How to Succeed at Contrivance

Winners never quit publishing.Title [Football]: “Earn the Right to Win: How Success in Any Field Starts with Superior Preparation”

Title [Basketball]: “Toughness: Developing True Strength On and Off the Court”

Authors: Tom Coughlin and David Fisher [Football]; Jay Bilas and Coach K [Basketball]

Ranks: 18 [Football]; 29 [Basketball]

Blurb [Football]: “Preparation is easy to praise but very hard to master. No modern coach, in any sport, understands that better than NFL veteran Tom Coughlin… Now Coughlin shares his best advice and anecdotes and shows how they apply beyond the gridiron.”

Blurb [Basketball]: “Through his ups and downs, on and off the court, Jay learned the true meaning of toughness from coaches, teammates, and colleagues. Now, he discusses this misunderstood — yet vital — attribute and how it contributes to winning in sports and in life.”

Additional Blurb [Football]: “Earn the Right to Win can help you master a winning combination: preparation, smart decision making, and toughness in the face of adversity.”

Review [Basketball]: “On the topic of toughness, Jay KNOWS toughness.”

Customers Also Bought [Football]: “Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization” by John Wooden

Customers Also Bought [Basketball]: “Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success Playbook: Applying the Pyramid of Success to Your Life” by John Wooden

Footnote: If your life is an arbitrary rule-bound bureaucracy, a better guide might be Kafka.

Earn the Right to Win [Amazon]

Toughness [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

7 Comments

Sport as life? Really?

This is almost as funny as watching Bidniz Skule students try to read Sun Tzu without the imagination/intellect to alter what a genius wrote about warfare and apply it to 20th/21st century bidniz.

Of course if they had imagination/intellect then more than likely they wouldn’t be bidniz skule students.

In an unrelated topic, I didn’t realize that this weekend was fucking daylight savings time. Goes to show what I get for not watching local newz anymore.

You can’t mock Coach Wooden around here. How many basketball national championships does Oregon have? Sincerely, Dodger, UCLA 1972, 1975.

@Dodgerblue: 1939. The first one. No matter what happens, we’ll always be at the top of the list.

Sports – a genetic lottery to begin with, then a series of breaks. Who knows? The QB who could save my Jets might be an accounting major at U Mass who went out for high school baseball, didn’t make it, and gave up on sports.

@nojo: Actually Oregon is at the bottom of the list which is normally headed by the most recent champion. Maybe not in Oregon.

So, two more guys who have been pretty successful (NFL head coach Coughlin is 151-121, Bilas has a nice job at ESPN), highly paid cogs in the great American sports machine add their two cents on how to live your life. Have either done anything more consequential than being middle managers? No. Is a life completely meaningless without sports what I am looking for? No. Thanks but no thanks.

@Dave H: In Oregon, #1 comes first.

And yes, any sports-book life advice boils down to Steve Martin’s lesson in How to Be a Millionaire: First, get a million dollars.

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