Bill Walsh Quotes

This success wasn’t an accident; I had written the script for our success. Informed preplanning — looking perceptively into the future and getting ready for it — gave the Stanford football team a distinct advantage. I took that advantage with me when I was hired by the 49ers.

MY FIVE DOS FOR GETTING BACK INTO THE GAME:
1. Do expect defeat. It’s a given when the stakes are high and the competition is working ferociously to beat you. If you’re surprised when it happens, you’re dreaming; dreamers don’t last long.
2. Do force yourself to stop looking backward and dwelling on the professional “train wreck” you have just been in. It’s mental quicksand.
3. Do allow yourself appropriate recovery — grieving — time. You’ve been knocked senseless; give yourself a little time to recuperate. A keyword here is “little.” Don’t let it drag on.
4. Do tell yourself, “I am going to stand and fight again,” with the knowledge that often when things are at their worst you’re closer than you can imagine to success. Our Super Bowl victory arrived less than sixteen months after my “train wreck” in Miami.
5. Do begin planning for your next serious encounter. The smallest steps — plans — move you forward on the road to recovery. Focus on the fix.

MY FIVE DON’TS:
1. Don’t ask, “Why me?”
2. Don’t expect sympathy.
3. Don’t bellyache.
4. Don’t keep accepting condolences.
5. Don’t blame others.

Conventional wisdom often produces conventional results

Leadership, at its best, is exactly that: teaching skills, attitudes, and goals (yes, goals are both defined and taught)

When the inevitable setback, loss, failure, or defeat comes crashing down on you — losing a big sale, being passed over for a career-making promotion, even getting fired — allow yourself the “grieving time,” but then recognize that the road to recovery and victory lies in having the strength to get up off the mat and start planning your next move. This is how you must think if you want to win. Otherwise you have lost.

The competitor who won’t go away, who won’t stay down, has one of the most formidable competitive advantages of all. When the worst happens, as it did to me, I was helped by knowing what it took to be that kind of competitor — to not go away, to get up and fight back.

In planning for a successful future, the past can show you how to get there. Too often we avert our gaze when that past is unpleasant. We don’t want to go there again, even though it contains the road map to a bright future. How good are you at looking through the evidence from the past — especially the recent past? There’s a certain knack to it, but basically it requires a keen eye for analysis, a commonsense mind for parsing evidence that offers clues to why things went as they did — both good and bad. And, of course, it often requires a strong stomach, because what you’re rummaging through may include not only achievements but the remains of a very painful professional fiasco.

Of course, if this were some crappy novel, it’d be a bunch of albino Vatican hit men trying to cover up the fact that Jesus’s descendants are a family of Lithuanian shoe salesmen in Perth Amboy and the papacy is run by aliens.

A leader must be keen and alert to what drives a decision, a plan of action. If it was based on good logic, sound principles, and strong belief, I felt comfortable in being unswerving in moving toward my goal. Any other reason (or reasons) for persisting were examined carefully. Among the most common faulty reasons are (1) trying to prove you are right and (2) trying to prove someone else is wrong. Of course, they amount to about the same thing and often lead to the same place: defeat.

Planning for the future shouldn’t be postponed until the future arrives.

Communication creates collaboration. Big ears are better than big egos. When you’re not listening, ask good questions.

The ability to help the people around me self-actualize their goals underlines the single aspect of my abilities and the label that I value most — teacher. — BILL WALSH

They were locked into the past and unwittingly locking themselves out of the future. Leaders do this to themselves and their organizations all the time.

Like water, many decent individuals will seek lower ground if left to their own inclinations. In most cases you are the one who inspires and demands they go upward rather than settle for the comfort of doing what comes easily.

Your competitor must never look at you across the field, conference table, or anywhere else and conclude, “I not only beat you, I broke your spirit.” The dance of the doomed tells them they’ve broken your spirit. That message can hurt you the next time around.