Did you do your best?
I never had a clue that the title of this article would become one of the most important questions in my life. In fact, I happened upon it by accident when searching for something else. Here’s what happened.
When our kids were younger, they developed an interest in basketball. Embracing my love of technology and the information available on the internet, I pursued studying basketball (I never made it past reasonable driveway player) and looked first for lessons and wisdom from the most successful college basketball coach in history, John Wooden. Coach Wooden ended up coaching many of the most talented players in the world during his tenure at UCLA that included winning 10 NCAA National Championships in 12 years as head coach.
I started out looking for drills and skills development strategies, ways he must have developed “mental toughness” in his players, along with techniques to get them working well as a team versus a collection of talented individuals. I was struggling to find what I was looking for, so I jumped on a related path and started reading about what the players had to say about what they had learned while playing for Coach Wooden. That’s when it hit me. All of the UCLA players that had played under Wooden, including names like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton, never talked about basketball when talking about their coach. They only talked about the impact he had on their life.
It appears that Coach Wooden wasn’t impressed by the wonderful talent his players could exhibit on the court. His attention and focus were narrowed in to each player's personal character. Wooden felt his job went far beyond delivering a winning team on the basketball court each year. All of his effort was in helping these young men become valuable and contributing citizens for the rest of their lives. Not an easy task when you consider that they showed up on campus their freshman year with a feeling of entitlement having been told since they were young that they were better than anyone else. The tellers were referring to basketball, but kids in their teens let those good feelings creep into all the other areas of their life. It’s just human nature.
Coach Wooden would always need to break these kids completely down and quickly build them back up, providing them with the proper tools for success, not just on the basketball court but for the rest of their life. The tool he became most famous for was his “Pyramid of Success,” which I’ll write about in the future. But the one I immediately realized could play a huge role in my own life was his “Did you do your best” tool.
Coach Wooden knew his team consisted of some of the best players in the world and that during the season their schedule would include teams they might beat by more than 50 points. Early on, he noticed that many of his best players wouldn’t put forth any real effort when they played teams that struggled to compete with them. He saw this as rude and conceited behavior and wouldn’t stand for it. That’s when he developed his “Did you do your best” philosophy.
It went like this: when his team completed a game and gathered back in the locker room, the coach would ask each player who had been out on the court whether he had done his best. He didn’t care what the final score was or whether his team had won or lost; he just wanted an honest answer to that question. If a player responded “yes,” then he told the player that he was a winner (even if the team had lost the game).
If a player responded “no,” then Coach Wooden would share that it was that player himself who was the loser that day and that it may affect whether he would be given a chance to even play in the next game, since he didn’t understand the lessons the coach was attempting to teach him, and when he doesn't give his individual best, every other member of the team also loses.
So, at first, I began using this thought process on our kids. It didn’t matter what their report card said, all I wanted to know was if they did their best. It didn’t matter what the final score was in any of the sports they participated in, was it their best? Class projects? Did you do your best? Volunteering? Did you do your best? Learning something new? Well…you get the point. And it worked! Our kids weren’t afraid to tell us they were struggling with a class if they had given it their best effort and, together, we could immediately begin developing a new strategy to help their “best” improve to “better than before” or a “better best.”
I realized how big this was for our family the first time one of our kids tossed the question back to me regarding the business we owned. “Dad, did you do your best?” The light bulb immediately came on when I realized that everything tied to “Did you do your best” was completely applicable to me. Did I do my best…as a son, husband, father, brother, uncle, the leader of our team at work, a neighbor, community member, member of a nonprofit board, and as a volunteer. In fact, I realized I should apply the question to every area of my life. Why? Because you can achieve the greatest rewards in life, not by being the best, but simply, by always doing your best.
So, c’mon, how about you? Are you willing to give the “Did you do your best” thought process a try. There’s no real down side to giving it a whirl. I shared the positive impact it’s had on our family’s life, and my own personal life, to encourage you to at least take it out for a spin and decide for yourself. Plus, I believe in you! GiddyUp!