Some people read business books. Loads of ‘em. You know the ones I mean. They’ve all got ALL CAPS TITLES in RED on WHITE COVERS and names like OVERSUBSCRIBED or SUPERCOACH or THE FIVE FIGURE BULLSHITTERY.
There’s a handful of them on my shelf. Martin buys them for me. He means well.
Some people read business books. I don’t. I read sports books.
I read books about sports I like - Penguins Stopped Play about the joy of village cricket, and And It Was Beautiful about Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United, and Englischer Fussball about why Germany are better than England at winning games of football. They all have great insights, and then the usual platitudinous crap about “trusting the process.”
And I read books about sports I couldn’t care less about. Like the one I’ve just read. The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse.
Never watched an innings of baseball in my life. But I devoured that book.
It’s about how the Chicago Cubs overturned 108 years of history to win the World Series.
How? Easy. They worked out a process and followed it. They trusted it.
Their process was simple. Incredibly simple.
Do simple better.
Don’t overthink it, don’t re-invent the wheel. Do what works, and do it better than the competition. Have a process to do simple things well, and it makes everything easier. Why?
The process is fearless.
The process lacks emotion.
The process is the moment.
The process is the mental anchor.
The process simplifies the task.
Great advice for winning a World Series with the youngest line-up of a deciding game in the sport’s history.
Even better advice for business success.
It’s easy to get into the weeds, especially if you’re a creative. You’re afraid of your ideas not landing. Emotionally invested in your success. Looking ahead to next month. Adrift on a sea of responsibilities. And making things harder for yourself.
A good process fixes all of that. Don’t overthink it. Do what works, and do it better than the competition. Stick to the plan.
The key to success?
It’s the process, stupid.
Something mint - Disney co-opting the concept of victory
While we’re on American sports, this week was the Superbowl. I watched it once, in 2005. Didn’t do much for me.
But even if you’ve never, ever watched a second of gridiron, I want you to indulge me. Picture it. The quarterback has just thrown the winning pass. The players have dumped a barrel of something luminous over a middle aged man. The press crowd in, microphones in front of the star player.
How does it go? You know how it goes.
“Nyquillus Dillwad, you’ve just won the Superbowl. What are you going to do next?”
“I’m going to Disney World!”
Disney - as far as I know - don’t have an NFL team. They don’t even have an NHL team, which is why the formerly mighty Anaheim team are just “The Ducks” nowadays. But for people the world over, winning the superbowl conjours up trips to Disney World. Or Disney Land. And it has done since 1987.
Since then, the only year no single winning player mentioned Disney after the game was 2005.
Billions are spent on Superbowl ads. All it costs Disney to totally own the space is a couple of tickets every year.
Great messaging. If you could go anywhere, and a Superbowl winner can, of course you’d go to Disney. It’s what dreams are made of.
SPORTSSSSS!