YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

*Anyone who is deeply interested in the study of human potential, and especially those who know that they themselves have much more inside themselves to give than they've ever been called upon to contribute before.

*Businesspeople and leaders in all areas of civic life who want to learn how to inspire themselves and their teams to greatness, and who want to learn from the very best about exactly how to do that.

*Athletes and coaches who want to bring the absolute best out of themselves, and increase their own contribution to the success of the teams of which they are a significant part.

*Everyone who knows that there's more to life than winning and that a life defined by competitive greatness and unshakeable self-worth has nothing to do with whatever it happens to say on the scoreboard.

It's hard to do your best, much harder than most people realize. By definition, "your best" is the absolute greatest effort you are capable of giving, and sadly, most people just never even come close to that.

Legendary basketball coach John Wooden was a master when it came to seeing potential greatness and infinite self-worth lying dormant inside the players on his teams, and his leadership style - that you can learn to adapt for yourself - was perfectly suited to drawing excellence from the teammates entrusted to his care.

For Wooden, there was a standard that ranked above winning, and he believed that if you give every single thing you have within you to be your very best, then you're already a success no matter what.

Doing your best is all that can ever be asked of you; it's literally everything, and although winning may be a natural byproduct of that supreme effort, it could never be the sole reason for a team's or a person's existence.

Before people start to think that this "gentle" approach may be good for building self-esteem and making players "feel good" but wouldn't translate into winning actual ballgames, they should know that John Wooden was also one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time. 

Teams he coached won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years, including winning 88 consecutive games, setting legendary records that likely will never be broken. So yeah, there might be something to this "gentle" approach after all.

Additionally, just like some people underestimate what the gym can teach them about life (Spoiler Alert: a lot), they may also underestimate what this book can teach them about leadership and achieving greatness in whatever it is they're called to do.

On the contrary, John Wooden always believed that basketball was simply a vehicle for teaching his players the most important lessons about life itself.

You can take the leadership principles and maxims concerning personal excellence and adapt them to whatever situation you find yourself in, whether that be leading a sales team, helping your children become the people you've always known them capable of becoming, or stretching yourself to fulfill more of your own potential.

I won't pretend that winning isn't important to me. Indeed, John Wooden and his elite basketball players loved to win, but it was the way they played and behaved that was ultimately more impressive than any of the records or the championships themselves.

Disciplined, intensely focused on executing the fundamentals, self-controlled, team-focused, and unselfish, they would have been winners no matter what, and this is because of Wooden's exceptional leadership style.

John Wooden also possessed an immense moral strength that was given expression in many of the actions he took as a coach and leader. For one thing, when racism was still a significant presence in collegiate sports, he refused to enter basketball tournaments that his black players weren't allowed to participate in. They were a team, and if they couldn't all play, then none of them were going to be there.

It was this strict, incredibly demanding coaching style, combined with this gentleness, and a strong, enduring belief in human potential and infinite human worth that made John Wooden such a spectacular role model. One that we would all do well to emulate in our own lives.

There's so much that we can all learn from John Wooden's example, and we're going to examine several of his most fundamentally important lessons here in this book breakdown. For example, we're going to discuss "Competitive Greatness," what it is, how it's achieved, and how it fits into a development model he called the Pyramid of Success.

We're also going to take a look at his extreme time management methodology and how exactly he was able to motivate and enable his players to reach deeper - and stretch further - than even they thought possible.

This isn't just about basketball, it's about life, and in life, there are effects and there are causes. To get the effects you want, you need to repeat the causes, over and over and over again, and you have to commit to doing your utmost in every situation, every circumstance, and while facing down any challenge.

Winning is never guaranteed, but if you give your absolute best to something, and you commit to standards of personal excellence far beyond anything that anyone else could ever ask of you, then you will be rewarded. You're going to get somewhere, and you're going to be damn proud of yourself once you do.

The mindsets, tactics, and strategies laid out in this book will arm you with virtually all of the tools you'll need to achieve championship results in your life, whatever that looks like for you.

The Essential Wooden is about determining what true success looks like and how you can achieve it, no matter what it says on the scoreboard. So let's find out what your best actually looks like. Time for tip-off!

#1: Doing Your Best Is Success

One of my core beliefs - and something I've repeated over and over again in my work - is that you don't need to "do" anything to make yourself worthy of basic human dignity and unconditional positive regard.

In a similar way, success, as John Wooden defines it, has nothing whatsoever to do with what it says on the scoreboard at the end of the game. Winning or losing will never define your worth as a human being, whether that's in sports, business, or anything else.

What matters is that you do your best, that you put in every single thing you have within you to become the best person you can possibly be, in whatever you happen to be doing. That is true success, and if you gave it everything you had, there's nothing that can ever appear on the scoreboard that will make you a loser.

That being said, doing your best is not easy. It's not simply shrugging your shoulders and saying, "Oh well, I guess I did my best." No, doing your best is literally the hardest thing you'll ever be called upon to do, and that's why so few people are actually doing their best in life.

It's hard - it's unbelievably hard to do your best - and if you're willing and able to give that much to something, then you're automatically a success. So no, doing your best is never easy. It's hard; "easy" is not a part of it. But what you'll find is that it's worth it. Here's why, according to John Wooden's philosophy:

Winning is sometimes the byproduct of success (doing your best), but success is never the byproduct of winning. You could do your best and still lose, but that will never make you a loser. Not to John Wooden, and not to me.

What's much more important than all of that is the personal pride - the tremendous satisfaction - that comes from doing your absolute best in life.

If you give your best effort every moment, you will be a winner for the rest of your life no matter what, and that pride in yourself that comes from doing something incredibly difficult and meaningful will matter to you more than anything else you could ever win.

#2: The Pyramid of Success

There are 15 essential qualities of a competitor that make up John Wooden's "Pyramid of Success," a teaching aid he developed over decades while helping to lift the teams he coached to the highest levels of university sports.

The full pyramid is introduced below, and you can read about each block right here in more depth, but the main takeaways are that greatness isn't an accident and that success leaves clues.

There is a specific, intentional structure to Wooden's Pyramid, and these qualities are literally the building blocks upon which success - in any endeavor - is constructed.

You don't have to memorize the whole thing, but if you begin to consciously develop these qualities within yourself, then lasting success will be the inevitable result. See the full Pyramid of Success laid out below, and notice how each level builds upon the level underneath it, culminating in the achievement of Competitive Greatness at the very top of the Pyramid:

You may also notice that along the sides are listed the qualities "faith" and "patience." When you assimilate these qualities within yourself over time, consistently strengthening them with faith and patience, then you will be a winner, no matter what happens.

But it's not going to happen by accident. You need to prepare for greatness, invite it to come by working hard, and never taking your eyes off the top of that Pyramid. This takes time, you need to have faith in the process, and you have to work hard today, with patient assurance that your efforts will be rewarded in the end.

Greatness is never an accident. It is always the intentional result of consistent, never-ending self-improvement, preparation, of constant striving toward a worthy goal. Eventually, if you keep stacking those blocks one on top of another, fortifying them with patience and faith, you will get to the apex. You will achieve Competitive Greatness. It's all in the preparation:

#3: Achieving Competitive Greatness

Just because you won, it doesn't mean you were any good. And even though you may have lost, that doesn't mean that you didn't achieve Competitive Greatness.

Performing at your best - Competitive Greatness - has nothing to do with winning, and everything to do with the battle itself. Speaking for myself, it's much more gratifying to lose to a superior opponent (after having given my best effort) than to win easily against someone in a competition where I didn't even have to try.

We feel good about ourselves because we kept going when it was difficult; because victory was never guaranteed; because the opponent was great but we were even better. So you can see how, in this way, the result of the contest is irrelevant compared to the manner in which you showed up and the supreme effort you brought to the attempt.

You'll never know how good you could become if you never face an opponent that demands your total effort in order to defeat them. In another excellent book about the teachings of John Wooden, Wooden on Leadership, Coach has this to say:

#4: Become the Model

People are watching. No matter how many people you lead - even if you don't consider yourself a leader - people are paying attention to how you do things, and they're watching because they want to follow someone who knows what to do. People naturally desire to place their faith in a strong leader, and they're watching for them all the time.

So if you aspire to become a leader, you have to be aware that people will always be watching. Your actions say something about your character and your philosophy, and these things do not go unnoticed.

Moreover, realize that you can positively influence every single person with whom you come into contact. I also believe that you have an ethical obligation to do so, an ethical obligation to be a role model for Greatness, and to show people, by your example, that goodness exists in the world and that they should embody it as well.

Speaking for myself here, I take whatever influence I've been able to gather online (and offline) extremely seriously. I'm conscious of the fact that people are paying attention to what I say, what I do, and how I treat others. This is a tremendous responsibility, and if you yourself have influence (and you do), it's critically important that you wield it well.

Your team, regardless of who's leading it, represents an enormous opportunity both for you to grow and to help others grow as well. When you elevate yourself and your own contribution, when raise your own standards, your whole team stands higher too.

#5: Strength and Gentleness

The old model of mental toughness was based on fear and ridicule, shame and doubt. It was based on hiding all evidence of weakness, and the old style of coaching and leadership involved yelling and screaming at people until they get closer to what we wanted them to be - not for the purpose of allowing them to reach their full potential.

Certainly, it wasn't a common belief that strength and gentleness could coexist within the same leader's style, much less that such a leader could win 88 games in a row and help his team win 10 championships in 12 years. And yet here we are!

Just to make this explicit: John Wooden loved to win. His players loved to win. Everyone loves to win, and that's what every competitor shows up to do. It's just that Wooden didn't consider it a victory if his team couldn't hold their heads up high after the game, and whether they could do that or not had nothing to do with the final score.

#6: Squeeze Every Second Out of Every Minute

#7: There is No Upper Limit

The above quote is one of those passages that make reading an entire book worth it, even if that were the only thing you took away from it. As it happens, there are dozens of amazing takeaways from this book, but this right here is one of the most important.

Once you realize the full import of this idea, it can, so to speak, make the whole library around you spin: Whatever you're doing in life you can always do more. There is always another level, always more that you can do, greater heights that you can reach, more success and satisfaction that you can pull from deep inside yourself. You can always do more.

What this means is that Life is an infinite game with no endpoint. You'll never "win" - you just earn the right to keep playing. The point of Life is Life itself, and as Miguel de Cervantes said, "The road is better than the inn." You're not trying to reach some final endpoint, any more than when you're dancing you're trying to reach a particular spot on the floor.

Practically, on a day-to-day level, all this is a friendly exhortation to keep striving for greatness in everything you do. It means that if you've accomplished something in life, you were always capable of doing so and that now it's time to reach beyond that, to do the thing you cannot do, to go further. To advance confidently toward the realization of what you might be able to achieve if only you commit to devoting your total effort to achieving it.

Lastly, realize that Competitive Greatness is rarely reached alone. Team sports can teach a person so much because Life is a team sport, and one of the reasons we're here is to help other people achieve Competitive Greatness as well.

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