5

The One-Day Contract

In a career as long as mine has been, as you might imagine, I’ve signed many contracts. In this chapter, I’ll tell you about one of the most important. I’m not talking about the most recent contract I signed, one that will keep me working as University of Louisville basketball coach until age seventy, if I’m fortunate enough to last that long. I’m not talking about the biggest contract I ever signed, to become president and head coach of the Boston Celtics. The contract I want to talk about in this chapter is one I make every day with myself.

Sitting with my brother-in-law Billy Minardi years ago along with a group of Wall Street brokers after a New York Knicks game, we were talking about one of the Knicks who signed a long-term contract and was playing with no urgency and no hustle, because he was very content with his long, secure deal. I said, “That’s our biggest mistake in sports. Guys play their best in the last year of their contracts.” Their response to me is what stimulated my mind for the title of this chapter. They said, “Here on Wall Street, we don’t have one-year contracts or multiyear contracts. We are only as good as our last trade. One severe case in poor judgment can land us in the unemployment office.” It stands to reason, if you’re always at your best toward the end of your contract, why not try to create a situation where you can capture that mentality all the time?

It really hit home for me three years ago, after a first-round loss to Morehead State in the NCAA Tournament, when I seriously pondered retirement for the first time. I had friends who had retired and enjoyed it. I had done some work with TBS and CBS during the NCAA Tournament and I’ve always enjoyed that. An agent told me he could land me a lucrative offer as an analyst. But my wife convinced me that I’d drive myself crazy if I weren’t coaching, and she’s right. I realize now that I need the game too much. So over the past three years, a switch has flipped on for me. I have become more focused on making the most of the present than I ever have been, and more determined not to get caught up in all the superficial distractions. Even when we lost in the first round to Morehead State, I realized I had a great group of guys and I really enjoyed working with them. I resolved simply to enjoy coaching, to stop agonizing over things that did not matter, and most of all to play out the terms for the rest of my career in a series of one-day contracts. Sometimes, I admit that I’ll finish a day and wonder whether even I would pick up my own option. But most days since adopting this philosophy I can honestly tell you I’ve coached as if the next day’s contract depended on it. You won’t always perform at your optimum, but you always can perform with the effort and mentality that a one-day contract would evoke, and that will certainly get the most out of your abilities.

The benefits can be immense. Ask yourself this question: Whatever your job is, whatever you’re working at right now, how would life be different if you were on a one-day contract? How might your approach change if this afternoon after you finished work, a supervisor would make the call on whether to retain you for another day or let you go?

How would that affect your mind-set? My guess is you’d be tremendously organized, at least for that one day. Every minute of that day would be directly devoted to trying to maximize your effort. Wanting it now is fine, but sometimes people focus too much on the “wanting” and not on the “now.” The one-day contract eliminates that. With a one-day contract, you’re busting it until the final buzzer.

Look at underperforming NBA teams. Can you imagine how they would perform if everyone were under a one-day contract? In college sports, we have scholarships that are one-year renewable. Sometimes I wish they were one-day renewable. It would solve the problems of some players. Some might think it would be stressful, but on the contrary, it would be an incredible motivator. (All right, I’m not seriously proposing that the NCAA do that, only wishing that many players would adopt that mind-set.) When you adopt a one-day contract mentality, it becomes less about what you are paid or what happened in the past than it is about what you can do today, and how you can make the most of what time you have.

The one-day contract is not unheard of in sports. Many times, an athlete ready to retire will sign a one-day contract with an organization so that he can retire as a member of that team. In short, athletes sign a one-day contract to finish their careers in the place they want to finish. For the rest of us, the one-day contract can result in the same outcome. It’s a tool that can help up us finish the way we want to by reaching the goals we set. It’s a mind-set, a way of looking at our lives and vocations that keeps our focus where it belongs and our effort at a high level. Knowing what we want to do isn’t a problem for most of us. Coming up with a disciplined routine to get there is very difficult.

Every New Year’s Day, millions of Americans set out with at least one new goal. We call them resolutions, and the implication is that they are things we will treat with resolve and determination. But Forbes magazine reported in January of 2013 that only 8 percent of the resolutions we make are accomplished over one year’s time. According to a study by Franklin-Covey planning experts, a third of New Year’s resolutions are broken by the end of January. What happens to the rest? You probably have experienced some of these things. People burn out on their goals, or they never get started, or they get discouraged, and regardless of what happens, they quit. If you hope to benefit from a one-day contract mentality, you must first address some of these things before you sign. In fact, you need to make three promises to yourself: You will not quit, you will not procrastinate, and you will not allow discouragement to sideline you. Let’s look at these three important issues first, starting with procrastination, lest anyone be tempted to put off reading about it.

DON’T PROCRASTINATE

Procrastination may be the most dangerous habit keeping people from the lives they want to lead. One significant reason that we won a national championship in 2013 is that at no point did we procrastinate as a coaching staff, and our players did a good job of taking care of matters immediately. When I had the idea of moving Kevin Ware from shooting guard to point guard, we acted on it immediately. It turned out to be one of the most important moves we could have made. Sure, when you make a successful move, you always wish you had done it sooner. But in this case, and in others, we did not wait to act on ideas that we had.

A person on a one-day contract cannot afford to give in to procrastination. It takes away from all goal-oriented people. If you have a goal, immediately you must challenge yourself to come up with the plan of attack. You think about it in a twenty-four-hour span, and then you come up with your plan. And then along the way, you alter your path as you need to, because obstacles and detours do come up and impede you from going the direction you want to go. Whether it’s the stock market and suddenly a foreign nation has a crisis that affects your ability to do what you want, or you’re an oil and gas company and there’s a spill somewhere, something always happens in the world of sports and business, and that’s when you redirect, as we did with our basketball team, restating our goals after a rough stretch in which we lost four out of seven games.

It is vitally important, in basketball and business, that when you have an idea, you not just let it sit. I have note cards that I carry everywhere I go. All day long, when I get an idea or have a thought, I write it down. If I see something while watching a game or hear something someone says I put it down on the note card, then try to make that thought better or that play better as I carry it around with me. It’s crucial in the competitive industry I’m in that I write every single thing down. After that, it’s just as important to enhance the thoughts and ideas that move you enough to get onto your notecard or notebook. Don’t let these things that come to you subside and pass away. Some of those things might be among your most valuable ideas.

In my case, it has become such a habit that to put something off is now against my nature. Some might think at times I act too quickly, but I have learned through long experience in my profession when to move quickly and when to give it time. For many people, however, procrastination ranks in the top five of their RPIs—Reaching-Potential Impediments. It’s one of the great obstacles. Psychology Today estimates that 20 percent of people chronically avoid difficult tasks and deliberately seek distractions or excuses to keep from tackling them. The problem is as old as man. There’s been a certain fascination with Leonardo da Vinci in recent years. He is considered one of the great painters in history and perhaps the most widely talented and brilliant man who ever lived, and two of his works, Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are among the most reproduced in the history of mankind. In addition to his contributions in art, his notebooks left behind discoveries, ideas, and inventions that were centuries ahead of their time. His place in history is rock solid. But Leonardo died with regrets. He was, some people think because of his diverse talents and interests, a great procrastinator. He was easily distracted. He only finished The Last Supper when his patron threatened to stop paying him. He is said to have spent countless hours doodling into notebooks without finishing threads of thought. He had the advantage that his doodling was genius. Still, he died with regret. His last words were, “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.” Of course, we know from historical context that his work certainly lived on and left its mark. But the regret he died with, even a person of his talent and accomplishment, shows us the toll that procrastination can take. Every year, I have players return to practice at the start of school having put off doing all summer those things that they knew they needed to do to get better. People on a one-day contract enter the day, or enter their office or place of work, knowing precisely what things they will do that day.

So many times, players will enter the offseason with the plan of working on their game, strengthening certain aspects that coaches have suggested they work on, only to come back in the fall having made little progress. This was the case with one of our most talented players, Chane Behanan, before the 2012–13 season. He didn’t have a productive summer, and as a result his season was not as productive as he had hoped it would be. At one point, Chane was thinking that he might have a chance to consider the NBA Draft after his sophomore season, but he hit a slump. Chane is a player with a great many distractions, and that can lead to not having a sense of urgency. Chane also is a player with a strong passion for the game and the highest of motivations for success—to provide a new life for his family after growing up in very rough circumstances in Cincinnati. For Chane, it was a procrastinating type of season. There were times when many were asking, “What is he waiting for?” But when the Final Four came around, there was no more waiting for Chane. When crunch time got to its most pressure-packed, Chane was the best he has been in his career. Look at these stats. In the second half of our semifinal win over Wichita State and the second half of our title game win over Michigan, Chane had a combined twenty-one points and seventeen rebounds. That’s as big-time a stat line against the best competition in college basketball as any frontcourt player in the game could post. Yet it took until that stage and that time to see the Chane Behanan we had all wanted to see. In the locker room after the Wichita State game, Kevin Ware said of Behanan, “’Bout time Chane played.” Across the way, Chane said, “Yeah, he’s probably right.” We’re hoping that Chane won’t put off becoming the player he is capable of being any longer. If he’ll sign a one-day contract, he can be one of the premier players in the nation.

You need to remember, procrastinating isn’t just putting something off. It also can be doing something other than what you mean to be doing. It’s going to the movies instead of going to work out. The great writer Victor Hugo would sometimes have his servant lock him in his house and take away all his clothes so he would have no other option but to stay in there and write. (Full disclosure: This entire book was written while fully clothed!) That’s an example of how dangerous a trap he viewed distraction and procrastination to be, and how committed Hugo was to avoiding it. We talked about the distractions of technology, but any manner of distraction can be used to procrastinate. You can be perfectly busy at your desk, but still procrastinating. In his excellent book on the subject, The Procrastination Equation, researcher Piers Steel outlines many of these procrastination pitfalls. One thing he found repeatedly is that a person’s energy level was directly related to his or her ability to focus and stay on task. But he also found that people who are constantly doing productive tasks or those they feel positive about wind up feeling that they have more energy. One positive of the one-day contract is that, by focusing on taking care of those things that need to be done and maximizing your efforts, you’ll feel more satisfied and energized at the end of the day if you’ve met your own terms.

Another factor that causes people to procrastinate is fear. But I’ve found that many of us in professional settings are operating with far too much fear. A one-day contract requires you to be bold. In fact, once you begin to experiment with new strategies (like the one-day contract) you’ll begin to be energized by the freedom that aggressive approach brings. You can’t be afraid to experiment and try new things. As long as it isn’t a money-risking venture, be bold in your experiments. Some things you thought would be great ideas won’t work out as well as you’d hoped. Others you didn’t think held much promise will be fantastic. But trying new approaches and examining their success or failure is what will enable you to learn and improve your performance.

The greatest example of drawing the value out of experimenting—good and bad—is the inventor Thomas Edison. The greatest inventor in American history likely failed more than any inventor in American history. Edison even lived in Louisville as a young man, where he failed as a telegraph operator and an Associated Press wire service worker. One night at work he was tinkering in the office and allowed battery acid to drop on the boss’s desk. He was fired the next morning. Look, you may screw up at work, but you’re never likely to do anything as bad as drip battery acid onto your boss. Lighten up and get aggressive.

We’re going to learn much more from Edison over the next few pages. But first, I want to ask you if you’re ready to sign a one-day contract? Not tomorrow or next week, but right now, before finishing this chapter. (Put finishing this chapter No. 1 on your list, however!)

You’re not signing up forever, just for a day. Eliminate those energy-draining activities and begin to plot out your days with purpose. You’ll still lapse into procrastination. But by starting each day with a new contract, you’ll experience many more days that are productive and leave you feeling positive to get to the next one. It’s a great tool, because there is no risk. You may have false starts. You may have one-day contracts that you tear up. Sign a new one tomorrow, and begin to hold yourself to the standards you know are necessary to reach your goals. You don’t need to fear signing this contract. Do it today.

DON’T GIVE IN TO DISCOURAGEMENT

We already have talked about persevering through various kinds of challenges, but the one-day contract helps with discouragement in a different way—by placing our focus where it needs to be. Let me show you how things work if your focus strays from the one-day contract mind-set. This example shows how you can get caught up in long-term goals instead of day-to-day work, and how the resulting discouragement and failure can lead you to fold up and move on. I know the example well because it is from my own life.

I was president and coach of the Boston Celtics, a dream job if ever there was one. But in the midst of adversity and failure, I quit as coach. I walked away. (I offered to stay on in an executive role to help fix the problems with the team, but the franchise didn’t want to keep me, and I didn’t blame them. Things weren’t going well.) My Celtics experience taught me many things. As I look back on it, I was living too much for the future. I was consumed with making changes and trying to do anything I could that would make me look good as an executive instead of coaching my players and just taking care of my work of the day. I had this huge contract and every day my overriding concern was living up to it. The contract hung over me, and under its weight I lost everything I needed to find success, particularly humility and patience.

That, it turned out, was a recipe for failure. I was focused on a long-term contract and all its consequences, pressures, and trappings and I lost sight of putting my head down and doing the work I needed to do.

Now understand, being on a one-day contract doesn’t make every day a successful one. We cannot have unrealistic expectations that everything we do will be a smashing success. I experienced this several years back when we got knocked out by Morehead State in the NCAA Tournament’s first round. We were up four with eight minutes to go when our best player, Preston Knowles, broke his foot. Elisha Justice, a walk-on, had to take his place. And although he did a serviceable job, he did not possess at that stage the talents of Preston. At the time, it was a disappointing loss and we took a lot of heat for it. But after a while, we had to stop making excuses for it, and accept that we lost to a great team. The one-day contract doesn’t always wind up the way we hoped it would the night before. Still, we organize and plan going into each day as if our contract is expiring at the end of it. And that in itself helps you handle discouragement better.

Discouragement often comes from focusing on the wrong things. It also derives from a lack of patience, which is a virtue we are losing in our society. The one-day contract alleviates one of the biggest reasons people give in to discouragement—a misplaced focus on the future or the present circumstances instead of on the present task. I’m not asking you to sign up to achieve something a year or a decade from now. I’m asking you to sign up to make the most of tomorrow. That sounds far less formidable, right? Which of us can’t plan and resolve to live and work one productive, efficient, successful day? It’s within our power.

Things might not be going well, but if you can feel good about your preparation for the day, the effort you gave, and that you maximized everything you could that day, you are more likely to feel encouraged the next day and less likely to throw in the towel. The one-day contract takes care of the immediate goals and focus. But for concerns about what is down the road, you also have to have a building mentality.

Here’s why a building mind-set is important: Many people, young people especially, look at the jobs they have and a rate of success that’s slower than they want and they begin to give in to discouragement. But they’re looking at it the wrong way. Sometimes people who quit on themselves too soon don’t understand the concept of building something. They’re on the lower rungs of the ladder looking up, frustrated that they can’t reach things at the top. They fail to understand that it’s not from the bottom that you reach those heights, but you have to pass through the lower rungs to get there. By sticking with it, you are building a résumé and laying a foundation. We had a national championship team in 2013. We were not a national championship team on the first day of practice in August. We didn’t even look like one in January. There may be times you don’t feel as if you are winning. The job may not compensate you well or challenge you or even be a job you’re passionate about, but at some point you have to consider what would happen if your big chance presented itself and someone called to ask your boss’s opinion of you that very day. If you’ve stuck with it, worked hard, given great effort, and earned good reviews, you’re going to keep moving up. If the reviews are lukewarm, you’re staying right where you are.

Sometimes people don’t understand the value of the job they have, or of the time they spend in a single day of working. Phil Laemmle, a longtime political science professor at the University of Louisville, used to speak to every group of incoming freshmen. He gave a lively presentation in which he’d break open a can of biscuit dough and compare it to their impressionable minds. But one of his more pertinent illustrations was when he would show the freshmen a movie ticket. He’d hold it up in front of them and have them agree that if they had a ticket to the movies for a certain time and date, they wouldn’t be likely to miss it. Then he told them that while they didn’t have a physical ticket, each class session represented a similar opportunity. And he urged them to understand that if they wouldn’t throw out a ticket to the movies, they shouldn’t throw out that class opportunity.

My career in sports has borne this out. I have had teams go into the locker room twenty points down, only to come back and win the game. How were these teams able to accomplish this? First, they were prepared going into the game. They also were able to make the appropriate adjustments to give us a chance at a comeback. But more than anything, they had an attitude that they were not going to quit, that they were going to continue to play relentlessly. And they left the locker room thinking not about erasing a twenty-point deficit, but about executing the next play, scoring first, getting a stop on the first possession of the half, and making the adjustments the coaches had shown them in the locker room. Just because the game had been discouraging to that point, they were not discouraged, or at the very least did not give into the discouragement they were feeling.

How did those players in difficult circumstances keep from becoming discouraged? By focusing on the job they had to do, but also by realizing that success was within their reach.

Thomas Edison had more than ten thousand failures in attempts to invent various items. Surely, here was a man who had to have been discouraged at the end of many days. But here’s what he said: “Nearly every man who develops an idea works at it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.”

Edison also said this: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try one more time.… Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” That is the subject we need to take up next.

DON’T QUIT

This is something I am seeing more and more in our society. People are folding in life like it’s a game of Texas Hold’em. Dropout rates from high school and college continue to be a problem. Even in a time with high unemployment rates, government figures showed that there were months when more people quit their jobs than were being laid off or fired.

We have talked about difficult times. One of the most disturbing trends I see today is a tendency among people to give up on their goals and dreams entirely too soon, or to fold up when the first adversity presents itself. If people don’t immediately see success, they think what they are doing is not for them. But look carefully at any successful athlete, businessperson, corporation, or sports team and you’ll see that mentality is not a part of the culture.

A recent survey by ChurchLeaders.com diagnosed the leading reasons why clergy leave their vocation. They don’t differ from reasons we’ve seen hindering focus and achievement in other areas: discouragement, failure, loneliness, moral failure, financial pressure, anger, burnout, health problems, marriage and family problems, and being too busy. All are obstacles, but none of those in and of themselves are reasons to quit. In fact, there are many examples of people enduring those and more yet still finding success right around the corner, because they simply stayed at it.

Succeeding in difficult times means perseverance, and that trait is not prevalent in these times. We are the now generation. We want success at our fingertips. Patience is ceasing to be a virtue. And let’s face it, you can develop all of the wonderful traits you need to succeed—focus, humility, toughness, and passion—but if you quit when things become difficult or when you become discouraged, they all are worthless.

It has happened with me. I allowed things to get to the point in Boston where I was no longer effective, and where the town and franchise recognized that they could do better with a new start. I have experienced the cycle that leads to quitting. But I’m not alone.

David Petraeus was one of the most respected generals in the United States. From there he became head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and was recognized as one of the most important military leaders in our nation. When an extramarital affair became public in 2012, Petraeus quickly resigned and left the public arena. His reasoning, a military official told NBC, was that, “In his mind, in his views, with his code of ethics and morals, he did a very dishonorable thing.” He believed that he brought dishonor to his position and undermined the trust the public had in him.

Although there is certainly truth to his statement, stepping down or leaving public service was not the solution. He was and remains too valuable an asset to quit on his country and himself. He made a mistake, and certainly no one knows that better than I do. You have to own up and face the consequences. Difficult times lie ahead in dealing with forgiveness from God and family. But he is a vital leader and should not compound his mistake by letting our nation down. Human frailties cannot lead us to quit, either on our jobs, our teams, or in this instance, our nation. From a military perspective, Petraeus’s viewpoint may have been correct. But on a grander scale, look at what he would have been able to do with his ability as a leader. One would hope this talented general would return to a leadership role where he can contribute to our nation. There are times when your effectiveness is finished, and where moving forward would benefit no one. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about adversity setting in and deciding to exit the stage when the benefit of sticking it out might be better for everyone involved. He surely knows his personal life better than anyone and he must chart his own path, but his departure leaves a great void, as does the loss of his experienced leadership.

Let’s look at a leader who could have quit, but did not. With the passage of time, Bill Clinton is coming to be viewed as one of our best modern-day presidents. Facing scandal of his own making and withering political pressure, he faced up to it and, in the end, not only had an extremely successful second term, but will go down in history as one of his era’s most popular presidents. Even after leaving office, his influence and importance to his party have remained strong. In fact, you could argue that he remains the central figure of his party.

Let’s look at the flip side: What might have happened had he stepped down instead of digging in and facing the painful public scrutiny? Imagine what might have happened if Bill Clinton would have walked away in disgrace. His post-presidential initiatives would not be what they are. His ability to help his party would’ve been destroyed. Even his wife may well have suffered in her ability to go on to become a U.S. senator and a highly successful secretary of state. The amount of charitable work Clinton has done with various global disasters might never have existed. His Clinton Global Initiative is active in 150 countries and expects to provide more than $73 billion in aid to people in need around the world. Let’s understand, the most difficult thing about digging in is finding peace with God and your family and making sure they come first, before expecting any true resolution of the public situation at hand. But once that healing is under way, you can find a wealth of resolve to weather the present difficulties and turn them into future success.

I understand the nature of it. You are embarrassed. You want to run away, and you think it’s easier to go away and hide because it may hurt less, but that is the direct opposite of the truth. Your problems don’t go away like that. Once peace reigns again through hard effort with your family, with lessons learned you can come back better than ever. For those who feel compelled to quit because of regret, the greatest hurdle is earning forgiveness. Only time will bring that forgiveness and heal those wounds. And for those who feel compelled to quit because of adversity, how do you know that you aren’t just a few short steps from turning the corner if only you will press on? There are many examples. Just look at the rewards, and what was accomplished by so many people by digging in and moving ahead and not giving in under pressure.

It hardly crossed my mind, when I was going through my turmoil with a pending extortion trial, to quit. I did say to my boss that I would do so if he wanted me to. But from the point he told me to never give that another thought, I dug in and fought and did what I thought was the right thing, and I wasn’t quitting at all. Still, I have to admit, had I not gone through my Celtics experience, I might’ve handled things differently. I learned from my earlier failure that to succeed, you have to keep moving forward. And believe me, it’s not easy. Learn from my experience. Part of the one-day contract is that you do not quit. You finish the day, and play to the final buzzer.

How many times have we seen in sports a situation that looks bleak, only to have success around the corner? What if Sugar Ray Leonard had said to Thomas Hearns after a few rounds, “It’s not going well. Good fight, maybe we’ll have another one,” and packed it in? At Louisville, our own football team had a similar experience. It doesn’t get much tougher than being down 14–3 in the middle of the third quarter in a hostile environment on the road with a Bowl Championship Series berth on the line. But it was worse than that for our team. Star quarterback Teddy Bridgewater was hobbled by a badly sprained ankle, and had a fractured wrist on his nonthrowing hand. It looked as if the Cardinals’ hopes for a BCS appearance were gone. But within a span of thirteen seconds, that all changed. Bridgewater improvised a shovel pass to running back Jeremy Wright for a touchdown. Moments later, Rutgers fumbled the kickoff and a Louisville recovery led to another Bridgewater touchdown pass. Louisville fans went from despair to the Sugar Bowl in a matter of minutes.

At U of L, I’ve gone into the month of February twice in the past three seasons knowing that our team had to win eight out of our final twelve regular-season games to feel confident that we would reach the NCAA Tournament. It’s a high-pressure situation. Usually, things had not gone the way we wanted up to that point. But never once did I think of not succeeding. I worked my one-day contract and practice by practice, game by game, we got to where we set out to go.

Discouragement cannot dictate your actions. People in these times need to redefine what gratification is for them.

Tom Coughlin is a good example. The critics were merciless. But he continued to work his plan for the New York Giants and won a Super Bowl that no one believed he could win.

The movie Lincoln was a box office hit. It’s worth noting that this Kentucky native never won an election in the state of his birth. His political and personal difficulties are sometimes overstated, but it can be fairly said that he suffered both personal and professional setbacks on the way to becoming president of the United States, but did not quit in his quest for public service.

“I am a slow walker,” Lincoln said. “But I never walk backwards.”

Quitting is a deliberate return to square one. In a few cases, it is necessary. There are times when quitting is best for all involved. But for most in our society today, the quitting happens far too soon. Make a promise to yourself now—you’re not going to quit. You might have bad days. You might get to the end of your one-day contract and feel like ripping it up. Don’t quit. Sign another one and keep at it.

EXECUTING THE ONE-DAY CONTRACT

So let’s say you’ve made this agreement with yourself. You’ve signed on the dotted line. What now? You’d better get busy. You have twenty-four hours to demonstrate your worth. The one-day contract forces you to prepare the night before, improving your performance with a plan of action for the following morning.

I am under contract at the University of Louisville until age seventy. But I’ve never paid less attention to a contract than the one I have now.

Starting three years ago, before retiring for bed, I would plan out the strategy for the next day’s practices, and the motivation of all our players. I’m on my one-day contract. It not only stimulates my mind to be the best I can be for that day, but most important, it makes me realize how lucky I am to deal with a remarkable group of young men. I get excited for the next day at work before the day even begins. That makes me plan for every minute. It makes me prepare and it keeps my focus on those areas that I can control, areas that actually matter. I do that every day in this job—I have one day to make this team better, how do I attack it? Everything is organized, down to the texts I send players at night. If the guys had a great practice, I’ll text them saying so, telling them that it’s what I expect of them every day, to get them thinking about the next one-day contract.

This is more than a to-do list. It is a mind-set that you train yourself to develop. Making lists and schedules is a must in leadership. I’ve done that my whole life. But a contract is something more. Think about what a contract entails. First, it is a commitment. You’re signing on to do a job or to accomplish a goal. There are definite terms. It is an agreement to do something. There must be action. Your days of putting things off until tomorrow are over. Often, there are incentives, but at the very least, there is a concrete set of expectations. It’s a binding document, and that’s the essence of what I want you to feel about what you are doing when you wake up in the morning. You are committing yourself. When you sit down to negotiate a contract, your priorities must be clear in your mind. And when crafting your one-day contract, you will want to think about not only what tasks you want to complete or actions you want to take, but about what mind-set you want to instill, and what you are building toward in your day’s work. And finally, there’s an element of evaluation. Did you complete the tasks? On a to-do list, you might or might not get through your list. With a one-day contract, we’re going to work on making your expectations manageable but achievable, and toward a larger end. Contracts can be altered, changed, or renegotiated, but they are always about getting the most out of your abilities. A contract is a daily challenge, and that contract that you are writing with yourself is about getting the most out of yourself every day, and getting the most out of your potential.

More than just mapping out your list of tasks for the next day, you should map out how you want to approach the day and its challenges, as well. In his blog on procrastination (at Procrastinus.com), Piers Steel cited a study by researchers for the Academy of Management Perspectives journal that surveyed two-hundred-plus working professionals. Workers who reported lower levels of fatigue and more energy used the following techniques at work: Learn something new, focus on what gives me joy in work, set a new goal, do something that will make a colleague happy, make time to show gratitude to someone I work with, seek feedback, reflect on how I make a difference at work, reflect on the meaning of my work.

As you build your one-day contract, these are things you might have in mind as guidelines. In addition to plotting out your day’s strategy, remember to spread these things into your day. I had not seen this list until putting this book together, but I recognize many of these items, because they are things I find myself doing.

On the other side of the equation, the following actions are those that were found among workers who reported higher levels of fatigue: drinking caffeinated beverages, talking to someone about common interests, listening to music, surfing the Web, checking and sending personal e-mail or text messages, making plans for the evening or weekend, daydreaming, and shopping.

Here is how a typical plan in the one-day contract mind-set works for me, and I will use our first day of practice before the 2012–13 season as an example. Keep in mind, my goals are firmly in place—to focus squarely on the day at hand, to build a team toward national championship level, and to establish a positive environment around our program:

ONE-DAY CONTRACT: RICK PITINO

Terms: To lay the groundwork for a championship program, set a tone for improving from last season’s Final Four run, and instill energy and a championship mind-set in players and coaches.

Points of emphasis: To be primarily positive in interactions with players and coaches; to listen; to improve on every single element of the day over the same day last season.

Schedule

6:30 a.m.—Meet with coaching staff. Be positive and energetic so that they will feed off that energy; challenge every coach to be better and have more of an impact on the program than they had last season.

7:15–7:45 a.m.—Meet with team trainers and strength and conditioning coaches. Listen to their input on where the team stands from a health and conditioning standpoint. Get them to buy into a one-day contract that challenges them to come up with innovative ways to improve our strength and conditioning. Leave them with this thought: If it’s not broken, break it and make it better. We will have to do this if we want to reach championship level.

8:00–8:42 a.m.—First individual instruction session, with point guards. Emphasis will be on positive instruction and improving on workouts from a season ago. Go into each workout with the goal that it will be the best I have ever conducted.

9:00–9:42 a.m.—Individual instruction with shooting guards and wing players.

10:00–10:42 a.m.—Individual instruction with power forwards.

11:00–11:42 a.m.—Individual instruction with centers. The contract for each session of individual instruction is the same.

Noon–1 p.m.—Have my smoothie for lunch, and exercise for one hour. Last season, I exercised for forty-five minutes, this year it will be for one hour. Even though I’m one year older, I had already planned to make it one year better.

You can see as this unfolds, that the plan isn’t just a list of tasks, but that there is meaning behind what I am doing, there is a motivational element, and that I am already writing into my contract from Day One the elements of improvement that will be needed for a championship season.

1:30–2:45 p.m.—Watch video. I committed to watching at least forty-five minutes of video per day, either of our workouts from the current season, game video, or tape of last season. I’ll also do any additional organizing needed for the rest of the day.

3:00–3:15 p.m.—During this time each day, I will speak to our team for fifteen minutes on a different topic. It’s just a little time to motivate our guys to be the best they can be between the lines, and to teach.

3:15–5:15 p.m.—Practice. These sessions are highly organized in themselves, with each drill and scrimmage scheduled down to the minute. They are crafted in consultation with our coaching staff to maximize all of the limited practice time we are permitted to have by NCAA rules. In addition, I have committed to make our practices more positive and energetic than they have been in the past. I approach these no differently from games. I need to be at my best, and diligent with each fundamental. This is part of my one-day contract. Attitude and approach to practice time might seem like something that could be taken for granted after as many years as I’ve been coaching, and it is. That is a danger. It’s why I write into the one-day contract that I should be as passionate and serious about creating great practices as I ever have been.

5:30–6:30—Meet as a staff to review the practice. Again, this is a heavy listening session for me, to hear what the staff thought of practice, and then weigh in myself with what I thought.

Evening—I plan dinner with my wife, and after that to handle recruiting phone calls and text messages. Later, the plan for the next day is devised in the same way, renewing the one-day contract, evaluating how things went earlier in the day, thinking about ways tomorrow can be better, and then planning concrete actions to make it better.

Points to consider at the end of the day: Was I positive enough with staff and team? Did I improve upon the same days from last season? What does tomorrow’s plan look like? If I were my boss, what would I say?

The contract, then, is more than a checklist of things to work through. It is a way to conduct yourself through the day. It sets your agenda and drives your actions. And it holds you to a high standard, which you renew daily.

My son Ryan is a good example of the right kind of approach. He’s a twenty-two-year-old who is trying to make it in a Wall Street–type environment. We’ve talked about the nature of his business, and the knowledge that you’re only as good as your last trade, and that you should keep yourself on a one-day contract.

So what does he do? He tries to be the earliest to work. He’s prepared and he’s early. All day, he asks questions, probing his more experienced coworkers as to how things could be done differently if they happen to go wrong or learning about what went right in the successful deals. I encourage him to find the people with experience and ask, “Can I buy you a drink after work? I’d like to get your insight on some things.” Then pick that person’s brain. I tell him to network. And even if people can’t take you up on the invitation, many will appreciate the indication that their opinion is valued.

If they do accept the invitation, listen to what they have to say, don’t try to give them the answers. So many young people today try to give you answers to the questions they have. Maybe that comes from insecurity, or the need to be seen as smart, but there’s nothing better than listening. At the end of the day, I’m always asking Ryan if he sent a text thanking whomever he went to learn from that evening.

If you are a leader holding yourself to the one-day contract standard, you can share it with those people who work with or for you.

When I met with our players after their Final Four trip in 2012, I asked them what they thought of the Final Four and they all said, “It was a wonderful experience.” And every one of them said, “We’ve got to win the championship next year.” Now, everybody says that, if you poll any team. But I asked our guys, “How do we bring it to the next level?” And I let the goals come from them. As a leader, if you can let your people state the goals, then you’re in a better position to do your job, which is coming up with the plan for how to go about it.

It’s interesting. Sometimes as a leader you can state a goal for your team, organization, or sales force, and they’ll think it’s too tough to meet, or too unrealistic. But if you first ask those same people to come up with a realistic goal, they’ll come up with the same thing you would have. And if they come up with a goal, you have a better chance of meeting it. Red Auerbach always told me he never would diagram plays in the huddle. He would say, “Russ [Bill Russell] or Cous [Bob Cousy], what do you think we should run?” He’d get suggestions, and then he’d choose the play. He would pick a different guy in every huddle, then go with his advice. He felt that once they made the suggestion, they were committed because they all were involved in the process. As a leader, the one-day contract can be of benefit not only to you personally but to those people under you. And it begins more effectively if those people are the ones stating the goals. Once they state them, you can follow along and bring them into your own success strategy by saying, “Here is our series of one-day contracts. Can we meet these day to day?”

I’ve always been very much into time management and looking for more efficient ways to do things. The one-day contract has been one of the best I’ve encountered in helping me to focus, and to make the most of the present. Whether you’re working for yourself, or part of a team, if you hold yourself to a one-day contract there is no choice but to do it now where your goals and ideas are concerned. If you procrastinate, you fall behind in the race. The one-day contract mentality also will force you to be organized and to prioritize your efforts. That thought you put into your success, combined with your preparation, will breed confidence. It will help you see results, but also to keep any results in perspective. The one-day contract makes you more interested in your process and leaves you less likely to be thrown into discouragement or overconfidence, regardless of the final score.

Life isn’t about having the perfect position or job that is made for you. More often, it’s about succeeding at the job given to you, and it is about building your résumé and reputation in order to climb the next rung.

Do this today: Sign a one-day contract with yourself, then earn another day. Write your plan down. Account for the hours of your day on paper. Start with the basics, then refine it as you get used to the practice. At the end of the day, try to be honest with yourself. Ask yourself candidly, “Was this effort enough? Did I earn another day?” If you did, you’re on your way. If you didn’t quite earn it, tomorrow you will get closer, or get it right.

Work as if your future depends on it—because it does. See difficult circumstances less as dead ends than as turning points. And remember that victory is closer than you think. In all areas of your life, your health, your family, your job, the stakes are too important. You can’t pack up and go home. Dig in and start your comeback.