Finding Your Trophy

Thoughts on Champions & Championships

I am not a basketball fan. I didn’t watch a single NCAA or NBA regular season game. I don’t care about the NBA Draft. I’m mildly curious about who is a free agent. In essence, it is the opposite of my admitted love affair with football. But I am a huge fan of stories. So I do watch a bit of March Madness. And I will try to watch every playoff game that LeBron James plays in. His story fascinates me. I can’t think of another sports figure in the last 30 years where so much was expected of them, yet has been so divisive. Watching him carry off the NBA Championship trophy in one arm and the series MVP trophy in the other inspired me to snap the above picture of my TV screen. But this post really isn’t an analysis of LeBron and his accomplishments, place in history, analysis of his detractors, etc. It’s about taking his story and applying a few lessons to the stories of you and me.Two requests …

First, if you just have surface awareness of the impact of this NBA Championship on the Cleveland area and LeBron’s role in the story, please read this article called “Titles and Tears” by Joe Posnanski. Second, if you are anti-professional sports, I highly encourage you to?—?at least for this post- set aside negative biases about sports, professional athletes, etc.

On to my thoughts …

There are four elements to the story of Cleveland, LeBron and an NBA Championship that we can apply to our lives as human, leaders, entrepreneurs, etc. Not coincidentally, these somewhat sync up with the“Hero’s Journey” model first outlined in 1949 by Joseph Campbell in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”.

• Accept Your Greatest Gift. I absolutely believe that each of us are born with a unique gift that puts us on a path to being a champion at something. I believe it is the role of each human to find this gift, accept it and convert it to value in the world. Unfortunately, many people never go on this journey?—?due to conditions, lack of nurturing or too much nurturing. Those that do go on this journey often miss the gift because it doesn’t match the story they’ve been telling themselves. Or when faced with the gift, they reject because it is too hard or too terrifying. Marianne Williamson sums it up nicely: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. When LeBron was in high school, he had “Chosen 1” tattooed across his back. Many people make the false claim that this was a sign of an inflated ego. It was not. It was a literal sign of accepting his greatest gift.
• Find Your “Cleveland”. Hardship breeds warriors. It is no coincidence that so many 19th and 20th century leaders came from hardship: military, factories, poverty, pioneers, racism et al. Too many of us want to be champions without every having to overcome anything. From Nick Offerman in his book “Gumption”: Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. This doesn’t mean accept your lot in life and just grind yourself in to powder. In LeBron’s story, he was roundly criticized for leaving Cleveland, but while he was gone, he won two championships and became a markedly better leader and more rounded player. Then he came back.
• Learn From Failures. I’ve had many people say they can’t be an entrepreneur because they’re “afraid of failure”. My response is always this: “You can’t be an entrepreneur because you are a huge narcissist.” Show me your relationship with failure and I will show you your capacity to be a champion. Simply put, Champions fail. And fail and fail and fail and fail. It is the crucible of failure that purifies skills, tests commitment, inspires creative thinking and creates resilience. Again, you can do your own research on LeBron’s failures and growth but I will give his average stat line across the 7 games of this Championship series: 29.7 points, 11.3 rebounds, 8.9 assists, 2.6 steals, and 2.3 blocks per gameThat’s a stat line of learning you don’t win Championships by just scoring the most points as an individual.
• Define Your Championship. In Angela Duckworth’s book “Grit”, Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll says that the key to being a champion is a “top level goal that ends in a period.” This is defining in your life what a “championship” means for you. As a young father, I had a commission sales job in the mid 90’s. My top level goal shifted from survival to simple top level goals that ended in periods. The first one I established is this: “Make enough money to hire someone else to mow my lawn”. And I got there! I continue this practice to this day. Without a clear, definable goal that includes a “trophy”, we tend to drift. For LeBron it was simple. “Bring a Championship to Cleveland.” Period. And this clip explains how he felt about it (skip to 3:56 if you don’t want to watch the entire clip):

A bonus 5th point: Winning Creates Haters

Becoming a champion your way always causes divisiveness and agitation in a few relationships. Insecure people don’t like to be reminded that they don’t have what it takes to be a champion. And the “what it takes” isn’t talent or resources but drive and commitment. They want a winner as long it doesn’t remind them of their own weaknesses. Further, many people are agitated by those that win and celebrate in non-traditional or “unacceptable” ways. This is reflected in the vitriol directed at LeBron and produced similar hate for Tim Tebow, Cam Newton and Richard Sherman to name a few.

I will leave you with this …

Becoming a Champion requires surrendering the role of author and accepting the role of main character in your story. This shift changes everything because it moves you from insecurity to humility, from doing to acting, from fear to courage, from ego to being. And in doing so, you hoist the ultimate trophy over your head: living a life that inspires others to do the same.