Becoming Great Is a Decision, Not a Happenstance

So the theme of the story I want to tell you is achieving greatness and I want to stress the emphasis of quitting trying to be better than others but only trying to be continuously better than yourself.

And I've got a pretty good role model for you.

On a wall in my office hangs a picture of Sandy Koufax pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

If you were born after 1966, the year Koufax retired at 31 years old due to unbearable arthritis in his pitching elbow.

You've never seen a pitching master like him.

As a matter of fact, if you're older, you've seen great ones, but never his equal.

He didn't have the longest career or most wins, etc. That's because of his arthritis. He was simply the greatest ever when he was in his prime.

Transitioned to greatness. he wasn't great from the beginning at the beginning of his career Koufax was less than a mediocre pitcher in fact during the first six years he lost more games than he won couldn't control his wildness and put up a horrible stat sheet under today's conditions you wouldn't have kept him around then something happened he became not just great but for his last six years and especially the last four he was the greatest pitcher who ever took the mound his stats are unbelievable unimaginable unapproachable especially in today's game in fact the harder and longer i think about sandy koufax the more i'm convinced that the distance between him and everyone else who plied the same trade during the same period of time is unequaled, despite the presence of immortals like Juan Marichal, Bob Gibson, Whitey Ford on the mound, Greg Louganis in the diving pool, Carl Lewis at the track and field arena, Jim Brown on the gridiron, Serena Williams on the tennis court, Wayne Gretzky on the ice.

Otherwise, other than those few, everyone else had contemporary peers, Koufax did not.

There was Sandy and there was everyone else. He stood alone.

And he showed us, and I'm going to demonstrate to you, that becoming great is a decision, vision, not a happenstance. And it's the result of good critical thinking and self-reflection.

So what happened? Well, facts explained long after retiring, quote, I became a good pitcher when I stopped trying to make hitters miss the ball and started making them try to hit this, unquote.

Note that Koufax called himself good, not great, in what has to be the gross understatement of the century.

In other words, he started paying more attention to what he could do than he did to what the other guy could do. Granted, he was an enormously talented and gifted athlete.

But until he focused on his strengths and developing those strengths, he languished in unreachable potential.

The rest is history. He became the man with the golden arm. And for the editorial staff of Sports Illustrated, their favorite athlete of the 20th century.

He who wielded the left arm of God.

Those are some pretty heady words about a guy who, if not for a key mental shift, which he made as a result of his own introspection, would have disappeared into oblivion.

What Koufax and the Sports Illustrated editors were saying is strikingly applicable to business and to careers today.

As conditions turned catastrophic when COVID hit, and as they rebounded since individuals and corporations who concentrated on expanding and improving their own cache of skills, broadening their experience and deepening their backgrounds inevitably became more competitive than others. Not by paying attention to the other guy, but by focusing on themselves.

This is excellent advice today.

Being competitive is about you, not the other guy. It's about continuously evaluating market conditions and demands and your readiness to meet them. It's about being honest about your strengths and weaknesses. It's about diligently doing something about them.

That's what Koufax did. In his case, his strength was his physical attributes and his talent.

Translate Fastball and curveball His weakness Was his attitude In the first half of his career He played to his weaknesses And the other guy's strengths In the second half The great second half He played to and developed His strength Which created the other guy's weaknesses It was no contest From there on in achievement depends as much on resolve as it does on talent and skills which means that no matter your level of skills you can do something about them immediately which brings up another piece of wisdom this time from thomas j watson who joined a small company called computing tabulating recording corporation in 1914 and ultimately renamed it and reformed it into international business machines, IBM, Big Blue.

Watson said, and this is a quote from him, if you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less than excellent work.

Notice that Koufax and Watson talked about what they did, not what the others were doing. So if you'll permit me to throw in my own little nugget, Here it is.

Quit trying to be better than others. Just try to continue to be better than you've been.

Here's why Sandy Koufax's picture has hung in every office of mine for 40-something years.

Every day, I look at that picture and take a minute to remind myself of three things.

The first is what Koufax said.

The second is to challenge myself that if i can do my job just half as well as he did his i'd be awfully good at what i do and the third is how much i have to do to continue being that good not better than anyone else just better than myself and that is the critical thinking involved in it transforming to and achieving greatness let's take a break now and we'll be back after this word from one of our sponsors and now a word from our sponsor bergen volunteers let me pause here for a moment to thank the people that help make vantage point possible vantage point is brought to you by bergen volunteers since 1966 they have been quietly at work in Bergen County.

Neighbors helping neighbors across 70 towns. They mentor kids who need someone in their core, and they help seniors stay independent at home. Through their Bergen Leads program, they have trained hundreds of people to lead in their own communities. They call what they do critical thinking with its sleeves rolled up, and that is exactly right. To everyone at Bergen Volunteers, thank you for supporting this show, and thank you for the work you do. You can learn more about them at BergenVolunteers.org.

I'm back, glad you are too.

It's time for our aphorisms of the day, and to remind you that the aphorist asserts the truth as he sees it, with no need to argue, defend, or explain it. He's unshakingly confident that he's right, and that's that. Take it or leave it.

In my very long career, here are a couple of inescapable truths that I've discovered along the way, which I'll share with you as we go through each episode.

After these, we'll see some great thoughts from great minds of the past. Aphorism number one, which is clearly reflective of the story I just told you about, Koufax, when attitudes change, results change. number two if you learn something today you didn't know yesterday you've had a good day if not you have a chance to change that tomorrow aphorism number three manage your business but coach your people and number four save the earth it's the only planet with chocolate for God's sakes let me tell you about a favorite great mind of the past of mine and that is G.K.

Chesterton Gilbert Keith Chesterton a Catholic apologist of the 19th and 20th century and philosopher and poet and a lot of other things that great men like that are who said we are perishing not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder what was chesterton talking about we're capable of building wondrous things roads, pharmaceuticals, works of art, but we seem to have lost the ability to sit back and look at them and wonder, to be in awe of them.

For 15 years when I taught my graduate leadership class at FDU, I used to make a set of concluding remarks when class was over.

In pursuit of one of our stated goals of becoming great, I asked them to think about becoming awesome, full of wonder, fascinating, by being fascinated by things around you, in awe of things around you.

And I sent them off understanding that if you will be fascinated by things, you will become fascinating.

If you are in awe of things around you, will become awesome.

And it's up to you to do that. And we do that by not letting ourselves, as Chesterton said, forget about how awesome and wondrous things around us are. And now a word from our sponsor, Kardam Consulting. Before we go on, let me thank another sponsor of Vantage Point, someone I have known for more than 20 years who spent a career developing people by putting them to work. Thank you, Ali. It's always a pleasure to be with you. My name is George Svokos, the founder of Kardam Consulting, and I've spent more than three decades in global pharmaceuticals.

I loved hearing you talk about Sandy Koufax today because his story is really a story about work ethic. Talent put him on the mound, but work made COFAX great.

I watched the same thing play out in business my whole career. The people who became great were never the ones watching the competition. They were the ones who came in every day and did the work a little better than they did it the day before.

That is work ethic and nobody can take it from you. It's a privilege to support Vantage Point and the work you are doing And I want to finish up with a favorite section of mine called What If.

We all know that the Dodgers play baseball in Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium.

But how many of you who are much younger and don't know the history of the game know that the Dodgers began in Brooklyn around the turn of the 19th century?

And by 1913 was such a success that Charlie Ebbets decided to build a stadium right there in Flatbush, and it was named after him, Ebbets Field. It was a wonderful little stadium, cozy, raucous, fun. but even people my age and in the interim don't know that Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, was putting heavy pressure on the city of New York to build the Dodgers a new stadium.

The stadium was already 35 to 40 years old and he wanted to build a new modern stadium the city of New York would not do it but offered him a plot of land and the building of a stadium in Queens not in Brooklyn O'Malley would hear nothing of it and told the city of New York you don't get it we're the Brooklyn Dodgers not the Queens Dodgers we take a stadium in Brooklyn or we don't and the city of new york you know all their infinite short-sightedness o'malley picked up and went west along with his friend horace stoneman who owned the new york giants who played up in northern manhattan there's a little infighting there because stoneman thought he would get los Angeles.

And O'Malley said, that was my idea. I'm getting Los Angeles.

O'Malley proved to be so forward-thinking that when he picked the Dodgers up after the 57 season and brought them to Los Angeles to play beginning in 1958, here's what he saw.

The population center of the united states ever since 1790 was moving slowly westward from maryland if you think about it through pennsylvania and to ohio and there it stayed for a while o'malley saw this happening and also saw that there was no baseball west of the Mississippi River. None. Today, 14 teams are playing out there and making more money than the 16 teams that are playing east of the Mississippi.

O'Malley basically led industries charge westward.

What would have happened if he didn't do that?

So close is the data that shows the move westward of the population and baseball and then football and then basketball, et cetera, et cetera. What if the city of New York gave in to O'Malley?

It's a good question to ask your professor or your classmates in your business management classes. It's a good exercise to conduct when you're having brainstorming meetings at work. What if Major League Baseball had acceded to Walter O'Malley's demands in the 1950s and went I went ahead and built a new stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

I'll revisit that in the next couple of weeks and we'll talk about it. But I think the answer is pretty simple.

Anyway, thanks for your time today.

Love the fact that we spent time together. And coming up in the next few weeks, I'm going to talk about a very dear subject to me, the power of the positive word and an example of what it can accomplish. I'm going to talk about ascending Everest.

And we're going to take an entirely new look at hiring and team building.

So that's it for me. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being with us. See you next time.

Until then, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep thinking critically.