For those of us who are old enough to remember Arnold Schwarzenegger as a body builder who only played parts where his thick Austrian accent didn’t interfere too much with the main plot lines, you may remember his line in Conan the Barbarian when asked, “What is best in life?” His answer, if you haven’t committed it to memory was:
“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”
Okay, so maybe not the most modern definitions of success. As someone who is interested in developing and sustaining a principle based culture where I work, I feel it is important to have a good working definition of what success is so that all stakeholders are on the same page.
Our school and district have partnered with the Positive Coaching Alliance to implement their core principle and values to improve the experience of all of our student-athletes. For our coaches, we expect that they exhibit the characteristics of the double goal coach. In short, we want our coaches to focus on doing everything they can to put the best product in the competitive arena but not at the cost of doing everything we can to develop our student athletes as people. Better athletes, better people.
While I think most of us know what our teams/student-athletes need to do to better themselves as competitors, some may question what exactly we can do to define exactly what a “better person” is. In Episode 325 of the Tim Ferriss Podcast I think I may have found a definition that I like to describe what we hope our athletes get from their interscholastic athletic experience.
“When asked the question, What habits or skills are most important to living a successful life,” former CD Baby CEO Derek Sivers responded as follows:
“First let’s define success. Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman were successful actors I think it’s a tough call. Like my first reaction is “yes,” but the more I think about it, my answer moves halfway toward “no.”
As a different example, think of someone you know who you’d consider to be like the definition of a total loser. Now give that person a million dollars, are they now a winner? Of course not. Now that sounds like a totally contrived example but a lot of fame and fortune is dropped in the lap of people who were just the right face in the right place at the right time, but are actually awful, miserable people by any definition.
So the more you think it through the more you realize that you have to define success first by your inner game, not some outside measure of money or fame, right? Mastering yourself, your mind and your actions. But now, but if you only master yourself and you don’t help anyone else, well then we’d call you happy, but like nobody would define you as successful.
So the very definition of success must include how much you helped others. And I’ll bet if you helped thousands of people, even if you didn’t ultimately profit from it, but you were personally miserable well, we still might call you successful because you helped others, right?
So the point is, if you want to be undeniably successful, you need to both master yourself and help others. Don’t focus on the money or the fame, the real success is mastering your emotions and actions and actually helping lots of people.”
Based on the definition, Derek went on to answer the original question, what habits or skills are most important to living a successful life, with these four points:
- Managing your state and your emotional actions and reactions.
- Knowing what people need in general and what you need in particular.
- People skills–how to see things from other people’s point of view and how to communicate from their point of view.
- Ability to focus, learn, practice and apply what you learned.
I hope that this resonated with you as much as it did with me. As we contemplate the end result of experience that we want kids to take from their time in sports, I think helping them along this path to success, is as good a vision as I have heard.
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