Win Forever

That’s so cool.

Coach Maslow on the football field.

Pete talks about how inspired he was by Maslow as a graduate student/coach at the University of the Pacific. He was particularly inspired by Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being (check out our Notes on that book + another book by Maslow called Motivation and Personality).

As you probably know by this point, Maslow was kinda the Grand-Godfather of the Positive Psychology movement. Way before researchers were looking at how to help people optimize their lives, he was studying the healthiest among us and asking, How can we all be like THAT?

At the peak of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is the need to self-actualize. Here’s how he puts it: “Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization… It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially: to become everything one is capable of becoming.”

As we become healthier human beings and satisfy our lower needs for safety and survival and love and esteem, the need to actualize our potential becomes as real as the need for oxygen.

What one CAN be, one MUST be.

Pete brought that wisdom to the football field—making his primary job as a coach all about helping his athletes experience their own greatness, to perform at their highest levels and to actualize their potential.

Those are the very first words of the book.

I remember being fired up when I first listened to them and again when I re-read the book.

Imagine that. When we think of Coach Wooden (who ESPN ranked as THE best coach of the 20th century, effectively making him the greatest coach ever), we think of his 10 championships in 12 seasons.

We pretty much NEVER think about the fact he coached at UCLA for 16 (!) seasons before he won his first title. And, he coached for a number of years before even showing up at UCLA.

In a fixed-mindset society, we like to think that greatness is born, that little or no effort is put in by those who achieve great things. But that’s NEVER the case. That’s the first point.

The second point: Once Coach Wooden figured it out, he FIGURED IT OUT. Hah! He was almost unstoppable. As Pete says, it was as if he could win forever. Now, Pete just needed to figure out HIS vision, and philosophy and plan to implement it.

Guess what? The same thing holds true for us. WE need to figure out *our* philosophy for being unstoppable—for creating an optimal life. We need to figure out what we’re doing when we’re ON—the fundamentals we’re rockin’ and the thoughts and behaviors we engage in that help us perform at our best.

So, what’s your vision for *your* life? Your philosophy for optimizing + actualizing? Your plan to put it in action so you can win forever and experience higher and higher (and more consistent) levels of happiness, meaning and mojo?!

Bust out your pad of paper and get on that! :)

That’s so good.

Get this: Pete was fired FIVE times before leading USC to its extraordinary success. FIVE (!!!) times. As he says, he needed those challenges and adversity to bring forth his truths.

That’s how it is for all of us. We need to look at failures as stepping stones to our success—challenging us to get stronger and more clear on who we are and what we’re committed to.

Robert Emmons is one of the world’s leading scholars in the positive psychology movement. Here’s how he frames the importance of challenges in his great book, Thanks! (see Notes): “It is relatively easy to feel grateful when good things are happening, and life is going the way we want it to. A much greater challenge is to be grateful when things are not going so well, and are not going the way we think they should. Anger, bitterness, and resentment seem to be so much easier, so much more a natural reaction in times like these…

The religious traditions encourage us to do more than react with passivity and resignation to loss and crisis; they advise us to change our perspective, so that our suffering is transformed into an opportunity for growth. Not only does the experience of tragedy give us an exceptional opportunity for growth, but some sort of suffering is also necessary for a person to achieve maximal psychological growth. In his study of self-actualizers, the paragons of mental wellness, the famed humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow noted that “the most important learning lessons… were tragedies, deaths, and trauma… which forced change in the life-outlook of the person and consequently in everything that he did.””

Sounds an awful lot like what Pete just described, eh?

Back to YOU. Are you experiencing any challenges in your life and/or ruminating about challenges from the past?

Quit beating yourself up and start seeing the opportunities for GROWTH inherent in those setbacks. We all have them. The best among us use them as fertilizer for our seed of potential. Let’s do that. :)

Winning Forever.

It’s NOT about the final score. Period. It’s about being in the game, striving to be your best and using every moment as an opportunity to get just a little closer to actualizing your potential.

A couple other key aspects of Pete’s philosophy include the idea to “Always Compete” and to strive to “do things better than they’ve ever been done before.”

Let’s break that down for a moment.

First, there’s “Always.”

And when Pete says “Always” he means ALWAYS.

Use every.single.moment. as an opportunity to compete with yourself (!) to see if you can do things better than you’ve ever done them before.

Super inspiring. Reminds me of the Greek word that sums up my entire philosophy: Areté. We come back to this word/concept again and again throughout these Notes.

Basic idea: Guys like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle told us that if we want happiness, a sense of FLOURISHING and well-being, we need to live with areté.

The word directly translates as “virtue” or “excellence,” but it has a deeper meaning—something closer to “expressing the highest version of yourself moment to moment to moment.”

THAT’s where the magic is.

Always Compete. (Always!!!)

Moment to moment to moment you are capable of expressing a certain version of yourself.

DO THAT. Be THAT version of yourself.

To the extent you don’t, there’s a gap between what you were capable of being and what you actually were in that moment. It’s in that gap (and only (!) in that gap) that regret, anxiety, depression and all the other ick sauce exists.

Close the gap and you actualized your potential in that moment. Do that consistently and you’re going to blow yourself away—feeling extraordinarily good, confident and capable as you march toward maximizing your potential.

Want to Win Forever—experiencing a higher, more consistent level of happiness, meaning and mojo (and every other measure of personal and professional success)? Live with areté. Always compete—striving to do things better than you’ve ever done them before.

Practice is Everything.

Pete shares some super inspiring stories about how he runs his practices and keeps his players going at full throttle and pushing the outer reaches of their potential all.the.time to condition them for game time. (Amazing stuff.)

Coach Wooden taught the same thing.

He didn’t focus on winning championships. He focused on trying to make today’s practice PERFECT—knowing that if you can string together a set of masterpiece practices, you’re going to do just fine come game time.

(But if you’re constantly leaning too far forward and thinking about the outcomes you’re after, you’ll be distracted and fail to prepare adequately and under perform. But only every time.)

Here’s how Wooden put it: “When I was teaching basketball, I urged my players to try their hardest to improve on that very day, to make that practice a masterpiece.

Too often we get distracted by what is outside our control. You can’t do anything about yesterday. The door to the past has been shut and the key thrown away. You can do nothing about tomorrow. It is yet to come. However, tomorrow is in large part determined by what you do today. So make today a masterpiece. You have control over that.

This rule is even more important in life than basketball. You have to apply yourself each day to become a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better. Only then will you will be able to approach being the best you can be. It begins by trying to make each day count and knowing you can never make up for a lost day.”

Always compete, eh?

Confidence.

The word comes from the Latin con– (expressing intensive force) + fidere (trust). It basically means INTENSE TRUST in oneself—which is EARNED via hard work and *knowing* you’ve been showing up and doing your best moment to moment to moment. (ALWAYS COMPETE!)

It’s that tenacious commitment to constantly striving to do your best that allows you to relax and, as Pete says, “Let it rip!” come game time.

Here’s to the intense trust that’s a by-product of doing your best day in and day out!

What would your life look like if you quit trying to be the best at something (relative to others) and simply tried to be the best version of yourself?

Let’s focus on fearlessly stepping into the next best version of ourselves as we actualize our potential and give our greatest gifts in greatest service to the world.

Here’s to Winning Forever!