Great Leadership Read: Wooden, by John Wooden

If you crack open the mind of the 20th Century's best athletic coach and dump its 90-plus years of living and teaching experience into a book, what you have is the best 160+ pages of inspiration and instruction you will read in a very long time.

Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court by Coach John Wooden and Steve Jamison is a quick and easy read because it is divided up into small sections of plain spoken, honest thoughts about living, teaching, coaching and leading.

It's a "cut through the bull and babble" book that should be required reading for anyone who wants to be better at what they do.

My copy of The book is dog eared like CRAZY!

I recently finished the book, and rarely has a book ended up with so many dog-eared pages and highlighted lines of text! It's a small book in form factor; easy to carry around, and certainly easy enough to hold a prominent place on my "frequently gone-to" books.


For those of you unaware, John Wooden was the head coach of the UCLA Men's Basketball team from 1948 to 1975. He is the winningest basketball coach of all time, has the record for most consecutive wins (88, breaking the previous record of 36), and has the record for the most NCAA Basketball Championships (10, with 7 in a row).

Lessons learned from his father: never lie, never cheat, never steal, don't whine, don't complain and don't make excuses were the foundation of his philosophy of living.

From there, the book unfolds and the themes of very hard work, meticulous preparation, attention to detail, and controlling all you are able quickly emerges. Narry a page goes by without a reference to hard work or doing one's best.

Coach Wooden expected nothing less than the best from himself and those on his teams. His philosophy of success in any endeavor can be summed up this way: if you do your absolute best, and you know that there was nothing you could have done to prepare any better, it makes no difference the outcome of the contest. You will have succeeded.

 

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