we successful?” The answer is always a resounding “NO!” “Could we even characterize that as a ‘failure’?” Again the answer is always unanimous, “YES!” So if a loss can be success and a victory can be failure, how do we truly measure these contradictory outcomes that are so integral to how we feel about ourselves? It is simple but not easy.
Success is the distance between someone’s resources and their results. Many of the components may be subjective but we have the exemplars written in the fabric of our culture. It is no wonder that Rocky continues to be a classic after all of these years. That movie personifies this idea about success. Rocky has almost none of the resources but uses what he has to get unexpected results. Conversely Apollo has all of the resources and barely gets the minimum expected. These may be fictitious characters but these stories play out in the real world everyday. Possibly even in your own life.
Now that you have a definition for success. Take it, use it, run with it. Measure yourself against it. Are you really succeeding or are you beating up on the U8 team because it’s easy? With the resources that you have at your disposal, are you living above or below that line? Recognition is the first step to moving in a new direction. Then put on the gloves and start swinging.
Fight the good fight people!
Pete
Do me a favor and breath deeply. Pull it in and then release it. The air is incidental, isn’t it? It’s the breathing that you noticed. You probably gave little thought to the air itself. That’s because air is all around and it feels pliable and weak. It is only when air is marshaled into a formidable force, like a hurricane, that it gets the respect that it deserves. We need the air that we breath, it a building block with the potential to give life or take it away. It is a resource of infinite importance that is invisible because we only see it when it smacks us in the face like in a hurricane.
Growing up, my grandparents owned an A-frame house in the Pocono Mountains. It remains one of my favorite places in the world even though they sold it over 20 years ago. This place was spectacular! It had no TV, only a radio that may have been from the 1950’s. There was no running water, we had to fill 5 gallon jugs at the spring nearby. The toilet was filled by rainwater that needed to be pumped into the basin after each use. There were exactly two bedrooms and about twelve beds. The master bedroom was on the first floor and it contained one king size bed. The rest of the beds were set up end to end in two columns on the second floor varying from a crib up to a queen size. At maximum capacity, the second floor could sleep about 20 people. It was located on a gravel road about a half mile from a lake with a small sand beach. The nearest store or other forms of civilization were at least five miles away. It was a wonderful place to vacation.
Huryk Unlimited 