Hitting Your Target

Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out.

Robert Collier

John Wooden won 10 NCAA Basketball Championships (the most in history) over a span of just 12 years. You would think this might be due to better in-game strategies, better recruits, or more complex practices and drills. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

To summarize his ideology, the first practice he held each year was on one subject… How to tie your shoes.

He believed if you didn’t tie your shoes well your feet might slide around in them during practice causing injury and blisters. If you were injured and couldn’t practice, you wouldn’t perform at your best in games. If the team isn’t at their best, you lose games. If you lose games, you’re not going to win a conference championship, let alone a national championship.

He showed his players that on any given day, we are only as good as how we perform our smallest tasks – that the fundamentals become the foundation for success.

By hitting our small targets, we hit our bigger goals.

While having coffee with one of my mentors, she drew something simple on my notebook. She drew a circle and within it, a bullseye. This simple figure helped me understand where true success stems from.

She pointed at the circle and said this is what we try to hit each day. Right here, this is “good.” These are our daily fundamentals. She then gestured at the bullseye within the circle and told me this is “brilliant.”

This is what we attain when we’ve hit the target enough times with our consistent hard work.

Brilliance often happens by accident. Hitting the target day after day makes us accident-prone.

So I asked, “How do we attain brilliance? How do we hit the bullseye?”

She shot imaginary arrow after arrow. Some were hitting the target and others weren’t. She showed this with dots on the page.

As she did this, more and more arrows hit the target. Soon most of the shots were hitting the target and consequently as the misses narrowed, more shots were hitting the bullseye too.

Each arrow was an action I was or could be taking, whether that was meditating, taking a deep breath in an argument, eating healthy, working out or any other healthy habit you can think of. All of these actions were moving me toward a set goal that I had determined in life, love, work, health, etc.

Excellence then is just a by-product of repeating the same healthy habits and actions day in and day out.

If you look at any athlete who is at the top of their game you’ll notice one common thread. Yes, they may have a higher peak than most, but more than anything, their bad days are better than everyone else’s. That is because they have the mental scaffolding that keeps them from falling too far when they’re not at their best.

Success and brilliance in our life is then accomplished through the consistency in which we perform the smallest of actions, and when we fail we don’t beat ourselves up. Rather, we say we’re getting better and learn from the lesson.

Our progress as a person fuels our momentum. Our growth compounds.

As we have goals for the many different areas of our life, ask this one question for each of them: What’s one thing I could do today that would help me get better – to help hit my target?

Although there are many common elements that I know help, each day I have a different answer to this question. On some days this might look like meditation and spending time with family and on others, it may be waking up at 6 am to go for a run.

Do the most YOU can do. There’s no need to compare yourself to others. My fundamentals allow me to only compare myself to who I was yesterday. My singular goal is to approach the ebbs and flows of life, of success and failure, better than I did the day before.

In a recent interview with one of John Wooden’s former players, they said, “I don’t remember anyone ever getting blisters.”