Renowned author and motivational speaker Les Brown once said, “there are winners, there are losers, and there are people who have not yet learned how to win.” In a culture that glorifies instant gratification, it is easy to become consumed in a mindset that focuses on the final outcome instead of the tedious process of perseverance, discipline and sweat equity. Mastery in any craft does not transpire overnight. Life is a journey of self-discovery and exploration. Immediate gratification is usually never our friend. It is almost always the enemy of our personal and professional growth.
So what are the tools, strategies, objectives, and tactics that separate winners from losers? And how are some individuals, teams, organizations, institutions, and companies year after year, season after season able to create high performance winning cultures?
In his book, Winners: And How They Succeed, author Alastair Campbell tackles questions such as these while taking the reader on an in-depth look into the culture of winning. Campbell draws on the wisdom of an astonishing array of talented people―from elite athletes to media mavens, from rulers of countries to rulers of global business empires to get to the heart of success and the mindsets that winning requires. Exploring the intersections of politics, business, and sports Alastair Campbell creates a blueprint for winning that the reader can follow to achieve their own aspirations.
Winners: And How They Succeed is one of those books that have altered my thinking, beliefs, behavior, and performance. Sometimes the difference between winning and losing is the ability to summon up extra reserves of energy we did not know we had.
One of life’s biggest challenges is to differentiate between what the world expects of you, and what you expect of yourself. Understand you are always a work in progress. It is about disrupting your own operations, your own habits of exploring areas in your life where you can improve and get better.
Your ability to grow. Your ability to win starts with your willingness to change. Each day you must show up. Excelling in your craft does not have business hours, it only has production hours. Your growth will always be contingent on your willingness to be uncomfortable. If you maintain a high standard of excellence with the little things, you never have to worry about the big things.
Focus on the process. Live intentionally and cultivate habits that work for you. And always remain a student of life. When in doubt focus on long-term sustainable achievement above selling your truth to the dollar for short-term instant praise and pleasure.
May the following forty-five lessons learned from Winners: And How They Succeed educate, inspire and empower you to develop a detailed strategic plan to move from where you are now, to where you want to be. Look beyond what is, into what can be and further into what should be. While never forgetting most roads that lead to success and winning are toll roads. There is a price that one must pay to travel it!
- How you win can be as important as weather you win.
- Haile Gebrselassie steps for success: 1) Use your background 2) If you have talent use it 3) Love doing what you do 4) Have role models 5) Have a good team around you 6) Always maintain discipline 7) Stick to your schedule 8) Always prepare properly 9) Always focus on the next win, not the last one 10) See the broader significance of winning
- A crisis is not something that has simply gone wrong. After all, things go wrong all the time and are usually fairly easily corrected. A crisis is an event or situation which threatens to overwhelm you if the wrong decisions are taken to deal with the problem.
- Innovation is the attitude that never assumes everything is going to stay the same forever but instead that everything is likely to change.
- The winner are the ones who will best respond to the rhythms of change, so that instead of being driven by changes, they lead it.
- One of the worst things you can do is to start to believe your own publicity.
- The last win is less important that the next one. The insight that if you stay the same, others are bound to improve.
- The thing about conventional wisdom is that it’s almost always wrong.
- Analytics takes raw statistics and determines what is just noise and what has a practical application.
- It is a very liberating experience to use facts to justify your decisions.
- It is wise to be “Fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffett
- Those who have been most successful with data have included their own knowledge and skepticism into the mix, a blend of intuition and objectivity.
- Politics has a superiority complex it needs to come to terms with.
- Alone I am nothing, but in a team I can achieve great things.
- Do not allow the media to define your reality.
- If you allow respected falsehoods to take hold, they become political truths. Silence becomes an admission of guilt and defensiveness gets punished.
- If there is nothing more to say, do not say it.
- “There is no worse feeling then being in a contest that you know deep down you are going to lose.” – Sebastian Coe
- When you speak do people want to listen.
- Label a person a loser and they will act like one.
- No matter how good the car is, it must have a driver.
- Data is always a conversation starter. There are simply too many variables for a purely statistical analysis of current and likely future performance.
- “Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” – Nelson Mandela
- The single most important quality you have in a negotiation is patience.
- The key with any economics data is to be consciously aware. There is a reasonable chance that you are going to be wrong.
- New ideas spread quickly, so keep having more new ones.
- Reputation is particularly a powerful winning currency.
- Leadership must carry with it a sense of loneliness.
- In sports there is no place to hide.
- “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – Winston Churchill
- Hoping for your opponent to make mistakes is not a strategy.
- “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” – Joan Didion
- The secret to running a successful business is to make sure that all key decision makers in that business have access to the same set of facts.
- To exercise power, you must hold power, develop power, use it to your own advantage.
- If you change your strategy all the time you really do not have one.
- Never underestimate your opponents and always hold onto the visceral fear of defeat.
- History takes its time to make a settled judgment.
- One of a leaders most important tasks is selecting the right people. A winning team is full of good leaders. The good leaders excel at devising strategy.
- When asked what makes you a successful coach or leader always talk about the players and team never about yourself.
- Great warriors know their worth and happy with their role.
- “I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.” – Abraham Lincoln
- There are two types of players. The players who bring what they have to the team and make the team good, and players who use the team to make themselves look good. – Roy Hodgson
- Diplomacy requires you to work with people you may detest.
- A resilient mindset can turn most setbacks into positive opportunities.
- Good teams excel at implementing strategy. You can have all the talent and ambition you need but without clear strategy understood by everybody nothing sustainable will transpire.
