UPTalk 2 - The Wonder of Simple
On a snowy night in 1948, a young and relatively unknown basketball coach by the name of John Wooden was waiting for a phone call from the University of Minnesota. He had given a midnight deadline for the university to offer him their vacant head coaching job. Midnight came and went and there was no call, so Coach Wooden instead accepted the head coach position at UCLA. It wasn’t until after he accepted the UCLA job that Wooden found out that Minnesota did in fact want to hire him, but the snowstorm had knocked out the phone lines and they were unable to make contact with him. Wooden chose to honour the commitment he made and went to UCLA. What followed next was the most successful 27 year run in NCAA Basketball history.
Under Coach Wooden, the once woeful UCLA Bruins became a respected basketball program who broke through and captured the school’s first NCAA basketball national championship in 1963-64. Over the course of the next 11 years, the Bruins would win the national championship 9 more times, including 7 straight championships from 1966 to 1973. All in, Wooden and his Bruins won 10 national championships in a 12-year span, a feat unmatched in NCAA history.
As the UCLA success story grew bigger and bigger, basketball coaches from all over the Unites States and from around the world came to visit, asked for some time with Coach Wooden and studied every move at UCLA. Why? Because Coach Wooden was accomplishing what everyone else wanted to do.
On first glance, coaches spending time at a ULCA practice during Coach Wooden’s years might walk out a little confused. If anything, they would leave the Bruins’ practice underwhelmed with how normal the practice looked. That’s because they were looking right past what was actually happening. For John Wooden, mastering the fundamentals of the game was the difference maker. At the NCAA level, it is assumed that players will arrive with a certain skill level and coaches often move quickly to more ‘advanced’ priorities. For Wooden, he was able separate his program not by taking the fundamentals for granted but rather by making this the supreme priority. In his book A Game Plan For Life, Wooden explains it like this,
“You win by becoming a better player of the game at large, not by adapting your technique to every new team you face. Your opponent will always be changing; its’ a losing race. But if you master the game, you will have the skills and the knowledge you need to defeat whoever you are facing.”
Whatever your pursuit these days, we can all learn from how wonderfully simple Coach Wooden’s approach to the game was. To be clear, I’m not trying to minimize the planning, preparation and attention to detail that would certainly have been part of Coach Wooden’s approach. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – I would suggest it was exactly because he worked so hard on the details of success that he was able to understand the value of simplifying rather than complicating.
Let’s say you currently have some fitness goals. If we were to allow the benefit of Coach Wooden’s influence, we would realize that at the very root, the best way to achieve your goals is to focus on the basic elements of the formula. A simple set of well-constructed exercises done with good technique in a regular and planned frequency. That’s it. As you start to roll, you’ll be tempted by new exercise regimes, expensive equipment and whatever else. These can all have their place but understand the value these represent is perhaps variety to keep you engaged or refinement for specific gains on an overall foundation of fitness. None of these new moves or new equipment, however, will ever come close to replacing the real drives of your success – a foundational understanding of workout principles and the willingness to show up and do the work. Have a simple plan and do the work. Then do the work again and again. When the results come, you’ll revel in how smart you are for keeping things simple.
For those of us in a coaching situation, whether it be with a sports team or in a work context, I encourage you to picture yourself sitting on the sidelines at of one of Coach Wooden’s practices. At first, you’ll say, ‘what’s the big deal?’ and you might even start to get a little bored. Just before you officially tap out and get up to leave the gym, the light bulb goes off and you’ll start to see what others are looking right past. If you spend your time making sure your team understands what it means to build a foundation and then works to perform these foundation skills exceedingly well, you will be successful in exceedingly rare fashion. It will be hard to trust at first because what is available to absolutely everyone is taken full advantage of by almost no one. Stick with it, and trust that you’re on to something.
Coach Wooden saw what was right in front of everyone in basketball. He simply took the time to dissect, understand and respect that it was all about the fundamentals. And that worked out pretty well for him.
So, go out there and find your simple, define your simple and then work with all your might to master your simple. And when you find yourself enjoying new levels of success, you’ll wonder why it took so long to appreciate the wonder of simple.