Why You Must Develop a Philosophy for Your Life
If you want to have a winning mindset, you must have a personal philosophy for your life and the pursuit of your goals. Think of yourself as a new head coach and the first thing you must do is choose a philosophy for your team.
For example, football coaches call their offensive and defensive philosophies schemes. Whether it’s the spread, hurry-up, zone read, or the West Coast on offense, or the 3-4, wide 9, Tampa 2 or zone blitz on defense. The best coaches have a philosophy that they learn, develop, and teach through a coaching tree. Not only this, but these coaches also know how to build a team around their scheme as well as adjust their scheme to fit the players they have. Undoubtedly, this takes years to learn.
If you don’t have a personal philosophy, then you will likely copy whatever appears to be working at the time for others. The problem with this is that it takes years and years of practice to master a philosophy for success. You just can’t copy someone else’s philosophy and expect to have the same success right away. It takes time and commitment to that philosophy.
If you don’t give it time, when you copy someone else’s philosophy, you end up comparing your beginning to the other person’s years of practice mastering that philosophy. Then when it doesn’t work for you, you chase and copy someone else. This is a recipe for a lifetime of chasing greatness while being relegated to a lifetime of being average.
Creating a Philosophy for Your Life
This idea of creating a philosophy for your life is what Pete Carroll writes about in his book Win Forever. In this book, Carroll tells a great story on how he got his ideas for creating a personal philosophy from the legendary John Wooden. In addition, Carroll shares that the other big influences on him developing his philosophy were Abraham Maslow, who is widely known for his hierarchy of needs theory, and Tim Gallwey, who is widely known for his Inner Game books.
What these three influencers have in common is that each had average careers until they developed their personal philosophies. Carrol’s “eureka” moment of this fact came while reading one of John Wooden’s books describing his Pyramid of Success. It took Wooden nearly 16 years to develop his philosophy. Carrol also notes that Wooden didn’t win his first national championship at UCLA until he could explain his philosophy clearly to his team. The culmination of this insight is Carrol’s Win Forever philosophy.
This is the biggest takeaway I want you to have today. Breakthrough success in life requires that you develop a philosophy for the work you do. In addition, it must be so clear to you that you can explain it to others in 25 words or less. If you want to maximize your potential in life, this is the way.