The other morning National Public Radio (NPR) featured an interesting interview with football coach Gary Patterson of Texas Christian University (TCU). Now TCU has always had respectable sports programs. But a National Championship caliber football program? No. Not until this year. As of this writing, TCU has just completed a perfect, undefeated season and is ranked 4th nationally—behind the likes of perennial powerhouses Alabama and Texas.
So what moved TCU from respectable to remarkable? According to NPR, it was a transformation in Coach Patterson. What changed was his focus. In Coach Patterson’s own words “I’m not going to keep talking about, well, if you don’t do this you’re going to get beat. That’s something maybe Gary Patterson in earlier years would have done to make myself feel better. That not what I’m going to do. I’m going to talk about the positives and what we need to do to win this ballgame. And maybe that’s why this team changed, because I’m not dealing with negatives all the time.”
To put it another way, success isn’t built on negatives and what you don’t do. Rather, accomplishments follow positive actions—what you do. Strategies filled with things not to do or to avoid pale in comparison to strategies comprised of things to do to make things happen they way you want them to happen. Winning is the result of positive, productive action. I think the coaches, players and fans of TCU will tell you that.
