Monday, February 6, 2012

Delivering Results

At some point people must understand, life is about delivering results. PERIOD. I see people trying to hustle, get over and take short cuts. The rich and the poor. Bernie Madoff, in all his pseudo-success, ultimately was a guy trying to hustle and take a short cut. It backfired on him. It will always backfire. There are no short cuts to long term, stable success. I sit and watch American Greed on CNBC constantly. Why does that show exist? Because there is so much content that can be created about people who tried to beat the system and failed. The next person always thinks they are smarter than the last person, only to find they were not smarter.

We try to really teach our guys this through basketball. We want them to commit themselves to delivering results at a level of excellence in every area of their life. We believe this is a habit that is developed and one of our jobs is to help our players develop this habit. Vince Lombardi said, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” We agree with this quote and try to make this part of our mission as a program everyday. Chasing the ring is another way of saying chase perfection; we will find excellence that way!

Excuses

We are entering that point of the season where we find out what our team is really made of. And more importantly, all these games impact whether we earn an automatic bid to the playoffs. Injuries and distractions have riddled our season thus far. And we enter the “make it or break it” points of the season looking to overcome these obstacles.

There is a poem that I require every member of our team to learn and it is a mantra by which I live. “Excuses are tools of incompetence, that build monuments of nothingness. And those that specialize in them, seldom succeed at anything else.” (Author Unknown).

Injuries and distractions or not, we will not make excuses. We will compete hard and give 100%. We will do everything possible to win. We know that we can win and if our entire team, coaches and players, trusts in each other and feeds off the chemistry we have together, we have the full potential to be successful. If one guy goes down, another guy needs to step up. That is what a TEAM is all about. We are young and the next two weeks offers us a chance to grow up individually and as a unit.