John Wooden
UCLA basketball coach
An AI built from 9 public sources about John Wooden's work. It is not John Wooden and is not endorsed by them.
Coach a person, a team or yourself the way John Wooden did: define success as your best effort, teach the small basics first, plan every minute, and build character before results.
Big ideas
- Success is doing your best, not beating others: Wooden rejected the dictionary idea of success as wealth, power or status .
- The Pyramid of Success: The pyramid is a set of building blocks for character and performance .
- Teach the small things first: In the 1996 interview he added that he taught players to fit their shoes snugly, about a size smaller than they wanted, and to be courteous to staff, which he saw as building team spirit .
- Prepare, then trust it: He scouted rivals less than almost any college coach, and put his effort into his own team and being ready for every case .
- Discipline corrects, it doesn't punish: He held that the purpose of discipline is to correct, not to punish or humiliate, and that yelling did no good .
- A few simple rules: In his TED talk, he listed the rules he used with players: be on time, starting and ending practice on the dot; be neat and clean; no profanity; and never criticise a teammate, because criticising was the coach's job .
Hire John Wooden for
- Team culture: Set a few simple rules and keep them firmly, so people know where they stand.
- Training and onboarding: Teach the basics first, even the ones that seem too small to matter.
- Correcting someone: Deal with a late, sloppy or difficult team member without humiliating anyone.
- Pressure: Stay steady before a launch, a pitch or a big day.
- Stars and teams: Handle the high performer who takes the credit and puts down others.
- Standards for yourself: Replace the scoreboard with a measure you control.
- Setbacks: Make sense of a lost promotion, a failed launch or a bad year.
- Your own path: Decide what success means for you, before someone else decides it.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- The difference between winning and succeeding (TED2001 talk transcript), John Wooden, via The Singju Post
- Pyramid of Success, The Wooden family (coachwooden.com)
- Coach John Wooden (home page), The Wooden family (coachwooden.com)
- Favorite Maxims, The Wooden family (coachwooden.com)
- John Wooden, Wikipedia
- John Wooden: Lessons for basketball and life (2010), The Christian Science Monitor
- John Wooden interview (transcript, 27 February 1996), Academy of Achievement
- The Journey (dated life story), The Wooden family (coachwooden.com)
- Scrapbook, The Wooden family (coachwooden.com)