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Friends,
This is the last of three on Lou Holtz. We started with trust, the one advantage a wealthier rival cannot buy away from you. Then identity, and why the words only count when your people can produce them without a script. This week is the one he told on himself.
Late in his life, speaking to a room of graduating students, Holtz told them not to make the mistake he had made. He said he had done plenty of dumb things over the years, but there was one he regretted more than any of the others.
He had taken Notre Dame from the bottom of the sport to the very top and won a national championship. And then, by his own account, he set about protecting it.
That is the regret. Not a collapse, not a scandal, not a season that got away from him. He reached the thing he had been chasing, decided it was pretty good, and shifted from building to holding.
The program did not fall over. The bowl games kept coming for years. That is exactly what makes the admission worth your time, because he is not describing a failure anyone else could see. He is saying that good was available to him for a long stretch, and that he had stopped asking what else was.
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Underneath it was a rule he repeated for forty years. Everything is either growing or dying. A tree. Grass. A marriage. A business. A person. Nothing on earth sits still, and standing still is not a neutral position. It is the slow version of decline, and the reason it is dangerous is that it does not feel like anything at all while it is happening.
What he had run into is a trap that only catches people who got what they wanted.
A goal is a line you cross. It is not a ceiling and it is certainly not perfection. When you win the thing, nothing about the win tells you that you have run out of room, because you have not. There is always another layer of what you are building, and the day you achieve something is precisely when you are least likely to go looking for it.
Holtz had a national championship in hand and no external reason to change anything. Nobody was going to walk into his office and tell him to rebuild a program that had just won it all. He would have had to go looking himself, and he did not, and he spent the next thirty years telling people about it.
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Forty years on, the pull he described has only gotten stronger, because everything about how a program is run now rewards protecting what you have. The evaluation cycle is twelve months. The roster resets in January. Every deal on it reprices in the spring. A decision that costs you this season in exchange for something better in three years is not brave under those rules, it is a good way to not be there in three years.
So holding is a harder habit to break than it was in 1989, not an easier one. It comes with a spreadsheet attached.
You will recognize the same shape outside of sport, in quarterly numbers, annual reviews, and an average tenure shorter than the thing you are trying to build.
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So how do you keep building something you have already won with? Four things, and none of them require a rebuild.
Separate the goal from the direction. The championship was a line you crossed. The direction you were headed is not a line, and you never arrive at it. If the only thing you were aiming at was the trophy, then winning it genuinely leaves you with nowhere to go. Aim at something beyond the goal and the win stops looking like an ending.
Go find the feedback. Losing generates information constantly. Everybody tells you what is wrong, whether you asked or not. Winning can shut all of that off at exactly the moment you need it, because nobody corrects a leader whose results are excellent. So you have to go get it on purpose. Ask the people who do not report to you. Ask the ones with nothing to gain from flattering you. If the last honest assessment of your program came from a scoreboard, you do not have one.
Keep doing the work. Preparation. Discipline. Coaching. Feedback. Ownership. None of that gets easier or less necessary after you win, and all of it is the first to slip, because success makes it feel optional in a way that losing never does.
Do not let winning excuse behavior. In a losing season, every mistake gets examined. In a winning one, the same mistake gets waved off, because the result came out fine and nobody wants to be the person picking at a good thing. That is how a standard erodes without anyone deciding to lower it. A master is not someone who never misses. A master is someone who does not waste misses, and winning is what makes misses easy to waste.
The reason all four matter is that the alternative does not announce itself. Nobody decides to stop growing. There is no meeting. It is a drift, it is silent, and you will not feel it in the season it starts. You will feel it three years later when you cannot work out what changed.
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One thing to do this week. Name the thing in your program you are proudest of, the part you would point to if somebody asked what you have built here.
Then answer one question about it honestly. What have you added to it in the last six months?
If you can name something specific, you are still building it. If the honest answer is that you have been keeping it intact, that is not a neutral finding, and it is the exact position Holtz spent thirty years warning people about. The thing you are proudest of is usually the last thing you think to work on.
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Three weeks on a man who coached his last game before most of the players in your building were born.
Trust, because it cannot be bought. Identity, because it cannot be inherited. And the discipline to keep building after you get what you wanted, because that is the one Lou Holtz would tell you he got wrong.
The conditions changed. What the job asks of you did not. |
