I was struck by the brevity and severity of his response. Not blocking, not tackling, not assignments. Not focus on any part of the game, but rather the outcome of the game itself. Something about the response seemed odd to me. It reeked of a desperation that in this case was very public, but not unique among those whose backs are against the wall. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Focus on the outcome is pervasive in football. The Oakland Raiders of the 1970’s espoused the “Just Win Baby!” philosophy, which dictated that as long as the Raiders were victorious, all means necessary to achieve the victory were warranted.
Reaching further into the annals of football lore, the most famous testament to the importance of winning is attributed to Vince Lombardi, the Hall of Fame coach of the Green Bay Packers in the 1950’s and 60’s. In his famous speech (famous among football fans and players, anyway) “What It Takes to Be #1,” which, according to ESPN, was quoted just last week to the New York Jets by their running back LaDanian Tomlinson, Lombardi offers that, “Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do things right once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” He continues, “I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour – is that moment when he has to work his heart out in a good cause and he’s exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.”
I’m going to risk excommunication from the congregation of football by suggesting that the Lombardi scriptures are wrong, or at least the popular and selective interpretation of them is. I believe the 49ers, and anyone else who hopes to do something great, should take a page from the Stoics’ philosophy, focusin on what one can control, not on the outcome.
By virtue of having been exposed to the ideas through William B. Irvine’s great book, “A Guide to The Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy,” I suggest there are two reasons for doing this – the second of which I think is the heart of Lombardi’s real message to football. First, by focusing only on winning, you limit the level of performance you can attain through any one competition, and thus the maximum level of performance you will ultimately reach. Second, winning is too abstract a goal to warrant focus.
Limiting Your Performance Through Winning
I’ll use an overly simplified example to illustrate the point. Let’s say I want to be the best swimmer I can be. I go down to the local “Y” to work out, and I’ll find many swimmers against whom I can race. If I focus only on beating them, I’ll focus on swimming just fast enough to achieve a win against what I can see. Maybe the fastest guy at the pool, the one with the sweet body suit and custom kickboard, will beat me at first, but after some diligent work (and maybe an equipment purchase) I’ll eventually win. Great. Now I’m a winner, but that doesn’t make me the best that I can be… I’m just the best in the pool. I have no idea how good I could be if I achieved perfection, and perhaps more important, I’m not well prepared for the inevitable contest against someone who’s better... I’m just good enough for now. Let’s consider the converse of this: Michael Phelps. He is already the best in the world. There is no one he can train with who is his equivalent. What does he focus on? It can’t be just winning because, for the most part, that’s a forgone conclusion. He continues to set records because he and his coach focus on what he can do to achieve the best performance of which he alone is capable. Because of his effort and execution of technical mastery (two things he controls 100%) and his physical talent (which he does not control and is ephemoral), this usually results in win, and almost always a sublime performance.
Winning Is An Abstraction
No matter how much you prepare, no matter how smart you are, no matter how hard you work, you cannot control the outcome of a “fair” competitive encounter. Consider two perfectly evenly matched competitors. They are equal in talent, intelligence and preparation: equal in every way. In a contest with no ties, chance or fate (things beyond the control of the participants) will decide the winner. Even in contests between unevenly matched opponents, chance can create unlikely outcomes. Accordingly, if you have no control over winning, there is really no sense in naming it as your goal. Are you really a failure if something outside of your influence creates an outcome?
I’m not suggesting that winning is meaningless. After all, coaches and players are measured on wins and losses. Perhaps that’s not a fair standard against which to measure them, but that’s a subject for a different piece. I suggest that in order to maximize the odds of winning, which is not something they can control, people should focus on achieving what they can control. I also suggest that this is consistent with the heart of Lombardi’s forgotten message.
The second half of the second sentence of Lombardi’s speech starts, “you don’t do things right once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit.” For the moment, let’s reframe “winning” as achieving a personal best performance, which I have argued is the best one can hope for. If you assume that performance improves marginally with each repetition, then each time you do something correctly, you do it faster, stronger… better. In other words, achieving your best performance in any one instance is a product of the habit of achieving your best performance each time. You cannot control winning, but you can control the habits that allow you to achieve your best performance, and continuing to achieve that is the best to which a team or individual can aspire.
What does this mean for the 49ers and the rest of us? Perfection in what you can control will, at best, put you in a position to win, then the chips will fall where they may. If you are not focusing on and optimizing the things you can control, and you lose, then you have no one to blame but yourself; you are, in fact, a loser. If, however, you execute perfectly on what you can control, only things outside of your influence will dictate the outcome. If you win, it’s only because of chance or because the opponent was over-matched – an outcome hardly worthy of praise. If you lose because of chance or your opponent was somehow advantaged, you cannot rightfully be blamed for the loss.
If not winning and losing, from what can I derive satisfaction? I believe that when Lombardi said, “Any man’s finest hour – is that moment when he has to work his heart out in a good cause and he’s exhausted on the field of battle – victorious,” he did not suggest we define victory merely in terms of a scoreboard. Rather, it was victory in the battle for any individual to achieve self-mastery, the battle against the temptation to take a shortcut, to curb ones effort, to shirk a responsibility. It is from this victory, which affords the best possible opportunity to achieve a win, that a competitor should derive satisfaction.
Coach Singletary – instruct your team to focus on preparation and execution, not winning. Focusing on winning is for losers.
