The lesson Lou Holtz learned in his very first game as a head college football coach. You can only coach one team — yours.
Real toughness isn’t throwing fists or getting in someone’s face. Real toughness is absorbing negative feedback, stepping back from its sting, and re-examing it for ways to improve.
Like famous magician Harry Houdini, people who do the impossible aren’t more gifted than others. They’ve just found the right strategy.
Malcolm Butler, unlikely hero of the Super Bowl, just kept getting better. It’s harder than it sounds. Improvement takes focus, persistence and the mental toughness to work outside your comfort zone, all without any guarantees.
It took the impossible to create the Super Bowl. Forty-six years ago, the New York Jets upset the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, despite entering the game as 19 1/2-point underdogs. “We’re going to win on Sunday. I guarantee it,” said Jets quarterback Joe Namath, who backed up his words with a 16-7 victory […]
Anyone who’s ever sold Girl Scout cookies knows the usual formula: Sell to family and friends, and maybe to some neighbors. Not Katie Francis. She started out by aiming for a world record, beat it, then kept raising her goals. That approach helped Katie, who was in sixth grade at the time, sell what you’d […]
If you read the papers, you’ve probably seen a list of corrections. Most of them clear up errors made the previous day. Not many corrections, therefore, match the one offered by the New York Times in July of 1969. It referred to a story that appeared 49 years earlier. That story had declared “absurd” the […]
“And the impossible dream comes true!” With those words, broadcaster Al Michaels put an exclamation point on the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s gold medal. Now, 35 winters later, that gold medal reminds everyone that what seems to be impossible can actually happen. For the next 17 days, Dr. Rob Gilbert and I will be offering […]
“With Jeter there are no surprises,” says my friend and co-author Dr. Rob Gilbert, a professor of sport psychology at Montclair State University. “He’s like a restaurant chain. You can go anywhere in the world and get the same thing. He’s never made an error off the field. He’s made some on the field, but never off.”
Years ago, in my sports writing days, a softball coach told me something that changed my life. “If someone is lazy on the field, they’ll be lazy in the office, too,” he said. “If someone is a team player on the field, they’ll be a team player in the office as well.” Those words came […]