Becoming Great Is a Decision, Not Happenstance
For six seasons, Sandy Koufax was, by his own standard, a less-than-mediocre pitcher. Raw arm, plenty of promise, not much to show for it. Then something changed. Not his fastball. His mind. And the man who spent half a decade losing became, in the eyes of Sports Illustrated, the “left arm of God” and, in the estimate of many, the greatest pitcher ever to take the mound.
In episode 9 of Vantage Point, Eli Amdur reaches for an unusual angle on critical thinking: sports. His argument is simple and, once you sit with it, quietly demanding. Becoming great is a decision, a vision, not a happenstance. It does not arrive by accident, and it rarely arrives by talent alone.
The Koufax Turn: Stop Trying to Make Them Miss
The pivot in Koufax’s career was not mechanical. It was a shift in where he pointed his attention. In his own words:
“I became a good pitcher when I stopped trying to make hitters miss the ball and started making them try to hit it.”
Read that twice. The old Koufax was fixated on the hitter, on deception, on the other guy failing. The new Koufax turned inward, toward his own strengths, and simply invited the batter to try. The result was one of the most dominant runs in baseball history.
Eli has kept a picture of Koufax on his office wall for more than forty years, and the reason is not nostalgia. It is a daily reminder of a principle that travels well beyond a pitcher’s mound: being competitive is about you, not the other guy.
Why Watching Rivals Is a Losing Strategy
Most of us do the opposite of what Koufax learned. We watch the competition. We benchmark ourselves against rivals, measure our worth by the gap, and adjust our effort to whatever the field seems to require. Eli’s counsel cuts against that instinct:
“Quit trying to be better than others. Just try to continue to be better than you’ve been.”
The distinction matters most when conditions change, which is precisely why Eli connects it to the COVID era. When the ground shifts under everyone, the person still fixated on beating a rival is chasing a moving, unreliable target. The person focused on their own strengths has something durable to stand on. As Eli puts it, greatness is less about outrunning others and more about the steady, self-directed work of improvement.
That is not a soft idea. It is a harder standard, because it never lets you off the hook. There is always a version of you that could be better tomorrow than the one who showed up today.
Thomas J. Watson and the Excellence You Can Reach Now
If the Koufax lesson feels distant from a desk job, Eli offers a bridge in Thomas J. Watson, the man who built IBM. Watson’s line is almost startling in how little patience it has for excuses:
“If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less than excellent work.”
There is no five-year plan in that sentence. No talent gate. No waiting for the right conditions. Excellence, in Watson’s framing, is a choice available immediately to anyone willing to make it. It pairs naturally with two of Eli’s own observations: no matter your level of skills, you can do something about them immediately, and achievement depends as much on resolve as it does on talent and skills.
Resolve is the word that does the heavy lifting. Talent gets a lot of credit it has not earned. Resolve is what turned six losing years into a legend.
When Attitudes Change, Results Change
Underneath both the Koufax story and the Watson quote sits the engine of the whole episode: mindset. Eli states it plainly.
“When attitudes change, results change.”
This is where the sports metaphor becomes a career and leadership metaphor. The change Koufax made was internal before it was ever visible in the box score. The same is true in an office, a business, a life. You do not wait for better results to feel better about the work. You change the attitude, and the results follow.
For those who lead others, Eli adds a companion principle worth pinning to a wall of your own: manage your business, but coach your people. Businesses get managed. People get coached. Confuse the two and you get neither greatness nor growth.
Chesterton and the Danger of Losing Wonder
The episode widens here into something more philosophical. Eli turns to G.K. Chesterton:
“We are perishing not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.”
The problem, in other words, is not scarcity of remarkable things. It is that we have stopped being amazed by them. Eli’s answer is characteristically hopeful: if you will be fascinated by things, you will become fascinating. If you are in awe of things, you will become awesome. Curiosity is not a personality trait handed out at birth. It is a practice, and like Koufax’s turn, it is a decision.
He offers a small daily test of the same idea: 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. And, because Vantage Point is serious without being solemn, one aphorism arrives with a wink: save the earth, it’s the only planet with chocolate, for God’s sakes.
What If the Dodgers Had Stayed in Brooklyn?
Eli closes with one of his signature counterfactuals, a reminder that history turns on choices too:
“Walter O’Malley, Ebbets Field, and the Dodgers going west. New York offers Queens instead of Brooklyn, O’Malley follows the population west where there was no baseball at all, and 14 teams now play west of the Mississippi. What if New York had built the Dodgers their Brooklyn stadium?”
It is a fitting bookend. One decision, one refusal, and the map of an entire sport gets redrawn. Greatness, or its loss, hinges on the calls we make.
Listen
For the full story, including the four aphorisms in Eli’s own voice and the extended reflection on work ethic, listen to episode 9.
- 🎧 Episode page: https://eliamdur.com/becoming-great/
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- 🎧 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@VantagePoint-Podcast
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This episode is supported by Bergen Volunteers and Kardam Consulting.