Page 173 - How to Create a Winning Organization

Make Each Day Your Masterpiece
ing. On average, I had 210 hours of practice time to accomplish 155
my teaching goals (105 practices, each two hours long). Or, as jour-
nalists, fans, and alumni might have declared, “John Wooden has
210 hours to win a national championship.” That comes down to
12,600 minutes of actual practice time during the regular season.
Those minutes can go by quickly—evaporate—if you’re careless
with them. Carelessness is not something I’ve been accused of with
any frequency.
I placed great significance in every single one of those minutes—
each an opportunity to teach our team what they needed to know
to improve, what they needed to do to achieve competitive great-
ness and, hopefully, outscore opponents. Each hour offered the po-
tential for helping us get better and better, closer and closer.
Wasting even one minute was painful for me—like throwing a gold
coin into the sea, never to be recovered.

YOU CAN’T GIVE 110 “Give me 100 percent.You can’t
PERCENT make up for a poor effort today by
I taught our players, assistant coaches, giving 110 percent tomorrow.You
and everyone connected to our team don’t have 110 percent.You only
to think the same way. To meet my have 100 percent, and that’s what
expectations, they were asked to offer I want from you right now.”
all they had all the time.
Consequently, one of the very few rules I did not alter from my
first day of coaching at Dayton, Kentucky, until my last day at