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- Humble and Hungry
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Now, onto Issue 51.
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Humble and Hungry
The morning after winning Georgia’s second straight national championship last January, Kirby Smart was already thinking about the next one.
His Bulldogs had a unique opportunity:
Become only the second college football program in history to win three straight championships, and the first in nearly 90 years.
But he wasn’t thinking about that specifically.
He was thinking about what it would take.
Georgia needed to remake itself and find a way to override human nature.
"But the disease that creeps into your program, it's called entitlement,” Smart said. “And I've seen it first hand.”
That was 11 months ago.
What happened since:
Georgia went 12-0 this season
They set an SEC record with 29 straight wins
They earned an opportunity to play for another SEC Championship
On Saturday, it came to an end, as Georgia lost to Alabama in the SEC title game.
I thought about Smart and what he’s accomplished the last few years at Georgia on Saturday night.
Specifically, I thought about how hard it is to sustain success.
For Smart, it starts with weeding entitlement out of your organization.
"We have a saying around our place: we eat off the floor,” Smart said last January. "If you're willing to eat off the floor, you can be special."
There’s a cognitive bias that comes with success.
Overconfidence.
People who experience success often develop a heightened sense of self-confidence.
This skews their perception of their future chances of success.
They start believing, I was successful in the past so I will be successful in the future.
But that’s not how it works.
Past success doesn’t guarantee future success.
If anything, it makes it harder.
Alabama coach Nick Saban knows plenty about sustaining success, having won seven national championships in his career.
On Saturday night, after praising his team, Saban was already reorienting his team to the future.
“How do you deal with success?” Saban said. “That’ll be the next challenge for this team. Now if we have an opportunity to do something else, what’s gonna be our internal motivation to want to continue to be successful?”
The lesson: Stay humble and hungry
This is the overarching lesson Smart and Saban drive in their programs on a daily basis.
The past doesn’t dictate the future.
Success last year doesn’t entitle you to success this year.
Every day is a new beginning.
You must remain humble and hungry.
If you believe future success is owed, you’ve begun your decline.
If you remain willing to eat off the floor, you have a chance.
One Idea for the Week
Someone out there needs to hear this:
Most mistakes aren’t as big as you think.
In 1999, a study coined the term “Spotlight Effect.”
It’s a psychological concept in which people believe they’re being noticed far more than they are.
We’re the center of our worlds, so we assume we’re the center of others’ as well.
But that’s not true.
People mostly think about themselves.
This is a powerful realization when we make mistakes.
Zoom in — we think the world is ending.
Zoom out — the world is unchanged.
This isn’t to say mistakes don’t matter or don’t have consequences.
It’s just to say:
Take some pressure off.
Learn and move forward.
The world keeps spinning.
I’d love to hear from you
What’s your biggest takeaway from this issue?
Reply to this email and let me know.
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Thanks for reading.
See you next Sunday.