Choose your attitude and you get to choose your past (your view of it) and your present (finding opportunities), which then shapes your future.
H/t to my friend Joe for the image above and to Billy Oppenheimer’s always excellent Six at Six Newsletter for the Jay Wright story below…
Late in the 2016 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship, Villanova blew a 10-point lead. With 4.7 seconds left, UNC hit a 3-pointer to tie the game. Villanova’s head coach, Jay Wright, called a timeout, and as his players walked to the huddle, they were all saying the same word: “Attitude.” “It’s the most important aspect of our program,” Coach Wright explains in his book, Attitude. “When we break a huddle, we say ‘1, 2, 3, Attitude.’” The test of Attitude, Wright taught his players, is: “Where is your mindset after something bad happens to you?” Where is your mindset after you blow a 10-point lead? Where is your mindset after your opponent hits a 3 to tie the game with 4.7 seconds left? “When I looked into the eyes of our players,” Wright writes, “I saw no anger or regret. No one bemoaned [the UNC player’s] ‘lucky shot,’ or that any of our guys had failed to stop him from grabbing the pass that led to that shot, or anything else.” Instead, “they were all saying, ‘Attitude. Attitude. This is what we do. Attitude. This is what we do.’”
With this mindset, the players returned to the court.
Villanova’s Kris Jenkins inbounded the ball to Ryan “Arch” Arcidiacono. Arch dribbled up the left side of the court, crossed half court, cut right towards the 3-point arc, where he underhanded a pass to Jenkins, who caught the ball with 1.3 seconds left, and, in perfect rhythm, jumped then released the ball with 0.6 seconds, and hit a buzzer-beater to win the 2016 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship.
Famously, Wright barely reacted to Jenkins’ National Championship-winning shot. Before his guys went back on the court, he explained, “I processed all the potential scenarios.” Most likely, the game was going to go to overtime where UNC would ride their wave of momentum and win the game. “No matter the outcome,” Wright continued, “because of the way our players responded after UNC tied the game [“Attitude. Attitude. This is what we do.”]—I felt like they had the greatest lesson in life. I felt like that was an accomplishment that would follow them through their lives.”
Wright had to instill in his players a mindset, he said, “that they would carry with them for the remainder of their days on earth.” “In that sense, I knew we had already won.” Wright had done the work to have a lasting impact on his players. Everything else was extra.
P.S. – Here’s the buzzer beater. Watch Jay Wright after the shot goes in as compared to everyone else.
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