It shows little boys who lived in a village built on stilts in water. They wanted to learn about soccer, but had no place to play. So they built a raft to use as a field!

They turned every disadvantage into an advantage. Their playing area was small, so they learned precise ball control. When the ball went into the water, they had to jump in to get it, so they became comfortable playing wet.

They never stopped being hungry, and their program turned into a great one.

Many thanks to one of my former athletes, Taryn Tabano, for sending it to me.

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Would you like to improve at what you do? “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success” can show you how! Are you a coach? “Ten Things Great Coaches Know” can make you a better one.

No wonder! Taking that first step is a huge moment for any baby. It separates the past from the future, and opens the way for a different life.

You’re just like a baby in the sense that first steps don’t end when you grow up. Life is full of first steps, and you can take them any time you want. You can go from out-of-shape to buff, from addicted to sober, from sick to healthy or from jobless to employed. In each case, that first step is the one that can transform everything. Nothing happens without it.

Just as with a baby, that first step isn’t easy. You may fall a few times. You may be a bit rocky on your feet. But those things are soon forgotten when you’re on your way to a new life.

If you’re not getting what you want from life, you can change it all with that one step. You can start doing something you haven’t been doing, or you can stop doing something harmful.

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova took a big step in her life. Years ago, after winning a major or two, she faced a choice: She could rest on her laurels or become one of the all-time greats. She chose greatness, and began by overhauling her diet. She became great, maybe the greatest of all time. It began with the one step of fixing her diet.

What step can you take today that will transform your life?

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Take a first step toward a new life today with “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success.”

She also said, with not as much pride, that her daughter can only do one thing at a time.

Only?

By being able to do “only” one thing at a time, her daughter owns the key to success. Doing “only” one thing at a time is a gift, not a limitation.

“I can’t do two things at once,” said Helena Bonham Carter. “I can’t even do one thing at once.”

Great things come to people who can define a task and then stay with it through completion. Narrow focus helps you beat the odds, win the big prize. It’s a basic part of your mental game. Multitasking is the enemy of quality.

“Multitasking is a way of screwing up several things at once,” a wise person once said.

Besides, the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time is a myth. You can switch quickly from one thought to another, but your brain cannot hold two simultaneously.

“To do two things at once is to do neither,” said ancient writer Publilius.

I’m not sure what the woman who can 12 things at a time does for a living, but I would bet on the quality of the work turned in by the daughter who can do “only” one thing.

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Writing in The New York Post after Rivera tore his ACL in a freak pre-game accident, Sherman says the relief pitcher is more than just a baseball player. He is the embodiment of greatness, not in the cheap, hero-a-day way so common today, but the kind who transforms his part of the world.

Sherman even uses the word “nobility” to describe Rivera, and he’s not wrong. Rivera has survived two decades in the New York spotlight without any hint of  blemish. He never did anything you wouldn’t want your children to see. He never brought embarrassment to  himself, his team or his profession. In Rivera, you are talking about a special kind of person.

And when that person can be the very best in the world at his job, you have someone who inspires reverence from teammates and opponents alike. In my book “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success,” there is a chapter on staying on guard against the self. The secret lies in four words: respect, humility, curiosity and hunger. Those words apply to Rivera. As Coach John Wooden said, “Talent can get you to the top, but character keeps you there.”

It doesn’t matter whether you like the Yankees or not. Any time you can see greatness, you want to look, appreciate and study. For instance, Sherman writes, “I would dare say I have never heard an opponent speak badly of Rivera.”

That in itself might be a bigger feat than all of Rivera’s saves.

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Would you like to improve at what you do? “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success” can show you how! Are you a coach? “Ten Things Great Coaches Know” can make you a better one.

It reminds me of the best parking job I ever did. Late for practice, I gained a few precious seconds by slipping gracefully into the parking space and racing into the gym. Only then did I realize that I was at the wrong gym. It was Wednesday, when we practice in the gym across town.

Moral of the story? It doesn’t matter how well you park if you’re in the wrong lot.

All this comes to mind because of a Baseball Prospectus article by Mike Ferrin. In discussing the trade in which the New York Yankees acquired pitcher Michael Pineda, he points to an article by Tom Verducci that cites research from Stan Conte, head trainer for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Conte indicates 50 percent of starting pitchers and 34 percent of all relief pitchers will wind up on the disabled list this year.

Think of that for a moment. If the citation is correct, you’ve got to wonder about modern routines. Despite all the advances in conditioning and in medicine, half the starting pitchers in the big leagues will be hurt badly enough this season to miss at least two weeks.

It makes you wonder if these advances are really advances at all. Are we doing the right things? Are trainers, managers, pitching coaches, etc., in the right parking lot?

I don’t have any data, but I wonder how today’s injury rate would stack up against the rates from 50 or even 100 years ago.

It seems to me that there are fragile pitchers in all eras, and durable pitchers in all eras.

Years ago, starting pitchers would work every fourth day, and sometimes fill in as relievers. Nowadays, starters work every fifth day, and hardly ever appear in relief. Nowadays, teams carefully monitor the number of pitches that every pitcher throws. Some teams even have special rules for how often the pitcher can work.

The Yankees did it, not too successfully, with Joba Chamberlain, and the Washington Nationals are doing the same with Stephen Strasburg, who is more than a year removed from surgery.

Is all of this producing more durable and more productive pitchers? If you have any data, I’d love to see it. In the meantime, you can’t help but wonder if, when it comes to nurturing pitchers, big-league baseball teams are in the wrong parking lot.

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Would you like to improve at what you do? “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success” can show you how! Are you a coach? “Ten Things Great Coaches Know” can make you a better one.

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”

Those words capture so much of what coaching should be about. The job of a leader is more than just giving orders or creating wins and losses. It’s about making a difference in lives.

At the school where I coach, headmaster Tom Nammack gathers the coaches for a talk before the school year begins. He always makes it a point to say, “The two hours the child spends with you every day might be the best two hours of his or her day.”
The older I get, the more I appreciate what he is saying. No one has it all, and the one you least suspect — the person who seems to have everything together — could be suffering on the inside.

That’s why leaders should look at those under their care as more than pieces to be placed into a strategic puzzle. They are human beings, who need support, guidance, challenge, fun and meaning.

Coach Pritchard, who is my co-author on “Ten Things Great Coaches Know,” told me another quote that leaders can keep in mind. It goes, “Never let the problem be solved become greater than the person to be loved.”

My friend Dr. Carl McGown, who has coached championship volleyball teams all over the world, has said, “It’s not important whether they love you. What’s important is that you love them.”
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“We’re going to re-set your baseline today,” a SEAL tells a group of athletes as they embark on a grueling session to test and expand their limits.

Olympians and SEALS are just like the rest of us. They have limits to their ability to endure discomfort, pain and frustration. The difference comes in the way they handle those limits. Their life is a struggle to re-set boundaries.

That’s what brought them to SEALS training, with its freezing water, rolls in the dirt, and heavy loads to lift, as detailed in this article from USA Today.

“We push in our training,” says Zack Railey, a 2008 Olympic silver medalist in sailing, “but this was just a totally different type of physical and mental exhaustion.”

Olympic gold medalist Garrett Weber-Gale went through the training with Michael Phelps and other swimmers in 2009. “I guess what I took away from that was the human body can always achieve more than we believe,” she said. “And that’s controlled purely by our minds.”

You may never play in the Olympics, but you can compete against the most important foe of all — yourself. You can become a SEAL or an Olympian in the way you struggle with the things that are holding you back.

As peak performance expert Dave Cross has written, all the things you want lie outside your comfort zone.

“You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown,” said Denis Waitley.
Don’t wait for a Navy SEAL to re-set your limits. Start doing it yourself today!

*** *** *** ***

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So it’s not surprising that Miller, former head of the players’ union, defends the money that they make, and contrasts their paychecks with those of corporate CEOs.

Using the same power of argument that he did when he was taking on the baseball establishment, Miller explains the difference between CEOs and athletes. He says that the baseball contracts are signed by the people who pay the money, whereas the CEO salaries are determined by boards, not by the people who will pay (the stockholders).

This line of thought may not change the opinion of those who believe that players make too much money, period.

But as always, Miller’s words make you think.

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This burst of energy impressed coach Vince Lombardi, who decided then and there that he wanted Wood on his team.

Whether or not the story is true in all its details, Lombardi certainly picked a good player in Wood. He helped the Packers win a couple of Super Bowls, and wound up in the pro football Hall of Fame.

Not every story turns out as well as this one did. People choose the wrong players, the wrong employees and even the wrong mates all the time. This costs time, money and, yes, dignity.

If your life involves having to make the right choice about people — and it does — then one question could change your life:
Is reading people an innate skill, or can it be learned?

This question may be impossible to answer without a study (or maybe even with a study), but one idea can point us in the right direction.

With each passing day we are learning that skills and abilities we once thought to be innate can be acquired through practice. That being the case, you suspect that reading people is a skill that can be improved.

What do you think? Is reading people an innate ability, or is it a skill that can be acquired?

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Would you like to improve at what you do? “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success” can show you how! Are you a coach? “Ten Things Great Coaches Know” can make you a better one.

Winners think otherwise. When they fail they don’t get discouraged. They get excited.

Today George Takei celebrates his 75th birthday. Takei played Mr. Sulu in the iconic science fiction TV show “Star Trek.”

Here he tells the story of a disastrous first meeting with the show’s producer, Gene Roddenberry.

“My agent called and said he had an interview for me with this man who was casting a pilot film for a science fiction thing and there’s this role for a running part. So I went and I met the man. As a matter of fact, when I met Gene Roddenberry, I mispronounced his name. I called him “Mr. Rosenberry.” And he mispronounced my name. He called me “Tack-I”, which is not an uncommon mispronunciation. It’s pronounced “Tack-eh” as you pronounced it, so we got started by mispronouncing each other’s names. When he described the role to me, I knew that this was the role that I had to have. And I knew that there would be a lot of competition for it, so I was really nervous about it. And so after a stressful tense week, the phone rang again and my agent told me that I had the part, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

So as George Takei can attest, it’s not how you start, it’s how well and how often you follow through. When he realized that a dream part was up for grabs, he made sure to grab it.

Someone once said, “Those who fail are those who quit without ever realizing how close they came to success.”

When Takei mispronounced the producer’s name, the game could have been over. Instead, he kept trying, and he won the game.

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Would you like to improve at what you do? “The Improvement Factor: How Winners Turn Practice into Success” can show you how! Are you a coach? “Ten Things Great Coaches Know” can make you a better one.