Remove Excuses and Success Follows

^{“Never be satisfied. Work constantly to improve. Perfection is a goal that can never be reached, but it must be the objective. The uphill climb is slow but the downhill road is fast.” – John Wooden}

The definition of an excuse is as follows, an attempt to lessen the blame or to defend or justify. More importantly, excuses are roadblocks that hinder our progress in our professions or as a human being. Odds are in our lives, we all have used an excuse to either get out of something or to lessen the blame on someone we like or to lessen the blame on ourselves. While it is natural to do so, it only hurts us in the long run. Not only is it bad to lie to yourself and others, but it is also bad for your profession and those you lead.

            While reading “Wooden on Leadership,” John Wooden discussed one of his biggest breakthroughs that he realized as a coach of the UCLA Bruins. Now before I go into the story, I must tell you some eye-popping stats on Coach Wooden, for those that do not know of him.. Coach Wooden is considered to be the best college basketball coach of all time. Coach Wooden’s UCLA Bruins won 10 NCAA Championships in 12 years. The Bruins also had won 88 straight games and had four undefeated seasons under his leadership as well.

 But this story that I am going to discuss is before those eye-popping stats happened. The season was the 1961-1962 season. Wooden’s team this year was a huge underdog and not expected to go very far into the NCAA postseason, but they did. They advanced all the way to the Final Four that season. It was also the first time in program history that the Bruins had made the Final Four, which is an amazing achievement. But that was not the biggest achievement of them all for UCLA. The first game in the Final Four for UCLA was against the Cincinnati Bearcats. With 2:27 left on the clock in the second half the game was tied at 70-70 between the two teams. UCLA committed an offensive foul and gave the ball over to the Bearcats. Cincinnati then let the clock run down to 10 seconds and then called for a timeout. After the timeout, Cincinnati again let the clock run down to three seconds, and then a player for the Bearcats who had not scored a point for the Bearcats shot the ball and scored and won the game for Cincinnati. The final score was 72-70.  The next night that same Cincinnati team won the national championship. Wooden’s next quote was his breakthrough, “Much to my surprise, UCLA had nearly won the 1962 NCAA basketball championship. Suddenly-shockingly- it became clear that our inadequate basketball facility, the Men’s Gym, did not mean we couldn’t win a national title.” Wooden believed the public gym that they practiced and played in was so inadequate that they could never win the national championship, but he was wrong. Wooden also went on to believe this, “No longer could I tell myself “no”; no longer could I be comfortable with the status quo. I now knew what I should have understood long before, namely UCLA could go all the way to the top despite the Men’s Gym. It was up to me to figure out how to do it.”

Coach Wooden’s realization changed his program forever. It allowed him to understand that it was not the Men’s Gym holding the team back, but his excuses. He realized that he couldn’t control where he played, but he could control how he reacted and how he coached.

Controlling what we can control is the biggest enemy to an excuse. When we believe that nothing is in our control that is when we allow excuses to take over our organization, and even worse, our life. So that is why we must not ever become comfortable. We must ceaselessly search for answers and ways to make our team or organization better than how we found it. A saying that I have learned to live by, which I learned from Sean Loyd, the head coach of the West Virginia State University baseball program, is to get 1 percent better every day. Just think about that, if we get just 1 percent better every single day our progress in just a month will be way better than before. If that doesn’t get you excited then I don’t know what will.

            Excuses are addictive and can give us a crutch that can hurt us in so many ways. From our jobs to our personal lives. If we just believe in doing our best every single day then there is no excuse that we can make, or will need to make, because we had the self-satisfaction in knowing that we did the best that we could do. Lastly I will leave you with this picture that I find sums up this post. 

Notes

Wooden, J., & Jamison, S. (2005). Wooden on leadership. New York: McGraw-Hill.