Quotes from Jon Gordon
Death Valley sunrise, June 2022
Quotes from "You Win in the Locker Room First" by Jon Gordon and Mike Smith.
Success happens by focusing on the process, not the outcome. Learn to enjoy the process.
Love the process and you’ll love what the process produces.
You win by cultivating the right culture, leadership, expectations, beliefs, mindset, relationships, and habits before you even play the game.
Culture drives expectations and beliefs; expectations and beliefs drive behavior; behavior drives habits; and habits create the future. It all starts with culture.
Everyone in an organization shapes the culture. We want an organization that is great on and off the field.
Every week you will face difficult circumstances that are completely out of your control. It is your culture that will be the driving force to create the resiliency, toughness, passion, and attitude to overcome the obstacles in your way.
Seven responsibilities:
Have fun, work hard, and enjoy the journey.
Show respect for every person you have contact with in the organization.
Put the team first. Successful teams have teammates that are unselfish and willing to put their individual goals behind the team goals.
Do your job. It is defined, but you must always be prepared for it to change.
Appropriately handle victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation. Do not get too high in victory or too low in defeat. Be the same person every day.
Understand that all organizational decisions aim to make the team better, stronger, and more efficient.
Have a positive attitude. Use positive language (both verbal and body language).
Every team has the same goals, so it’s not your goals that will lead you to success but your commitment to the process, one game (rehearsal) at a time, that will define your season.
Research from Harvard University supports the idea that the emotions you feel are contagious and affect the people around you. Each member of your team is contagious and every day you all are either sharing positive or negative energy with each other. Great cultures are built with positive contagious energy.
People are most energized when they are contributing to a bigger cause beyond themselves.
One of the most important things a leader must do is to be positive and optimistic.
Never a bad day; only bad moments.
Every moment of the day someone on the team or organization is taking cues from you.
One person can’t make a team, but one person can break a team.
No complaining. If you have a complaint, also bring a suggested solution to the complaint.
If you are complaining, you are not leading. If you are leading, you are not complaining.
It’s not OK to be moody.
Every team and organization must guard against the disease of complacency. Each year, the best teams recommit themselves to being better than they were the year before. Past success does not determine future success. Future success is the result of how you work, prepare, and practice and how you strive to improve each day.
Be humble. Don’t think you know it all. See yourself as a lifelong learner who is always seeking ways to learn, grow, and improve.
Humility doesn’t mean that you think less of yourself. It just means you think of yourself less.
Make your next work your best work.
Be willing to pay the price that greatness requires. Don’t be average. Strive to be great.
Great leaders know that their job is to serve their teams.
True greatness is achieved when a leader brings out the greatness in others.
Shout praise in public and whisper criticism in private.
Relationships are the foundation upon which winning teams are built, and all great relationships are based on value, respect, love, trust, and care.
If you want to win, don’t focus on winning. Focus on the culture, people, and process that produces wins.
Never underestimate the importance of making time to make someone feel special.
Talent without character is like a race car with no steering wheel. It looks great from the outside and drives fast, but without something guiding it, a crash is very likely.