The One-Day Contract: How to Add Value to Every Minute of Your Life

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It Begins with Humility
 
 
More than any play I drew up on the board in our locker room, more than any strategy or concept we used during our national championship season, one word paved the way for everything that would follow: humility.
This probably is not the way most books following a national championship begin. There are victories to talk about, stories to tell, and lessons to learn. Humility is not even a basketball word. You might ask, where does this guy, or any basketball coach, get off talking about humility? I agree that humility is scarce in the athletic world. Egos run rampant, as much on the sidelines as on the court. The egotistical coach, the arrogant athlete, they are stereotypes that too often ring true.
Here at the outset of this book, you should understand that there are two ways to handle subjects as a coach or teacher. You can teach people or try to help them from showing them how you succeeded, or you can allow them to see and learn from your failures. The former is much more fun. But the latter often is more instructive. In this book, I not only will talk about successes and how they came about, but failures, too, in the hope that both sides will be helpful for some; because we all come up short at some point.
I was not a picture of humility for much of my career. That is one reason I want to talk about it first. The other reason is this: Without humility, no other principle or lesson I talk about in this book will hit home. It is the key to everything that follows.
When our players came back to campus before school started for the 2012–13 season, I knew there was a great danger of becoming complacent or resting on the success of having made the Final Four the previous April. When we got the team together, the theme of my first discussion in our first meeting was humility. It was the theme of my first speech to our fan base during our annual Tipoff Luncheon in October. And it was the last word I wrote on the board after every victory through our entire season, right through the NCAA championship game. For our team, humility was the key to staying focused and to keeping a winning mind-set, as well as the key to accepting setbacks and turning them to positives. Most of our players embraced the lesson of humility, which is a remarkable thing for a group of young people.
It was more than the key for our players. It was the key for me. The longer I live and the more I experience, the more I believe that humility is the quality essential to sustained success, and a lack of it is the major stumbling block for those who find success for a time, then lose it. I’m not claiming to have perfected the trait, but I have learned its importance, and am learning to let it take root in my life and work. The lesson of humility comes to everyone eventually. Either you learn its value, or life drills it into you—and life can be a painful teacher. It is a lesson best learned before life makes you another case study. Let me give you an example: myself.
We all have our share of personal regrets. My greatest professional regret might surprise you. It wasn’t leaving the University of Kentucky and walking into my first professional failure with the Boston Celtics. Failure is not final, and I always have said it is fertilizer for future success. No, my great regret from a professional standpoint is that I was not humbler at an earlier age. Here is how it worked for me. My early coaching career was a succession of surprising rebuilding jobs, each more celebrated than the one before. My first head coaching job was at Boston University. The team had won seventeen games combined in the two years before I arrived and hadn’t had a winning season in fifteen years. Within five years we had made the NCAA Tournament. After working as an assistant coach to Hubie Brown for the New York Knicks, I took over as head coach at Providence College, which had just finished a 12–20 season. In my second season, we went to a Final Four. The next season I had a dream job, head coach of the New York Knicks. For a kid who grew up just eight blocks from Madison Square Garden, at 26th Street, it was as much as I could ask for. They’d won just twenty-four games the year before. In my second season, we won the franchise’s first Eastern Division championship in nearly two decades.
From there it was on to the Roman Empire of college basketball, the University of Kentucky. We took a program famously crippled by NCAA probation and were back in the Final Four in four years, and won a national title in six. Professionally, everything I touched seemed to be turning into gold.
Over the course of that time, I developed a feeling that much of that success was about me and what I was doing. It was difficult not to feel that way. There’s no question when you coach at Kentucky, you fall into a trap of thinking you’re much better than you really are, because of the adulation and attention. It is constant and seems to come in a never-ending supply. I did not know it in the midst of it, but that arrogance, that thinking of yourself as the best, is one of the biggest reasons successful people stumble and fail. It helped lead me into an error, but it was a fortunate one.
I was very lucky to have left that atmosphere when I did. I look back at my time at Kentucky and realize I didn’t carry myself with the humility necessary to foster more lasting relationships. Thankfully, I was able to build some with several remarkable people, anyway, that remain to this day. Because I left when I did, after being on top for some great years, I had a good ending. Most Kentucky coaches have not. Adolph Rupp didn’t; he was in a fierce battle to keep coaching. Joe B. Hall retired under fire despite winning a national title and reaching three Final Fours. Eddie Sutton left in turmoil. Tubby Smith never got his just credit for the outstanding job he did. His major problem was winning the championship too soon. So for me, leaving Kentucky personally wasn’t a bad thing. I recognized that I was falling into a trap with all that adulation; but I really didn’t understand completely the consequences until I failed with the Celtics. If I hadn’t left, I might not have learned that important lesson of humility. Instead, the experience taught me a great deal and I emerged from my time in Boston with the knowledge that I needed to live my life more humbly. I retained that knowledge, but from time to time I would forget it, or not put it into practice, much to my dismay and detriment, which I will discuss during this book.
The consequences of not learning humility can be tragic. If we don’t always see these consequences in our own lives, we should be able to recognize them all around us. Not learning humility is, for one thing, an expensive lesson. In 2009, Sports Illustrated estimated that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years after their playing careers are over, and 78 percent of NFL players are facing serious financial distress just two years after their retirement. Others might tell you it’s a lack of discipline or poor financial advice that brings this about. I’m convinced that more than anything else, in most of these cases, it’s a deficit of humility.
Look at the headlines to see examples of people with great talent who fail in many ways. What usually isn’t in the headlines or the stories is the root cause of their failure. People could see it coming for Terrell Owens, the onetime dominant receiver of the National Football League, the player who at the top of his game once said, “I love me some me!” Here was a guy who once caught a touchdown pass over two defenders, grabbed a marker from someone behind the end zone, autographed a ball, and then tossed it to one of his financial advisors. The flamboyant celebrations, the constant need to be in the spotlight even off the field, the brash pronouncements, these are typical of the kind of arrogance displayed in all areas of life today, even if Owens is an extreme example. As high as he was riding—and he made $80 million from 2000 to 2010—Owens took wild financial risks. He made questionable real estate deals. He lost $2 million in an electronic bingo venture in Alabama, an investment that not only was made on an illegal enterprise, but in violation of NFL gambling rules. In 2011, with his football performance sliding, he went to a judge in Georgia asking the court to reduce his support payments to the four mothers of his four children. His Georgia home was in foreclosure. In January of 2012, he told GQ magazine that to anyone who texts him asking him where he is, he responds with a three-word message, “I’m in hell.” Yet he still was not heeding life’s call to humility.
This is a story that is repeated with painful regularity. The mistakes Owens made, while on a much larger scale, perhaps, are mistakes that many make. NFL player Adam “Pacman” Jones recently told a gathering of incoming league rookies that he once blew a million dollars in a single weekend. Beside him on the stage, Owens remarked, “Man, you crazy.” And if Terrell Owens calls you crazy, you can take it to the bank. Self-aggrandizement, alienation of friends, family, or teammates, a tragic tendency to overestimate one’s talent that leads to overreaching, they all are traits of people who lack humility.
This also is a story that is not new. The ancient Greeks had a word for this very situation: hubris. It means extreme confidence or arrogance to the point that one loses touch with reality and overestimates one’s abilities. Often in Greek mythology and drama, their heroes would have great success, only to demonstrate hubris, bite off more than they could chew, and be laid low. The Greeks took this concept so seriously that hubris was a crime in ancient Athens. To humiliate a defeated foe was a crime.
Today, it is commonplace. NFL receivers aren’t the only ones who fall into the trap. Some of the most insecure people are movie stars. To see the Mel Gibsons of the world achieve such stunning success, believe they cannot fail, and then be brought low out of arrogance and lack of humility is becoming a frequent narrative. Nowhere is it more personified than in Charlie Sheen. His reckless behavior, combined with a complete refusal to honestly assess himself, led him to assert that he was “winning” even as he was losing stature and face in the entertainment world, not to mention the leading role on a top-rated television show he had helped build. That he capitalized on his runaway arrogance with a so-called comedy tour shouldn’t obscure the truth. What he achieved was not true success, but mere notoriety, and not even the best kind. By failing to embrace humility and clinging in desperation to his own arrogance and misplaced belief in himself, Sheen continued the cycle of self-destruction that was leading to his problems. The same cycle can be seen in many fields, from business leaders who saw no limits to their income or luxuries, to politicians who thought they were on a roll that could not be stopped, only to be run out of office. The list of those for whom humility not only might have saved a fortune, but their future, is long and star-studded.
I can see how it worked in my life. Whether it was Boston University, the Knicks, Providence, or Kentucky, every downtrodden program I took over turned around dramatically. So when I looked at the situation with the Boston Celtics, who were to get two of the top six picks in the upcoming NBA Draft Lottery, why would it be any different? Because I lacked humility, I just couldn’t accept the possibility that I had only a 28 percent chance of getting the best-case scenario, the No. 1 and No. 2 picks. Of course I would get those picks, I reasoned. If I had been humbler, if I had been more aware of where my success came from, I would have looked at that situation and understood that the team was over the salary cap, that the odds were against getting Tim Duncan, the best player in that year’s draft, and that it was not the great opportunity I was making it out to be. I might still have gone to the NBA, but it would have been a different job, had I understood better why you win. A lack of humility clouded my judgment.
Lacking humility makes you overextend. It makes you feel immune not only from common consequences, but sometimes the law. Mike Tyson spent time in jail, and then lost his considerable fortune because of a ridiculous lifestyle of consumption and surrounding himself with bad advisors. People who lack humility often do this. Rather than surround themselves with more talented people with whom they would have to share credit and success, they pick the wrong people, and rarely share the credit. Show me a chief executive officer who keeps all of a $20 million bonus instead of passing some of it along to his fellow executives, and I’ll show you someone who lacks humility, and is heading for a fall. Humility forces you to treat people around you better, to share with people, to carry them with you in any success you have. Humble people do that. That’s why you see people like John Wooden, maybe the greatest coach of all time in any sport, or Mike Krzyzewski, who is the modern-day John Wooden, sustain success for so long. You can readily see their humility. That doesn’t mean they don’t have flaws, don’t get angry or make mistakes. Everybody does. But the key that opens up all the greatness is humility.
Read this list of athletes who have filed for bankruptcy, and consider the cost of not learning this valuable lesson: Warren Sapp, Dennis Rodman, Allen Iverson, Mike Tyson, Marion Jones, Lawrence Taylor, Antoine Walker, Latrell Sprewell, Evander Holyfield, Michael Vick, Travis Henry, Lenny Dykstra, Kenny Anderson, and Leon Spinks. And that list is far from complete.
Even for those whom it doesn’t ruin financially, a lack of humility can bring other difficulties. In every player I have coached who has not reached his potential on and off the court, the common missing element in his life and attitude is humility. The overspending, buying ten watches, the decadent lifestyle, the entourages, the unrealistic expectation of their own stature and longevity—all this leads to poor choices and reckless decision making. There are many athletes who believe that because they are invincible at times on the court, it will spill over into other areas. This is a crucial misjudgment, and it all stems from a lack of humility. So many athletes I’ve coached are struggling right now. Every day, I hope they will find humility and become more like Jamal Mashburn, who was the opposite. He never thought he was good enough, and worked every day to get better. He wasn’t a so-called McDonald’s All-American, and he felt hard work and a willingness to listen to every suggestion for improvement were his road map to success. Jamal seemed to have a blueprint for how humility works in athletics. He was one of the most popular and respected players in University of Kentucky history. People sensed his humble spirit and were drawn to him. Jamal knew how to save and develop a lifestyle that was healthy and humble for his family. He also invested wisely for his future. Today he is the CEO of a Lexus/Toyota dealership and currently owns pieces of franchises with Papa John’s, Outback Steakhouse, and Dunkin’ Donuts, and no one outside his inner circle would even know it. I only wish Jamal would serve as an example for all my players, not only in how to act, but how to develop a successful life down the road.
A lack of humility can damage your influence on others. As I watched New York Jets coach Rex Ryan go about his brash predictions, including guaranteeing a victory in the 2012 AFC Championship game, it just blew me away—and I’m from New York! I was confused about why he was do...