REFLECTION
When the “no days off” line started to circulate around the Patriots locker room, no one believed we were trying to build a schedule that literally had no breaks. What we were trying to do was ingrain a competitive mindset that stayed constant, whether we lost or won.
The way we looked at it was, we all have a set of priorities that are meaningful in our lives. To give any one of those priorities the attention it deserves, we have to compartmentalize the others. No shame in that. No reason to feel guilty.
But understand, while we’re resting or decompressing, or celebrating…others are working.
During the football season, if you win on Sunday, it’s nice to go out that night with family and friends. Of course, you want to take advantage of the Monday off-day, especially when pundits and local news are singing your praises. Then by Tuesday, you’ll be rested and ready to go.
That’s a very normal way to think.
Just know, the competition for next week has already started. If the team you’re playing next is coming off a loss, while you were celebrating Sunday night, they were working. While you’re absorbing all the kudos Monday morning while you rest, they’re being hyper critical of their mistakes. They’re attacking the week with the humility and self-awareness necessary for improvement. That means if the team that won the week before is just getting back to work on Tuesday, they’re already two days behind their much hungrier competition who lost the week before.
We all know that growth happens outside our comfort zone, on the other side of learning from yesterday’s failures. We all recognize that bringing those lessons into our work today is how we can be better tomorrow. It’s how every good team handles a loss. But it should be the same approach after a win, as well.
The ideal thing for a winning team to do is to come back the next day and say, “We’re not here to talk about all the things we did well. We're here to talk about all the things we didn't do well, because if we don't do those things well this week, we’re going to get beat.”
LESSON
Cultivating this kind of consistent forward-looking mindset is hard, because human nature always pulls us back toward our baser instincts, the way gravity pulls things back to earth.
After a big win, we want to give ourselves rewards for doing something positive. It’s normal to want to take a victory lap. We don’t want to hear, “yeah, but…” It’s human nature to let winning go to your head a little bit and think that if you were good enough to win this time, you should be good enough to win next time by doing the exact same things—maybe even less!
It’s like a combination of two seemingly contradictory cognitive biases—recency bias and “rosy retrospection”—where we give more weight to recent events, yet we remember the older events much more positively than we experienced them. What that looks like in football, when you win the Super Bowl for example, is that you get caught up in how good it feels to have won, which colors how you think about all the work that went into it, and makes you forget how difficult it was and how precarious the victory was the entire time.
We had a great saying at Michigan that came from our longtime equipment manager, John Falk, who’d say: "Which ring is my favorite? The next one.” Not everyone is wired to think that way. When you live too much in the past and your identity is wrapped up in all the things you’ve done, it can be easy to take the past for granted and develop a sense of entitlement that shuts out the humility which emerges if you focus, instead, on all the things you haven’t done yet. If you work your ass off to win the Super Bowl or the Rose Bowl, and you actually do it, it’s hard to make the case to some people that you’ve actually got to do more if you want to win again.
The key is to keep the past in proper perspective. A great leader helps their learnmates learn the important lessons of the past (failures and successes) and utilizes those lessons while guiding the team toward their collective mission, so that everyone stays focused on the task ahead of them.
This is how you learn to live with the past, not in the past.
APPLICATION
Someone recently shared a great line with me that I’d never heard before: train like you’ve never won, and compete like you’ve never lost. It’s a profound statement, because both parts of it are true.
The next business venture, the next game, the next season, the next project…these are each new endeavors! They have never happened before and will never happen again. You will tackle them with a new team. Even if every person you run it back with is the same, they are not the same, just as you are not the same.
As the leader of a team or an organization, you can’t expect that this time will be the same as last time, or that what you did last time will work the same way this time. Just because you won doesn’t mean you did everything right. And if you lost, it doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. Regardless of the outcome, you have to do the hard things to learn from those experiences. You have to keep improving, trying new and different things, because your next experience is, itself, new and different, with its own set of unique challenges and obstacles.
It’s true in sports, in art, in business, in life, more generally. And failure to recognize this fact is why big companies, for instance, have a tendency to struggle with innovation. When they have an opportunity to solve a new problem, they don’t look for novel ideas, they look for cost-efficient solutions. It’s the difference in mentality between a manager and an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur forges new paths, managers optimize processes. They do some version of what they’ve always done, not because it’s the perfect solution for this problem, but because they’re comfortable that it’s worked for previous ones.
Big companies behave like winners who can’t afford to lose. Their first priority is to protect their success and manage the brand, so they fall into a pattern of playing it safe. Startups, on the other hand, live permanently in the present and will try anything, because they haven’t won a thing. They’ve also never lost. So every idea has validity, at least at first, and carries roughly the same level of risk for them.
The risk profile isn’t the same for big companies. Their systems and processes, their products and services, they form the core of who those companies are. Their culture and values. You never want to deviate too far from what has made you successful historically. The trick, as a leader of one of those organizations, is to understand whether you are taking the lessons you learned from past successes and applying them to new opportunities in unique ways, or you are living in fear of failure and trying to photocopy the past by doing what you’ve always done.
That is the needle every leader has to thread.
Football teams often struggle with this. It’s not uncommon to hear teams with a proud history say things like, “we’re a running team, it’s in our DNA.” “We’re going to put a hat on a hat, and impose our will.” Easy to say when the 2001 Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers aren’t in your conference.
Teams like that have a tendency to allow past successes to become their future identity in a way that prevents growth. They’ll say things like, “We won on the ground, because that’s who we are,” when the reality is, that sentence should be flipped. Because of who we are, we won on the ground. You know a team is doing things right, taking the lessons from the past and applying them to the future, when their focus is on the process before the outcome, and their values come before their actions.
My Patriots teams were very good at this. Some years, we were run heavy. Some years, we relied on the defense. Other years I aired it out downfield, or leaned on our tight ends, or kept everything within five yards of the line of scrimmage. We never assumed we could just do what we did the year before. Instead, we took the lessons from the previous season and applied them to the unique challenges of the season in front of us. We were always working to get better. It’s like we operated with the DNA of a startup and the institutional memory of a big, successful company. It was the perfect combination of nature-nature.
In the end, the work of a great leader and a good team never stops, not even in success—no excuses, no days off. You lead a winning team toward sustained excellence the same way you lead a struggling team to transformational success: you learn to live with the past instead of in the past.
