Lots of people talk about competition, especially those who seek to achieve high performance no matter what the profession. In my experience, however, the real essence of competing is often misunderstood. Competition to me is not about beating your opponent. It is about doing your best; it is about striving to reach your potential; and it is about being in relentless pursuit of a competitive edge in everything you do.
As I worked through that process of developing my vision and plan for success, I decided that competition had to be at the heart of everything we would do—absolutely everything. Our stated goal would be to “do things better than they have ever been done before.” When you think about it, that is a statement about competition in its purest form. However successful you may be, there is always some element you can improve upon, some achievement to exceed.
I can’t say this any more loudly or any more clearly: Competition is the central theme in the Win Forever philosophy. It is absolutely essential to our program. If food, water, and sleep are essential in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, competition is at the core of Win Forever’s philosophical needs. Where Nike says, “Just Do It,” we say, “If you want to Win Forever, Always Compete.” Competition would become everything to the players and coaches in my next program.
Competition is typically defined as a contest between individuals, groups, teams, or nations; it is a test of skills. In my world, however, competition is much more than that. It is a mentality, an outlook, and a way of approaching every day. The traditional definition of competition requires having an opponent. For players, the real “opposition” is not necessarily the team they are matched up against in a given week—far from it. The real opposition is the challenge to remain focused on maximizing their abilities in preparation for the game.
I have worked for plenty of teams where coaches spend the week or even the month leading up to a “big” game talking down the opposition. They fuel traditional rivalries and do whatever they can to build up the other team as the enemy. Of course, this approach wins games for many teams, but I don’t agree. The essence of my message about competing has nothing to do with the opponent. My competitive approach is that “it’s all about us.” If we’ve really done the preparation to elevate ourselves to our full potential, it shouldn’t matter whom we’re playing.
Once I understood that we were competing with ourselves, it changed my view of future opponents. Many people confuse “opponent” with “enemy,” but in my experience, that is extremely unproductive. My opponents are not my enemies. My opponents are the people who offer me the opportunity to succeed. The tougher my opponents, the more they present me with an opportunity to live up to my full potential and play my best. From an extreme perspective, that’s a reason to love them, not to hate them. At the end of the day, that opponent is the person who makes you into the best competitor you can be.
Thus, a Win Forever team or organization holds opponents in high regard because they are the ones who call on us to reach our potential. In our practices, we always end each day with our best offensive players competing against our best defensive players to create the most competitive situations. It is crucial to maximizing the development of the team.
Of course, when we say that the competition is “all about us,” that doesn’t mean that we don’t think about our opponents. Of course we do. We think about them a lot. But what we do is try to understand their makeup and nature. We want to center our focus on what we can control, which is us. We have no control over what our opponents do; we can only control what we do. We want to maximize our potential, and to do that we must focus our energy and efforts on ourselves.
These thoughts about being a competitor are not necessarily all insights that I came up with on my own. Some are simply truths about performance that I have observed by being around extraordinary achievers during my career. I have had the good fortune of working with or admiring from afar many individuals who have taught me about competing. Among all of those people, the greatest individual competitor I have come in close contact with is Hall of Fame wide receiver Jerry Rice. I worked with him in San Francisco, and I have always said that the 49ers had many great competitors in the organization, but Jerry stood above the rest.
From my very first days on the staff, it was obvious to me that Jerry felt he had to prove to himself and his teammates that he was great. And this was not just on game day; it was during walk-throughs, training camp, off-season workouts, and even charity events. The beauty of it was that his mentality became a part of the 49ers culture, and Ronnie Lott, Steve Young, and others followed suit. Still, Jerry was different from anyone else.
As I got to know Jerry, I learned that he had to prove who he was every single chance he got. Apparently he had this drive at an early age, and it was an approach he carried over to his NFL career. Whatever it was, Jerry would give everything he had to beat you. He came to practice taped up, in full pads, and ready to go every day, and he’d finish in the end zone every time he caught the ball. He is easily recognized as one of the great competitors of all time. When I say Jerry competed at everything, I mean it. I saw it for myself.
During my first year in San Fransico, there was a celebrity basketball game at Santa Clara University pitting the 49ers from the 1980s against the 49ers of the 1990s. As a new coach on the staff and interested in 49ers history, I went to watch the game. The score was fairly even, and I was watching some of the guys and their personalities. Jerry played really well, scoring a bunch of points, then checking out of the game for a while. He was having fun on the bench signing autographs and talking to fans.
Then, over the loudspeaker, the announcer said that Carlton Williamson had become the leading scorer in the game. I looked around and Jerry was already on a knee checking back into the game. He went in for several minutes, scored twelve points in a wild flurry, and then took himself back out again. It was all just to make sure he was the leading scorer in the game.
He didn’t say anything to anybody, but it was so clear what he was all about. He may not even remember doing that, yet it was a magnificent illustration that to him everything was a personal competition. Basketball, of course, had nothing to do with it.
As a great competitor, Jerry understood that by staying in the mind-set of always competing he could develop the awareness to capture the “opportunities within opportunities” that other people might miss. In other words, he was constantly seeking a competitive edge. It helps to always be searching for that tiny edge in whatever you’re doing—even if it’s small, silly stuff—because that’s how you are going to catch things that someone else might not when it really matters. It’s an extremely powerful tool.
Just as important as that competitive intensity was the fact that you could see without a doubt that Jerry was really competing with himself. He never allowed his success or failure to be defined by anyone else. Jerry Rice’s ability to maintain his competitive focus made him into one of the great figures in the history of sports. I think his example is an unusually valuable one.
Adopting an all-out “always compete” approach to your passions does not necessarily come without a price. For example, it may be difficult to get a good night’s sleep if your mind is occupied by thoughts of doing things better than they have ever been done before, or being the best you can be. In extreme cases, you may be faced with a decision to uproot yourself and your family in order to pursue a professional opportunity.
One of the first, but not the last, times that brought this into focus came when I left UOP, after coaching for three years as a graduate assistant. Something needed to change, and my two choices were to coach at Moreau Catholic High School in the Bay Area, which would have been convenient, or to pack up a U-Haul and move to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to coach under Monte Kiffin and Lou Holtz, who had just been named head coach at the University of Arkansas. At the time, it was just Glena and I, but nonetheless I made the difficult choice to shift our entire lives just so I could pursue that competitive opportunity.
I want to be honest about what it takes to compete at an extreme level—but I don’t for a minute want to scare anyone away from embracing competition. Having the drive to always compete doesn’t necessarily mean you have to either make the choices I’ve made or not compete at all. That couldn’t be further from the truth. You can compete to be a good student, compete to be a good friend, compete to be a good dad, or a husband or wife. My point is to make conscious choices about what you compete at, and always compete to do your best at whatever that is. The idea is that you can be a great competitor at whatever you’re doing. You can direct this competitive mentality to serve you in all aspects of your life.