Nothing was more compelling about this week's David v. Goliath NCAA Men's Basketball Championship than the story of the meteoric rise of Butler coach Brad Stevens. At just thirty-three years of age, he joins an elite cadre of young coaches in a number of different categories. Stevens is the youngest coach ever in a Final Four, save for the legendary Bobby Knight. He's the youngest in a championship game except for one of Knight's predecessors at Indiana, Branch McCracken. And Stevens holds the record for most wins in his first three years as a head coach, besting the likes of Jim Boeheim, and, well, everybody else.
Brad Stevens' rise to prominence in the basketball world highlights four truisms of success.
After graduating from Depauw University in 1999 with a degree in economics, Stevens took a promising job working in the marketing department at Pharmaceutical manufacturer, Eli Lilly, headquartered in Indianapolis. It was a good job--good.
But Stevens had his sites set on his dream job, coaching basketball. So he quit working at Eli Lilly and found a volunteer position in Butler's basketball office. Which brings us to truism number . . .
2. You have to be willing to starve for your art.
To make ends meet, Stevens took a part time job working at Appleby's and lived in a friend's basement. No pride here, the stuff of which failure is designed to relieve us. He was prepared to do whatever it took to succeed.
And he and his wife chose potential success, though they realized the consequences could be utter failure. Brad's wife Tracy got a law degree to provide support should the coaching gig not go as planned. But she nevertheless fully supported the decision to follow the dream.
The forgoing is also support for Truism number . . .
3. Find a great spouse.
"One thing we both decided was, hey," says Brad of his wife, Tracy, "we're going to be a lot happier if we're both really passionate about what we're both doing. I'm the most blessed person in the world because she is the best, we've got a great family and we're just really lucky."
And finally, Truism number . . .
4. Honor the moment.
One of his bosses at Eli Lilly took Stevens aside early on and told him not to concentrate on getting to the top. Rather, he should focus on doing a good job every day, all the time.
Stevens applied this principle to basketball: "You’ve got a lot of people always looking for the next step. And that’s not what I was doing. I was just trying to figure out a way to win the next game."
In another interview, Stevens says: "Win the next game. Win the next possession. That's our focus. It's boring. It's also the way championships are won."
You might also like: The Philosophy of Success
Photo credit: zml.com
Interesting article, thanks. Honoring the moment is enjoyable so even if you don't make it to the top, you've succeeded in living fully from moment to moment, you've succeeded in giving yourself, your attention, fully to life. There are conventional notions of success, and then there are other kinds of success that may be less generally recognized.
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