Any Given Sunday was a big movie when it came out in 1999. In the movie, Al Pacino coached an American football team, and apparently, they were going through a rough patch. I am not a sports movie fan and never bothered to see it. But recently, I heard an excerpt from an Al Pacino team talk in the movie.
And it is right up there with Rev. Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech!
(Read in Al Pacino's voice)
Because in either game
life or football
the margin for error is so small.
I mean
one-half step too late or too early
you don't quite make it.You know, when you get old in life...
You find out that life is just a game of inches.
The inches we need are everywhere around us.
They are in every break of the game
every minute, every second.On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch.
Cause we know when we add up all those inches that's going to make the fucking difference between WINNING and LOSING
between LIVING and DYING.http://essaysfromexodus.scripting.com/stories/storyReader$1492
Okay, maybe this isn't in the same sphere as the speech that shaped civil rights for millions of blacks in a segregated America. But I think it provides a valuable lesson on how to win an American football game.
American football is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with possession of the oval-shaped football, attempts to advance down the field by running with the ball or passing it, while the defense, the team without possession of the ball, aims to stop the offense's advance and to take control of the ball for themselves. The offense must advance at least ten yards in four downs or plays; if they fail, they turn over the football to the defense, but if they succeed, they are given a new set of four downs to continue the drive. Points are scored primarily by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone for a touchdown or kicking the ball through the opponent's goalposts for a field goal.
The team with the most points at the end of a game wins.
Inch by inch
play by play
Beyond football, what if winning is about adding up small improvements every day?
Author James Clear tells this story in his Best seller Atomic Habits
Since 1908, British riders had won just a single gold medal at the Olympic Games, and they had fared even worse in cycling’s biggest race, the Tour de France. In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the event.
In 2003, Dave Brailsford was hired to put British Cycling on a new trajectory. What made him different from previous coaches was his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do.
Just five years after Brailsford took over, during the ten years from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships and 66 Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and captured 5 Tour de France victories in what is widely regarded as the most successful run in cycling history.
Here's his punchline:
If you get one percent better each day for one year, you'll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.
Imagine a toddler. Every day it grows a bit. But it impossible to measure this bitesize growth. However, after a year, you can see a significant difference in its height.
Many companies have adopted this approach of making small continuous improvements with great success. Most notably, Toyota employs this philosophy within its organization and has esteemed it as one of its core values. Within its production system, Toyota encourages and empowers all employees to identify areas of potential improvement and create viable solutions.
Toyota has 364,445 employees worldwide and is the second-largest in the world behind Volkswagen, based on 2018 unit sales.
James Clear believes we can make tiny continuous improvement a personal habit.
Measure backwards.
What did you do last week? How can you improve by just a little bit this week?
In the beginning, making a choice that is 1 percent better won't impact you very much today. But as time goes on, these small improvements compound and you suddenly find a very big gap between people who make slightly better decisions daily and those who don't.
Final note
Avoid what didn't work.
In many cases, improvement is not about doing more things right, but about doing fewer things wrong.
It's remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to consistently not be stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. - Charles Munger, Berkshire Hathaway co- chair
Let's end how we began.
Al Pacino take it from here.
I don't know what to say really.
Three minutes
to the biggest battle of our professional lives
all comes down to today.
Either
we heal
as a team
or we are going to crumble.
Inch by inch
play by play
till we're finished.
We are in hell right now, gentlemen
believe me
and
we can stay here
and get the shit kicked out of us
or
we can fight our way
back into the light.
We can climb out of hell.
One inch, at a time.