God Is In The Details | Instilling Excellence

I stumbled across an amazing blog at SamuelThomasDavies.com.  He is a self-proclaimed scout of the leading edge of the human sciences for what’s new, surprising, and important in life and business. 

This a really good article on how coach Bill Walsh turned the San Francisco 49ers from a 2-14 team to Super Bowl Champions in just 3 years.

According to Walsh's process and the article, the 3 steps are to success are:

Step 1. Choose an action and an attitude that will make the highest possible contribution toward your goal – THE ONE THING.

Step 2. Give yourself instructions to follow.

Step 3. Commit to your action and attitude for a minimum of 66 days.

A brief summary, along with the 3 steps listed above is simple: focus on the process, I identify your ONE BIG THING, and be detailed oriented with consistency and you too can find success in coaching and in life.

You can get a more detailed summary of his article after the jump.

In the late 70’s, the San Francisco 49ers were one of the worst teams in the NFL, until they hired Bill Walsh.  In only 3 years, he took them from a 2-14 record to an NFL Super Bowl championship. 

He did so by refusing to focus on winning (echoing Coach John Wooden’s philosophy of “practice over product”) and instead focused on implementing a seemingly simple set of values and beliefs that governed everything he, as a coach, stood for.

He called it…

…the “Standard of Performance.”

Walsh believed that in order to uphold these principles, everyone—whether a general manager, CEO, assembly-line foreman, or secretary—had to honor them.  It was about “instilling excellence”.

When reading inspirational stories like Walsh’s it’s tempting to tell ourselves a story: big achievements are a result of big actions.

The reality is it’s the deceptively little things, applied consistently, that make the highest possible contribution toward your goals.

[The] seemingly trivial matters, taken together and added to many, many other so-called trivial matters build into something very big: namely, your success.

We all have goals we want to achieve, but one of the most common mistakes people make is failing to identify the concrete actions and attitudes needed to make that goal a reality.

The biggest reasons why we don’t achieve our goals:
1 - Your 'why' isn't big enough 

2 - Your language is 'I should' or 'I could' instead of 'I must.'

3 - You don't have a concrete plan of action.

In other words, You don’t quantify or implement a Standard of Performance.   Or, you don’t have that ONE BIG THING.

How To Achieve Success
Step 1. Choose an action and an attitude that will make the highest possible contribution toward your goal – THE ONE THING.

Think of your goal. The action, in this instance, is a daily habit that makes everything else easier or unnecessary. 

Step 2. Give yourself instructions to follow.

Don’t entertain what you could or should do; execute on what you must do. Commit it to writing and decide what you’re going to do and when and how you’re going to do it. This is known as an implementation intention.

Step 3. Commit to your action and attitude for a minimum of 66 days.
According to the European Journal Social Psychology, habit autonomy takes, on average, 66 days (or 2 months).

As the old saying goes, “God is in the detail.” Look after your habits, and your goals will take care of themselves.