The Right Call

Sally Jenkins

📚 GENRE: Personal Development

📃 PAGES: 272

✅ COMPLETED: March 8, 2024

🧐 RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Short Summary

Written by famed sports writer Sally Jenkins, The Right Call features valuable anecdotes and insight about athletes, excellence, and leadership from Jenkins’s Hall of Fame career. The habits and principles outlined in the book can be adopted by everyday people working in any field or discipline. 

Key Takeaways

1️⃣ Leadership: Care About Your People, Prioritize Relationships — You need to be liked and respected by your team to have any chance of motivating and leading them. Your message and vision simply won’t matter if you don’t have these. One of the ways you can earn your team’s approval and respect is simply by caring about them and their well-being. Show them that you genuinely care. Give them the tools and resources they need to be successful. Make creating a relationship with everybody on your team a priority. Building strong relationships with your people is more important than anything you bring to the table from a skills and knowledge standpoint. As Pat Summit said, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

2️⃣ Failure: Learn, Don’t Pout — Failure is going to happen. It’s inevitable, and it’s actually a good thing because the lessons failure offers will bring you closer to success. Rather than beat yourself up when you fail by endlessly replaying things in your mind, choose to learn from it. Dissect the failure and try to figure out where things went wrong and how you can improve. When you look at failure in a more analytical way, you take some of the emotional sting out of it and prevent the failure from becoming unproductive. You get something from the failure, which should always be the goal. An example: On the first day of the NFL offseason, Peyton Manning used to watch every interception he threw and look for commonalities among his bad throws. He would then design targeted drills to help improve those areas. 

3️⃣ Performance: Stay Cool, Stay Loose — Professional athletes perform on some of the grandest stages and under some of the most extreme pressure. We often watch these athletes and wonder how they “rise to the occasion” so effortlessly. In reality, athletes who perform well in the clutch aren’t elevating their game in some mystical way; they’re simply finding a way to stay composed and cool. They keep the performance in perspective by treating every play like it’s a rep in their backyard, and they find a way to keep a quiet and still mind. They don’t allow the mind, and its fight-or-flight mode, to derail them. For everyday people, one of the ways this can be mimicked is by trying to stay loose. We perform far worse when we’re mechanical and overthinking things. 

Favorite Quote

“If you don't care about the people you work with, you're hosed,’ [Tom] Brady remarked shortly after winning his seventh Super Bowl. ‘And you better get out of that leadership role. Or you better find a way to become more caring and empathetic to the people you're working with. People want to do their best. And you've got to give them tools to be their best.... You've got to motivate everybody.... And it obviously starts at the top. And everybody is going to look at the leader and say, is this the person I want to follow?”

Book Notes 📑

Prologue: Getting Serious About Greatness

  • About the Author — Sally Jenkins is a sports columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post. She has also written stories for Sports Illustrated and ESPN, and is a five-time winner of the Associated Press Sports Columnist of the Year Award. She is also renowned author with more than 10 books to her name. In 2005, Jenkins became the first woman inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame.
  • About the Book — Through her work as a sports writer, Jenkins has had a front row seat to excellence. She’s been able to observe star athletes — like Steph Curry, LeBron James, Charles Barkley, Patrick Mahomes, and countless more — up close and personal. This book features valuable anecdotes and is a distillation of everything Jenkins has learned from athletes about being great.
    • Quote (P. xvii): “The longer I watch, the more I return to a question my father liked to pose rhetorically. ‘Who can describe the athletic heart?’ he asked. The way he said it made me feel that it was the most important challenge in the world. The following [pages] is an effort to answer that challenge — to try to catalog the inner qualities that allow ordinary people to overcome pressures, elevate their performances, and find champion identities, even when they don’t always win. In reading, you may decide an athletic heart is worth acquiring for yourself.”
  • Sports: What We Can Learn — There are a lot of lessons all of us can take from sports and professional athletes. Anybody can take an athlete’s mindset into their daily 9-5 corporate job. It’s about competing, being disciplined, getting better every day, and pushing yourself to give a full effort. Through Jenkins’s experience following and observing professional athletes, this book attempts to deliver insight into what it takes to achieve excellence in any field. A few of the early insights and anecdotes introduced in the prologue include:
    • Master Your Craft — Talent is great, and necessary, but it’s more about mastering your craft. It’s about looking for ways to improve and become better at what you do.
      • Quote (P. xi): “After spending time with [Billie Jean] King, listening to her talk about how tennis was less about talent than about ‘mastering a craft’, I sat down to write.”
    • Work Ethic — Professional athletes work incredibly hard. Even somebody that fans consider to be a below-average player is extremely good and generally works much harder than the average person.
      • Quote (P. xi): “The laziest-seeming pro athlete works much harder than the average person, day in and day out, to get better, and is more forthright when it comes to confronting their unevenness under pressure.”
      • Quote (P. xv): “I can’t stress enough that champions are essentially the product of their own work.”
    • Maximum Effort — Nobody is perfect, and nobody is ever going to achieve perfection. The key is to try to get there. The pursuit of perfection, and the daily demands that perfection requires, will lead to significant growth over time. It’s critical to put forth a maximum effort, no matter what you do for a living and are passionate about. Strive for perfection. And when you make mistakes, don’t be content with shrugging them off; take accountability, learn from them, and use the lessons to improve.
      • Quote (P. xiii): “Sitting with Charles Barkley, back when he was a young All-Star NBA player for the Philadelphia 76ers, and hearing him say from the bottom of his tremendous heart, ‘I realize I’m never going to be perfect, but as long as you strive to, at least you’re going to get better. I don’t ever want to make a mistake and say, ‘That’s all right.’ Because then it becomes a part of you. I don’t want mistakes to become a part of my life.’”
    • Believe In Yourself — Bet on you. You should be working hard enough day in and day out that there’s nobody you’d rather trust in a certain high-pressure situation than yourself. Self-belief and confidence come naturally from working hard and trying to get better every day. Work hard, and believe in yourself.
      • Quote (P. xiv): “What they teach is that identity is a self-construct. ‘People who bet on themselves tend to win’, Billie Jean [King] said on one occasion, and you could tell from her tone that she was trying to tell you what mattered most was not the winning but the guts. I can’t stress enough that champions are essentially the product of their own work.”
    • Sacrifice — Excellence requires sacrifice. There’s no way around it. Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and many, many other professional athletes have also echoed this thought. You can’t live a life of comfort and ease and expect to become great at what you do. For the most part, you have to give up the Netflix, partying, fast food, and horsing around. You have to be serious about your goals, look for ways to get better, work hard, study hard, and remain extremely disciplined to your daily habits. All of it requires sacrifice in some way, and not everyone is going to understand it.
      • Quote (P. xv): “Even eating was a part of the job to him [tennis Hall of Famer, Pete Sampras], a nightly mechanical loading of sauceless pasta, whether he wanted it or, ‘choking it down,’ he said, because he believed that for him, real excellence couldn’t co-exist with self-indulgence. ‘The truth? You can’t have it both ways,’ he said once.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — Professional athletes, through their work ethic, commitment, and perseverance, offer a proven formula for success. The way they push themselves to be great can be studied and adopted into everyday life. Through the reflections of renowned sports writer Sally Jenkins, this book outlines some of the most important lessons sports and professional athletes have to offer. 

Ch. 1: The "Right" Call

  • Personal Gameplan — Most of us don’t take the time to put together a gameplan for ourselves. We go through life without much purpose or intention — everything is reactionary. In order to maximize your time and make as much progress as possible, it’s important to put together a gameplan for yourself. Think about what you want in life. Write down a few goals. By having a solid gameplan for yourself, you give your life direction.
    • Quote (P. 3): “‘A lot of times, we don’t really put together the best game plan for ourselves,’ seven-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback Tom Brady has observed. ‘We kind of wake up every day and are very reactive to the situations that happen in our life and you end up never really gaining ground on what’s important.’”
  • Be Deliberate & Intentional — Building on the bullet above, most of your daily routine should be very deliberate and intentional. Come out with a plan for every day. Decide what you want to learn or accomplish during the day, then go out and do it. Make progress toward your goals every single day. Try to get 1% better daily. Stay disciplined to your habits. Learn. Grow. The key is to be very intentional with everything you do. To use a basketball analogy, don’t just come out and shoot hoops; target a certain area of your game you want to work on, then work on it.
    • Quote (P. 7): “Consistent champions don’t just drift through the circumstances of their day; everything they do is deliberate. What you come to notice is that they share some commonalities in how they go about their business, across all endeavors. There is a reason why NFL Hall of Famer Peyton Manning is as good at television as he was at quarterbacking.”
  • Excellence: The Big Seven — After covering professional athletes for decades, Jenkins noticed there are seven traits that are consistent in high performers. These seven areas help athletes achieve excellence and can be adopted into anyone’s life. Each one of these is covered in its own individual chapter.
    • Conditioning — For athletes, conditioning means training the body and getting into great shape. By doing so, they’re able to perform at a high level, even at the end of a game when their body is tired. For the average person, this could mean exercising hard, studying hard, or simply working as much as possible toward a goal. Whatever it may entail, the key is to train hard so you build your endurance. 
    • Practice — You get better at something by repeating the action, over and over and over again. The more you practice, the better you get. There’s simply no substitute for getting the reps in. 
    • Discipline — Are you going to get your work in? Professional athletes are unbelievably disciplined to their daily habits and routine. They do not miss workouts, film study sessions, and recovery treatment. To get anywhere in life, you have to identify a set of daily habits that are going to help you grown and knock them out every single day. No excuses. 
    • Candor — Being able to look yourself in the mirror and understand what you’re good at, and what needs work, is critical. Having high self-awareness will help you see what you need to spend your time working on in order to improve. Honest self-assessments are big. 
    • Culture — No one succeeds alone, not even LeBron James. Culture plays a surprisingly big role in the success of teams. It’s worth spending time to build a strong culture. The key is authentic commitment; everyone needs to be committed to the team’s goal, to their teammates, to the project. The best cultures are ones in which people put the team over themselves.
      • Quote (P. 15): “‘Leadership is about other people,’ Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll has said. . . And without that connection there is no leadership.’”
    • Failure — Failure is ultimately a stepping stone to success. The lessons you learn when you fail are invaluable and only accelerate your growth. You should WANT to fail. Failure is a requirement for success. It’s unavoidable, so stop trying to dodge it. Embrace it. 
    • Intention — Everything you do should be done with intention and purpose. The last thing you want to do is come out every day without a plan. When you’re coasting through life, you’re not making progress. Come out with a plan of attack every single day and in everything you do. Even your values should be intentional and well-thought out. When you have a set of core values that you believe in, they help you make decisions.
      • Quote (P. 12): “‘A lot of people don’t know, they don’t really know, what their core values are, and haven’t done the work to dig down deep and look at themselves with some awareness of all that,” says [Lynn] Marriott. ‘There are skills to decision-making, but the foundation has to be your vision and your values. These are super-important building blocks to know if something [a decision] is a yes or a no.’”
  • Enjoy the Grind — It’s not easy working hard and being disciplined to your routine every day. It’s hard. But those days and nights where you push yourself to be better are the moments that are going to set you apart and help you achieve your goals and dreams in life. It happens slowly. It takes incredible commitment every day to achieve excellence. But if you stay disciplined to your habits, big things will happen for you. That’s why you have to enjoy the grind; the grind is where all of the progress is at. The grind IS the dream.
    • Quote (P. 15): “A chief characteristic of the high performers in these pages, one identifiable personal quality they all possess, is this: they care more about the overall endeavor than their status. They’re not overly preoccupied by their fortune or elevation. Make no mistake, great champions can be flamboyant, strong characters. But first and foremost, they lose themselves in the enterprise. They’re wholly engaged in the work for its own sake. The riches or fame they might enjoy is purely a secondary consequence.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — Enjoy the daily grind of getting better. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. Those days and nights where you push yourself to be better are where you set yourself apart. Be intentional and purposeful with your time. Be deliberate about everything you do. Try not to live a reactionary life. 

Ch. 2: Conditioning

  • Working Hard — Athletes are some of the hardest workers in any field. It takes an incredible work ethic to achieve the excellence that professional sports demand. To become great at what you do, you have to work at it. There’s no way around it. Those hours that you put in when everyone else is resting are the hours that help you separate.
    • Quote (P. 17): “For twenty years, Michael Phelps swam for five miles a day, six and seven days a week, trawling through resistant liquid, staring at a black line on the pool bottom. Phelps swam on Sundays, and his birthdays. ‘Nobody else did that,’ his coach Bob Bowman says. . . ‘The thing that made him great was the work,’ Bowman observed.”
  • Exercise & Energy — As other books like Outlive, The Body, and others have also explained, exercise is so good for your mental, physical, and emotional health. It gets the blood pumping, the endorphins going, and helps every area of your life. The body uses glucose in the blood as its first option for fuel, with the brain consuming more glucose than any other organ in the body. As the two books mentioned above, and The Song of the Cell, explain, mitochondria are the energy suppliers in cells and help fuel the body.
    • Quote (P. 19): “Even in a resting state, it’s estimated the brain consumes about 20 percent of the body’s fuel.”
    • Quote (P. 20): “Exercise engages powerful systems throughout the body that work in concert: the pumping of blood, oxygen, proteins, and other nutrients creates mitochondria, known as ‘the powerhouse’ of the cells, which charge human biochemical physical reactions as well as facilitate neuronal activity. One neuroscientist has compared mitochondria to the battery-pack arrays that Tesla sports cars run on. All of this has an impact on the dynamism you bring to a specific task, whether mental or physical.”
  • Willpower: Pushing Yourself — To become great at something, you have to be willing to put in work when you aren’t in the mood, or when you “don’t feel like it.” Probably 99% of people decide not to do things they know they should do, simply because they don’t feel like it in the moment. You have to be willing to push yourself past those feelings if you’re going to get anywhere. Don’t feel like it? Do it anyway. Tired? Do it anyway. This isn’t easy, but it’s what all of life’s top performers do — they push themselves when they’re feeling motivated and fresh, and they push themselves when they’re tired and don’t feel like it. They’re disciplined to their routine. The extra work helps separate them.
    • Quote (P. 22): “‘I think the hardest thing to do, the hardest time to do something, is when you’re tired,’ [Michael] Phelps told me during a midwinter conversation in Bowman’s small office just off a pool deck at the peak of his career.”
    • Quote (P. 30): “Willpower is ‘one of the most relevant predictors’ of long-term professional success, according to behavioral health researcher Michael Sofis of the firm Advocates for Human Potential.”
  • Interesting Fact — Michael Phelps won a record eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympic Games. He swam in 17 different races in those Olympics. That’s a lot of work. 
  • Willpower & Exercise: A Link — Exercise and physical conditioning have been proven to enhance your mental performance and endurance. When you exercise, you’re able to maintain mental focus for longer periods of time. Some of the top professional chess players in the world are now training their body like athletes to take advantage of the powerful benefits of exercise. An added benefit comes in the way of willpower: when you exercise regularly, you have more motivation and drive.
    • Quote (P. 33): “As the head researcher in a group of scientists at the University of Kansas, he [Michael Sofis] demonstrated that it was possible for almost anyone to improve their willpower by using exercise.”
    • Quote (P. 34): “When you make yourself exercise consistently, it improves mood, reduces stress, and enhances cognition — which then reinforces your desire to repeat the healthy activity. Your willpower accrues like interest in bank account.”
    • Quote (P. 35): “When researchers from the Center for Creative Leadership cataloged the habits of 757 upper-management American executives over a five-year period, they found the most successful ones tended to exercise more and smoked and drank less on average than their peers. What’s more, their colleagues perceived them as more competent. An aura of fitness affected their projections of authority.”
  • Fight-or-Flight Mode — Cortisol is a hormone that is released in response to stress and when you’re feeling anxious. Part of our fight-or-flight response, the hormone is designed to help you sharpen your focus and handle a tough situation. The fight-or-flight response helped our ancestors escape potentially deadly situations. It essentially puts you into hyperdrive by pumping more blood and oxygen to your brain and other major organs, supercharges your adrenaline, and heightens your focus and awareness. To make this happen, blood shifts away from other parts of the body, like your hands and feet. That’s why it’s sometimes hard to use your extremities under pressure.
    • Quote (P. 36): “Stress gets a bad name. Most people mistakenly associate it with purely negative effects, with distress. It actually serves a fundamental purpose in human physiology: the discharge of cortisol, and the speeding up of our heart rates and shortness of breath that come with the fight-or-flight response may feel like ill effects, but they’re also signs that your body is producing energy and getting more oxygen to your brain to push you to full wide-awakeness. Stress-response is your biochemistry’s way of helping you ‘rise to a moment that matters,’ argues health psychologist and Stanford Business School management-science professor, Kelly McGonigal.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — To be great at anything, you have to be willing to put in the work, even when you don’t feel like it. You also have to be willing to work when everybody else is taking it easy. Those extra hours of work add up over time and will help you separate from the pack. 

Ch. 3: Practice

  • Practice With Purpose — To actually develop your skills and see progress, it’s critical to practice with purpose. Whatever you’re trying to be good at, practice it every day, and practice it with intention. To use a basketball analogy: Don’t just come out and shoot hoops; have a specific area of your game that you want to improve (e.g. my footwork and finishing in the post), then work hard to improve that area in your practice sessions. Trying to learn Spanish? Don’t just hop on Duolingo for 30 minutes per day and go through the motions — work on a specific area. By practicing with purpose, you will improve much faster than you would by simply going through the motions.
    • Quote (P. 41): “Practice differs from conditioning: it’s strategic, informed, targeted work, usually under the evaluative eye of a teacher or coach. Though the two can have some overlap, conditioning is about broad development of capacities, whereas practice is about refinement of skills through diagnosis and rehearsal. The word ‘practice’ evokes tedium, but it’s really a matter of being interested in and willing to work at critical details. This vague yet fundamental misunderstanding results in a lot of bad or ineffectual practice: work without meaningful results.”
    • Quote (P. 42): “Good practice is transformative. It’s what converts any ambition or dream into reality.”
    • Quote (P. 44): “As the great basketball coach John Wooden once observed, ‘Don’t mistake activity for achievement: practice the right way.’ So what constitutes the right kind of practice for a particular endeavor? First of all, your practice must have a purpose, a sure understanding of what the point of it is. Second, it should have measurable results.”
  • Work on Weaknesses — One of the best ways to practice with purpose is to target your particular weaknesses. This requires the ability to take an honest self-assessment. What are you worst at? What area of your life needs the most improvement? Of the skills you’re weak at, which ones will be the most important for your career or life in the future? Once these weaknesses are identified, work to improve them. Many people struggle with public speaking. Join Toastmasters so you can get some exposure to giving presentations.
    • Quote (P. 51): “The difference between elites and amateurs is that elites practice those things they are worst at and dislike the most, while the rest of us run around our backhands our whole lives, or live with a weak left hand, or avoid doing math.”
    • Quote (P. 51): “As individuals, athletes are as flawed as you or me, of course. But as performers, they know something the rest of us don’t: the value of remedying weaknesses instead of just playing to your strengths.”
    • Quote (P. 53): “But what’s not disputed is that the right kind of practice that targets specific weaknesses, whether in hitting a baseball or delivering a presentation, has improving effects and that improvement is available to anybody.”
  • Don’t Go Through the Motions — Building on the two points above, it is so important to avoid simply “going through the motions.” There’s no improvement there. The improvement comes from targeting a certain weakness and using your practice sessions to better those areas. When first learning a skill, you can certainly get pretty good by doing daily repetitive, non-targeted practice, but you will eventually hit a plateau. I’m experiencing this with Spanish. To get really good and avoid these plateaus, you have to practice with purpose. Peyton Manning, for example, in the offseason used to watch every single one of his interceptions to find commonalities. He would then create drills to target the weaknesses that led to those interceptions.
    • Quote (P. 53): “Most of us engage in what [Anders] Ericsson called ‘naïve’ practice. We work at a hobby like the guitar until we get pretty good at it, and that’s where we stay, on a plateau. But ‘deliberate’ practice focuses on harder, smaller breakthroughs, with the sort of continual assessment [Peyton] Manning did.”
    • Quote (P. 54): “Most importantly, they [athletes] understand that these incremental refinements have immense capacity for growth over a long period of time.”
  • Practice Under Pressure — One of the reasons we have a hard time performing when the stakes are high is that we don’t practice under pressure. When we’re practicing for a presentation, for example, we practice in front of the dog with our PJs on. Those are nowhere near the same conditions we face when it’s time to give the real presentation in front of a room full of people. When practicing, try to replicate “game” conditions. Create as much stress, tension, and pressure as possible during practice sessions. This may mean practicing your speech in front of a group of family and coworkers instead of the dog. What’s even better is to make your practice sessions harder than the real thing. 
  • Nerves: Fight-or-Flight Mode — Building on a bullet from chapter two, the reason it gets so hard to think clearly and use extremities like our hands and feet under pressure is that our fight-or-flight system is shifting blood away from these “less important” areas of the body to our major organs, like the brain and heart. When we’re nervous, cortisol is released and this fight-or-flight mode becomes activated. Our motor skills become compromised.
    • Quote (P. 59): “When your body shunts blood to large muscle groups in a fight-or-flight response, it simultaneously sends less blood to smaller muscle groups. They’re siphoned, drained. So, you lose fine motor control. Your hands and feet quit working as efficiently. A simple task a sportswriter has done her whole life, namely typing, can suddenly feel harder on deadline. That’s because it is harder. You have less blood in your hands and fingers. Also, it’s harder to think. That’s because your brain function is altered; as your body tries to help you with heightened alertness, it also narrows your focus, which can create a tightening, tunnel effect. All of this is why a pro tennis player is suddenly so inhibited he or she can’t toss the ball straight, or a writer might fumble at the keyboard and transpose letters in simple words.”
  • Performance Anxiety: Loosen Up! — The fight-or-flight response, and its tendency to make thinking and simple motor skills harder, explains why it’s sometimes difficult to give a speech. During a speech, we’re usually nervous and our fight-or-flight mode is on. To combat this problem, many of us try to write literally every word of the speech on our note cards. Interestingly, that type of mechanical approach actually makes things worse. Performance anxiety research has shown that we’re worse when we’re mechanical, rigid, and trying to think about every single word (in the case of a speech). We’re so much better when we allow ourselves to be free and fluid. We avoid locking ourselves up.
    • Quote (P. 60): “People in a state of maladaptive control [part of our fight-or-flight response] try to impose ‘step-by-step monitoring’ on what should be automatic free-flowing procedures. A simpler term for which is ‘overthinking.’ Beilock and a team of fellow researchers designed a study in which they asked elite collegiate soccer players to think about which side of the foot they were dribbling with as they moved through a set of cones. The players became so excessively mechanical that their footwork suffered measurably compared to their normal performance. In another experiment, Beilock asked experienced golfers to explain their putting stroke step by step, and to identify precisely when their clubhead stopped. Again, their accuracy suffered. Instead of letting their well-practiced strokes come forward, they were so focused on how to govern their limbs that they actually clenched up and became clumsier. ‘Attending to procedural skills hurts performance,’ she concluded.”
  • Performance Anxiety: A Solution — Performance anxiety is essentially the result of having too much of your attention on the mechanical process of what you’re about to do, or on the outcomes that you’re worried about. One of the ways you can combat nerves, and your built-in fight-or-flight mode, involves trying to take your mind off of the mechanical step-by-step process of what you’re about to do. Distracting yourself with an easy mental task, like counting or humming a song, can be very helpful here. This will free you up a bit. Again, we’re better when we’re not thinking mechanically and instead are letting things happen fluidly and naturally.
    • Ex. Major League — The movie Major League offers a nice example of this — the catcher had performance anxiety and couldn’t throw the ball back to the pitcher. The coach told him to read and memorize a Playboy magazine, then verbally say what he had memorized while throwing the ball to the pitcher. It worked. Doing this distracted his mind and freed him up from thinking about the mechanics of his throwing motion.
    • Quote (P. 60): “Maladaptive control [via our fight-or-flight mode] is essentially an attention-imbalance problem — you’re paying too much attention to what should be a relatively unconscious task. The cure is to take some of your attention away, and thus rebalance your neuro-responses. One way to achieve this balance is by distracting yourself with an uncomplicated mental task, like counting, or humming a song, Beilock suggests. As part of her experiments with golfers, Beilock asked them to putt while listening for a series of tones. This time, they were more accurate. They were better putters while thinking about something else than they were while focused on each motion of the putting stroke.”
  • Performance Anxiety: Athletes — Professional athletes deal with stress and nerves on some of the world’s grandest stages. Some fail (“choke”), but most of them do very well under extreme pressure. How? The answer is that they find a way to keep a quiet and sound mind. They don’t allow the mind, and their fight-or-flight mode, to derail them. They don’t “rise to the occasion”; instead, they have a way of staying cool when the heat is on. They are able to keep their mind and body in the state that both are in when they’re simply practicing on a high school field. The athlete is simply doing what they always do, as if nobody was watching. That’s the secret. It’s not about elevating their game; it’s about staying relaxed.
    • Quote (P. 61): “Successful athletes and coaches experience just as many sensations of alarm or anxiety in response to challenge as you or me. ‘Under certain adverse circumstances anyone’s mental preparedness can falter,’ Beilock asserts. But they learn ways to mitigate or reframe their adrenal firings to continue to operate under pressure — and what’s fascinating to any sportswriter is how they manage to do it on a regular basis. It’s not random and it’s not luck. The lesson to take from them is utterly counterintuitive. The essence of their performance is not that they do something extraordinary and extreme under pressure, but rather the opposite. When they are at their best, they are simply performing in their usual ordinary and well-practiced way.”
  • Learn From Performance — Whether good or bad, there are lessons to take from every performance. Similar to what Peyton Manning used to do in the offseason with his interceptions, it’s important to evaluate your outings and pick out what you did well, and what you didn’t do well. If you give a speech and bombed it, don’t review the video and pout about it. That does nothing for you. Instead, watch the video and try to identify where you need the most work. When you look at it from that perspective, it flips a switch in your mind. You go from a mindset of beating yourself up to a mindset of improvement. There’s a huge difference between those two approaches. You come out of the video sessions excited to improve.
    • Quote (P. 63): “The lesson: a single mistake or reversal is not who you are. The greats turn self-recrimination into self-analysis and design better practice. Calling yourself a loser, assuming that you are a head case, does nothing.”
    • Quote (P. 64): “An informed understanding of what’s happening in a performance gives you a chance to self-correct, if not in the moment, then afterwards with dedicated work. But you can only acquire that understanding with a wholesale awareness of your tendencies, good and bad, under the most difficult scenarios.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — The way to get good at something and avoid plateaus is through purposeful practice. Try to avoid simply going through the motions. Instead, come into your practice sessions with a plan. Pinpoint specific areas you want to improve, then work on those areas. 

Ch. 4: Discipline

  • Discipline: The Grind — Discipline is executing your daily habits over and over and over again. As Ray Lewis once said, “Greatness is a lot of small things done well, day after day, workout after workout, obedience after obedience.” Personal growth is about getting yourself into a set of habits designed to help you improve and having the discipline to knock them out every day. Nothing big happens overnight, but you will see major results over time if you have the discipline to stick to your routine. This is the grind. All athletes have a strict routine that they are uncompromising about.
    • Quote (P. 81): “Discipline is the voluntary regulating of behavior that drives repetitive excellence. Successful performers develop strong personal and institutional habits that are like clockwork.”
  • Discipline: Do It Until It’s Right — Discipline also means being willing to do something until it’s done right. It’s very easy to let things slide and not give a full effort. Athletes have the discipline to practice until they do things right and nail all of the details. They don’t settle for doing it “pretty good.” They have high standards and hold themselves, and each other, accountable to those standards. Try to hold yourself to high standards, and don’t settle for anything that isn’t done right. Do it until it’s right, even if that means it takes more time and effort.
    • Quote (P. 84): “‘The biggest issue with coaching is, do you want to do it until you get it right?’ [Muffett] McGraw told me. ‘Or do you get to a point of diminishing returns where you go, ‘You know, it’s not going to happen today, so let’s move on?’ Do you lower your goals? Instead of five in a row, do you try to get three in a row? And I think I was just like, ‘No, we stay till we get it right.’”
  • Discipline: Being Consistent — Yet another form of discipline involves sticking to your values and rules. This is especially important for anybody in a position of leadership. If you lay down a rule and don’t personally stick to it through thick and thin, you will lose the respect of your team. You have to be consistent. In short, practice what you preach. If you don’t, you risk losing your people.
    • Quote (P. 85): “Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll has observed, ‘Inconsistency is one of the greatest pitfalls’ in leaderly decision-making. . . ‘Any time you deal with a situation, you’re making a statement about who and what you are,’ Carroll has observed to The Ringer network. ‘And players are watching to see, do you believe in something, or are you just dealing with it randomly?’”
    • Quote (P. 85): “There is a special hostility reserved for leaders who treat standards as applicable to everyone but themselves. Others experience it as a kind of duplicity; it makes them feel confused, tricked, or even taken for fools. It turns the entire organization into a charade.”
  • Protect Your Time & Routine — Many people in leadership drown themselves in their work, so much so that they don’t have time for anything else in their life. Don’t let that happen. Do not become a slave to the job. There’s nothing wrong with putting in extra time, but never allow your routine to be compromised by an overload of work. You need to be highly protective of your time and your routine. An example would be working out. Your attitude should be, “mornings before work, I’m working out. That’s my time. Nothing is going to get in the way of that.” When you set personal boundaries like this, you prevent yourself from letting work overwhelm you and take over your life.
    • Quote (P. 88): “One of their worst habits is to let urgencies of the day overtake their agenda. They [executives] are so reactive and in crisis mode that they decide they don’t have time to work out. Which is why Cavalea’s first step with a new client is to help him or her revise their schedule, with boundaries for when it begins and ends. Personal discipline begins by taking charge of your daily calendar, so that decisions are not imposed on you. ‘If you’re saying this is how I do things, you’ll be amazed at how things and people start to adapt to you, as opposed to you feeling like you have to constantly adapt to them and to these problems and circumstances,’ Cavalea says.”
  • Discipline: Becoming More — Ultimately, the point of self-discipline and executing your routine day in and out is to improve and become something more than average. But it does take work and sacrifice to become something more. You have to be willing to give things up, whether it’s dessert and fast food, partying, video games, Netflix, social gatherings, or anything else along these lines. These things interfere with your routine and the overall process of getting better, and people won’t understand it when you turn down opportunities. But being highly disciplined and committed to your routine will set you apart and lead to great results over time. The question is: Do you want to become something more? A decision has to be made.
    • Quote (P. 90): “Discipline means rejecting average habits, refusing to cut a corner, resisting the pressure of the crowd, not drinking at a social dinner, not partaking in the group dessert, refusing to relax your routine, in danger of being called a stiff. ‘When you’re disciplined, with it also comes friction,’ Cavalea says. ‘Because you’re not just doing what everyone else is doing. You’re going to have to start making choices.’ But with those choices comes the knowledge that you’re doing something that others aren’t willing to, and which will set you apart.”
  • Discipline: Freedom & Confidence — I find that the grind actually frees me from anxiety by keeping me centered and focused, no matter what’s going on in my life. I have my daily habits to knock out (e.g. workouts, reading, etc.), and I am relentless about getting them in every day. It bothers me when I don’t get them in. My routine has also given me a lot of confidence and trust in myself. I know I’m doing the right things. Because I know I’m doing the right things every day, I don’t care as much about what people think about me. Most of the time, they aren’t pushing themselves like I am.
    • Quote (P. 90): “The late Harvey A. Dorman, a renowned mental performance coach for Major League Baseball pitchers, put it better than anyone. ‘Self-discipline is a form of freedom,’ he remarked. ‘Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from the expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear and doubt.’”
  • Chapter Takeaway — Discipline is a major key to success in life. Getting yourself into a set of good, small habits and being disciplined to those habits every day will lead to big success over time. It doesn’t happen overnight; it takes steady commitment day in and day out. All professional athletes have high levels of self-discipline. 

Ch. 5: Candor

  • Communication: Be Persuasive — As a leader, it’s not enough to simply give an order; you have to have strong reasons for the order and communicate those reasons. People are more likely to buy-in when a reason is given. HOW a decision is communicated is, therefore, is as important as the decision itself.
    • Quote (P. 205): “Merely giving an order is not decisional leadership; you have to persuade others to enact it with conviction. . . How a decision is conveyed is therefore as important as what the decision is, and profoundly impacts the chances of its success.”
  • Be Accountable — Accountability is one of life’s most important principles. You are responsible for everything that happens to you. Blaming and criticizing people is completely pointless; most people don’t blame themselves for anything (even if they were wrong) and will just resent you for pointing the finger at them. Take accountability for everything in your life. Own it. When you mess up, say “I messed up. I’m sorry. Let me make this right.” Then move on.
    • Quote (P. 106): “[Steve] Young concluded, ‘If you’re going to hold 10 others on the field to do things super hard in pressure, you need them in a mindset of accountability, not mitigation. . . The only way to success is to say: I screwed up and I will fix it. Now I want you to come with me.’”
    • Quote (P. 106): “The following season, [Steve] Young went on a personal accountability campaign to regain the trust of his teammates. When he threw interceptions, instead of reacting with shoulder-curling evasion, he made himself take the blame — whether it was his fault or not-and move on.”
  • ‘Next Play’ Mentality — As several other books have also touched on, you must have a ‘next play’ mentality in life. It does no good to pout or mope about something that didn’t go your way. You have to move on. You have to turn the page. If you messed up, take accountability and move on immediately. If something embarrassing happened to you, turn the page and get focused on the next thing in front of you. In football, if a quarterback throws an interception, he can’t dwell on it and let it affect his next throw. He has to move on to the next play and keep firing with confidence. If he doesn’t, he’s toast.
    • Quote (P. 106): “‘When the crowd is booing you, when the lights are on and your teammates are asking you why,’ [Steve] Young recalled, ‘you actually say: I screwed it up. My fault. The ball was in my hands…. But I’ll tell you what, let’s get some water and let’s turn around and win the game.’”
  • Focus on Solutions — Never, ever, ever critique something without having a solution ready to present. Nobody likes a complainer. If there’s something wrong with a process, come prepared to offer a solution when voicing your opinion. Your mind should be solution-oriented, meaning you’re always looking for solutions. Sitting there complaining about the way something is done, without having some kind of solution in mind to make it better, does nobody any good. People will only resent you for complaining incessantly. The same goes for criticizing people; if you find a certain behavior toxic, bring it up to the person, but also offer a way they can improve.
    • Quote (P. 108): “Great leaders never present a problem to the team or a player without also presenting that it can be solved. They stress the remedy or resolution.”
  • Give Feedback: Good & Bad — As someone in leadership, you owe it to your people to provide feedback, whether it’s good or bad. Feedback tells people what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. In either case, it can be used to improve. The worst thing you can do is not say anything, causing your people to speculate about where you stand. Feedback is a very strong improvement tool. For your own personal growth, you should be actively seeking feedback from people you admire and respect so you can make improvements.
    • Quote (P. 112): “‘Here’s one thing I learned: you always tell people how they’re doing, even if it’s someone like an MVP,’ [Tony] Dungy asserts. ‘It’s still good for me to say: You’re doing a great job; you’re doing exactly what we need to win.’”
    • Quote (P. 112): “Pat Summitt once observed, ‘In the absence of feedback, people will fill in the blanks with a negative.’ They will assume that you don’t like them, or that they’re doing a bad job.”
  • Be Authentic — It’s important to be authentic when you’re leading people. Nobody likes a fake person, a corporate talking head. Try to be as authentic as possible with your people. But here’s the key: you have to act on what you say. You can’t say certain things to your team, then not follow through. You’ll lose respect right away. Be authentic in your communication, but then follow through. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — Take full accountability, have a ‘next play’ mentality, give and seek feedback, be authentic, and always focus your attention on solutions. These are a few of the keys to strong leadership and communication. 

Ch. 6: Culture

  • Culture > Scheme — Culture is a sneaky important tenant of strong leadership. You have to take care of your people and create an environment that is welcoming, high-energy, collaborative, and focused. Your people should feel included and empowered. They should enjoy the workplace environment, not dread it. Don’t neglect culture — it matters.
    • Quote (P. 120): “‘I think the biggest lesson I learned is that culture is way more important than scheme,’ [Steve] Kerr said in a 2022 seminar with Harvard Law students and professors. ‘I would say coaching is maybe 25 to 30 percent strategy. Everything else is about communication and what your players feel when they come into the building every day.’”
  • Culture: Define Your Values — The first step to building a strong team-wide culture is to define your values as a leader. What do you stand for? What do you want the culture to be about? What are the values you will stand for, no matter what? What is most important to you and the organization? The answers to these questions will help give your culture a sense of direction and personality. An example: Dan Campbell, the head coach of the Detroit Lions, in his very first press conference promised that he would build a team that is hard-nosed and tough as nails. In the first few years he’s coached the team, the Lions have become exactly that. They’ve adopted a culture that embodies their head coach and his values.
    • Quote (P. 121): “The x’s and o’s, [Pete] Carroll said, were only a fractional part of running a team. ‘Listen. Go back to your hotel tonight,’ Carroll told him [Steve Kerr], ‘and think about what the most important values are to you. And write them down. Who are you? What are you all about, and what are your uncompromising principles? What are you going to stand by, and what do you stand for?’”
    • Quote (P. 122): “A winning coach, [Bill] Walsh believed, had to have ‘a conceptual blueprint.’ A philosophy that was ‘the aggregate of his attitudes towards fundamental matters.’”
  • Leadership: Relationships First — Effective leadership requires the ability to build strong relationships with your team members. You have to truly care about everybody on your team. Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich both prioritize this with their NBA teams. You can’t be a lone wolf and lead a team; it’s imperative that you connect with your people. Barking orders, then ducking and dodging them will never work. The better you are at creating strong relationships, the more effective you will be. To help establish a healthy and productive culture, you should encourage all members of your team to get to know each other on a personal level. Team dinners, outings, and activities can help here. The stronger the relationships, the stronger the culture.
    • Quote (P. 130): “‘That to me is the first order of business for any leader in any field, to develop the relationship first,’ he [Steve Kerr] said later. ‘Then you can lay out your vision, and talk about your plans, and what you have in store. Every person I’ve ever known responds to that human connection.’”
  • Culture: Pick a Style — Similar to the bullet above about selecting values that form the foundation of your culture, it’s important to pick a style. The style you select will help mold your culture and give your team or organization an identity. Steve Kerr, for example, chose a style heavily predicated on fun, energy, and relationships. Bill Belichick, on the other hand, chose a more buttoned-up culture that revolved around his “Do Your Job” mantra. Dan Campbell chose a hard-nosed, gritty style for his Detroit Lions. It’s important to pick some kind of style that forms your identity. Then work on making your team feel it.
    • Quote (P. 131): “As the Warriors took the floor for their first practices, [Steve] Kerr wanted them to feel the new culture, in every detail. ‘The values that are important to you have to come alive,’ Kerr observes. ‘And that’s how culture is defined.’”
  • Culture: Invite Collaboration — One of the features of a strong culture is collaboration. People shouldn’t feel like pawns who simply take orders from the big shots; they should feel invited to collaborate and share ideas. When they feel like they’re welcome to collaborate, it gets them engaged and invested in their work. From there, they should be encouraged to take risks and fail. Incorporating these features into your culture can have some nice benefits. The team will be more engaged and innovative.
    • Quote (P. 184): “The very best leaders don’t tell people what to do. They ask them what they want to do together.”
  • Culture: Let It Become You — For culture to be effective, it has to be rooted in a certain style and carefully-chosen core values. But then it has to be become you, meaning it needs to be everywhere. It needs to be plastered on the walls and engrained in every area of the organization. It needs to be widely communicated across the company. People you hire need to embody the culture; if they aren’t a fit, don’t hire them. Everything the organization says and does needs to be a strong representation of the culture. Live it. Breathe it.
    • Quote (P. 136): “When everything that attaches to an organization is bent to the same thematic end — mission, hierarchy, personalities, vocabulary, daily practices and rituals, even office décor — then you can create the powerful ongoing identity narrative called a ‘winning’ culture.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — Leadership is about relationships with people. Culture is about creating an identity around carefully-chosen values and an overall style. For a culture to be effective, it has to clearly outlined, and it should completely reign over the entire organization. It’s your identity. 

Ch. 7: Failure

  • Failure: Learn From Mistakes — The first thing to understand about failure is that there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, it’s a good thing. Failure is ultimately a stepping stone to success. The more you fail, the closer you’re getting to success. Why? Because the lessons failure offers are invaluable. With every failure, you learn. And the more you learn, the better you become. When you inevitably fail, don’t take the attitude of pouting about it. Instead, be excited about dissecting it. Learn from the mistake. What did you do wrong? How can it be avoided next time? So many lessons come out of failure. 
    • Quote (P. 150): “The management scientist Paul C. Nutt has estimated that literally half of all organizational decisions fail. His analysis found a striking difference between corporate leaders who are able to break out of a failure mode and those who compound their mis-takes. The successful ones are more forthright and searching when a decision goes wrong. They treat losing with a spirit of inquiry. Like Andy Reid, they look deeply into their own processes for its weak points.”
    • Quote (P. 155): “‘Losing is only temporary and not all encompassing,’ [John] Wooden said. ‘You must simply study it, learn from it, and try hard not to lose the same way. Then you must have the self-control to forget about it.’”
  • Failure: Invite It — Again, there’s nothing wrong with failure. When it comes to organizations, the worst thing you can do is create a culture of fear, where everyone is scared to death to take risks and fail. When this happens, growth and innovation are dead. Nobody will want to take a risk and try something new. The best culture is one in which everyone is encouraged to bring new ideas to the table and take risks. There will be failures in a system like this. And that’s perfectly OK. You will learn from every failure and ultimately come out of it better. As Denzel Washington says: “If you aren’t failing, you’re not even trying.”
    • Quote (P. 151): “It’s counterintuitive, but good decision-makers make a certain amount of failure discussable, and even permissible. In any dynamic exercise, there will inevitably be some ‘misses,’ because you’re asking people to make bold choices and enact them with high commitment.”
    • Quote (P. 151): “Intolerance of failure leads to hesitancy. Leaders who expect every decision to be a winner will wind up with teams that tend to freeze in ‘the clutch.’”
  • Leadership: Believe In Your Team — Your team will respect you when you show belief in them and trust them. You lose your team when you micromanage and don’t take chances with them. An example from sports: NFL players play harder for coaches who believe in them by going for it on fourth down. When you show belief in your team, you get their buy-in. They’ll want to go harder for you. 
    • Quote (P. 163): “[Ron] Rivera discovered something interesting when he became more committed in his play calling: His players committed with him. When they saw his willingness to make a hard decision without fear, they redoubled their effort to make the play work.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — Failure is inevitable. The key is to make sure you get something from every failure. Dissect it. Learn from it. Come away better from every failure. Whatever you do, never run away and hide from failure. As Denzel Washington says: “If you aren’t failing, you’re not even trying.”

Ch. 8: Intention

  • Leadership: Set the Bar — As a leader, it’s your job to set the example. Your people will follow your lead. If you work hard and demand high-quality work, you’ll get it. If you’re constantly pushing yourself to learn and improve, you’ll inspire your team to do the same. If your team sees you slacking off and not taking things seriously, they’ll adopt similar habits. Whether you’re a QB, CEO, or middle manager, it’s up to you to set the right example through your actions and your words.
    • Quote (P. 168): “When the most prominent figure at the very top of an organization is the most intentional person in it, the impact is pervasive.”
    • Quote (P. 174): “Later, [Tom] Brady reflected, ‘They [your team] are only going to trust and respect you if they see you do the work first. And if you’re not willing to do it, then why should they be willing to do it?’”
  • Leadership: Care About Your People — This point builds on a similar bullet in chapter six about building strong relationships with your team. As a person in leadership, it does not matter how talented, skilled, and knowledgeable you are at an individual level; if you don’t genuinely care about the well-being of each member of your team and don’t make an effort to connect with them, you are toast. Whether you accept it or not, it’s important to be liked by your team. This is more important than the level of skill and talent you personally bring to the table. If your team doesn’t like and respect you, it’s going to be trouble. The way you earn your team’s approval is by working hard and genuinely caring about them. Show them you care as often as possible, and give them the tools they need to be successful.
    • Quote (P. 179): “‘If you don’t care about the people you work with, you’re hosed,’ [Tom] Brady remarked shortly after winning his seventh Super Bowl. ‘And you better get out of that leadership role. Or you better find a way to become more caring and empathetic to the people you’re working with. People want to do their best. And you’ve got to give them tools to be their best…. You’ve got to motivate everybody…. And it obviously starts at the top. And everybody is going to look at the leader and say, is this the person I want to follow?’”
    • Quote (P. 179): “The social psychologist Robert Hogan, a pioneer in using personality assessment to profile leaders, contends that we study leadership from exactly the wrong perspective. We tend to evaluate it — poorly — by looking at individuals who aggressively get to the top. When, in fact, we should evaluate potential leaders by asking those below them whether they find them worth working for. ‘The academic study of leadership has failed, and the reason is that it focuses on the leader when the appropriate focus is on the followers,’ Hogan has observed. ‘The focus should be on the workforce or the team, and what they perceive. Because if they don’t perceive the right thing, you’re through.’ . . . Hogan therefore identifies good intentions as the most essential quality in any leader.”
    • Quote (P. 180): “Pat Summitt once sharply articulated, ‘People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.’”
    • Quote (P. 180): “A pair of managerial assessment experts, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, set out to study the question of whether it’s particularly necessary for a leader to be liked. They surveyed impressions of 51,836 executives and found that just 27 who ranked in the bottom quartile of likability were rated highly as leaders by their subordinates. In other words, ‘the chances that a manager who is strongly disliked will be considered a good leader are only about one in 2000,’ they wrote.”
    • Quote (P. 181): “[Urban] Meyer failed to realize what every leader should: ‘Before people decide what they think of your message, they decide what they think of you,’ a team of social psychologists observed in the Harvard Business Review.”
    • Quote (P. 186): “He [Tony Dungy] was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame in 2016, and his enshrinement biography begins with this quote from him: ‘The secret to success is leadership, and good leadership is all about making the lives of your team members or workers better.’”
  • Chapter Takeaway — There are some really great lessons about leadership in this chapter. Maybe the most important one involves caring about your people. There’s no away around it: you need to be well-liked and respected by your team to have any chance of motivating and leading them. If they don’t like you or respect you, you’re in trouble. One of the ways you can earn their approval and respect is to simply care about them and their well-being. Show them that you care whenever possible. Make creating strong relationships with your people a priority. 

Epilogue

  • Do What You Love — Passion is one of the commonalities among all high performers, regardless of the field they work in. When you’re doing what you love, working crazy hours and pushing yourself to be better are effortless because the “work” doesn’t feel like work. Your energy and drive are effortless and limitless when you’re passionate about what you do. You pay attention to details and do your best work because it matters to you. You’re not just going through the motions like most people who are doing the job just to get by. 
    • Quote (P. 203): “When you choose a profession for love, you find that last invisible measure, the one that can vault you into a more imaginative state than just digging a trench for pay. Those who find something they can fully immerse themselves in tend to discover that work acquires its own impetus. It becomes a natural part of what you do — you begin to live your work. And when that happens, you can’t lose.”