The Winners Manuel by Jim Tressel

Chapter 1 Highlights

If the game of life ended tonight, would you be a winner?

If you do the things you need to do
When you need to do them,
Someday you can do the things you want to do
When you want to do them!

Goals are important, but it’s important to understand that people are not defined by their goals and whether or not they reach them. A win or a loss does not make you or me a better or worse human being. This is where, in our society, we’ve so easily lost perspective on the truth about who we are. We have to separate who we are from what we do.

John Wooden defines the elusive quality of success: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”

Success is found in “peace of mind”. That was a revolutionary thought to me. I don’t have to look at others to tell whether I’ve made it. They can’t tell me anything about my success, because they have no idea if I have peace of mind. That’s a radical shift in thinking and drastically different from basing my success on whether I win or lose.

We expanded his (Coach Wooden) definition like this: “Success is the inner satisfaction and peace of mind that comes from knowing I did the best I was capable of going for the group.”

Our purpose in adding “for the group” was to capture the truth that in being our best, we add it to those around us. It forces us to define success in terms of what the group needs, what our team needs…

We must never let goals, adversity – or even success – define us. Those things don’t hit at the heart of who we are.

If a person measures his success by his inner satisfaction and the peace of mind that comes from knowing he did the best he was capable of doing for the group, he’ll be able to gauge that success correctly.

Success is an everyday proposition. It isn’t defined by a championship game or the day you get your diploma…Don’t get me wrong, those are great days, and we should celebrate those accomplishments. But the key to a successful life is the journey and the process. It’s the emphasis on the journey to success that we work on each day, step by step.

It’s hard in today’s society to keep success in its proper perspective and not base our sense of self-worth on what we do. But it you can get there, it’s such a comfort. If we lose a game, we’re not losers – that’s not who we are. And by the same token, if we win a game, that doesn’t make us wonderful people. We achieved our goal, and that has its place, but that success – or any failure – doesn’t define us.

I don’t have empirical data to back it up, but I believe the more we’ve helped our young people discover their purpose and set specific, measurable goals for their whole lives, the more games we’ve won.