Triumphing over tragedies is not common for many reasons. Partly because many of us accept tragedy as a final verdict. Something that cannot be changed. Many of us also find great shame and embarrassment in our tragedies. Therefore, these experiences are kept in silence and privacy. And regrettably when this is the case, we don’t have to deal with them.

Sports on the other hand, provides great life lessons on the public stage. There is no hiding the results. Because sports are played in the public arena, regardless of how big or small the crowd is.
the highs and lows are there for everyone to see. In sports there are clear results, winners and losers, opportunities to perform and be on stage, and therefore to be evaluated and judged.  While performance in real life is not quite as clear cut or easy to evaluate as a game, a tournament or a season, we can still learn great lessons and improve our lives by looking at the stories and lessons available through sports and how athletes and teams move beyond tragedy to triumph.

This year’s NCAA Division I Men’s basketball championship tournament provides one such story.  What’s unique about this year’s champion, the University of Virginia men’s basketball team, is that they did what no other team had done before, went from tragedy to triumph in a single year.

The 2019 version of Virginia’s basketball team triumphed with their first ever NCAA basketball championship.  This came on the heels of 2018 when the unthinkable happened and they experienced the tragedy of being the first ever #1 seeded team to lose to a #16 seed team. If you know anything about college basketball, it is a real-life David and Goliath story, with Virginia playing the role of Goliath.  A defeat that isn’t supposed to happen. A defeat that not only knocked them out of the championship tournament but humiliated the team in the process.

But this isn’t a story about defeat. It’s a story about triumph. About getting up when knocked down, owning your past, learning from it, and achieving what you are capable of. From ultimate tragedy to ultimate triumph in one year’s time. A story of refusing to be defined by a tragedy and pushing on to Triumph.  

The Virginia basketball team could have chosen to sulk and wallow in their humiliating defeat. Many people do. For some it’s difficult to let failures go, to move on. Many of us treat a single event or set-back as a verdict, the fates telling us “it is meant to be, you can’t achieve what you really want”. We let the event define us. We become known as the person, group, or team that can’t get over the hump, can’t win the big one, can’t pull it off, can’t deliver or be counted on. You know the types, they have a reputation, a history that has been built one day, one event, one game at a time. People who allow their past to define their future. Just when they think they’re going to get over the hump the past comes back to greet them.   You know these people, maybe you are one of them.

However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, like the Virginia basketball team, you can choose to be different, to learn from your past, to correct mistakes, to improve in areas of weakness, to apply strengths in different ways and to use your past as motivation. That’s what the Virginia basketball team did, and you can too.

The first step is to recognize that failures and set-backs are a normal part of life. That many highly successful people have failed and it didn’t define them and failure doesn’t need to define you. It’s important to recognize that failure is okay, if we learn from it. We must get over the mind-set that failures and set-backs are permanent judgements on our value and abilities. Sometimes we unwittingly undermine our own success, because acting consistent with our past is easier, more comfortable and requires far less effort than making positive changes. Even though we wish we were different we subconsciously fall back to what we’ve always done.  Afterall, once we’ve failed or underperformed, it’s easier to do it the next time and the time after that. We allow our past performance to define us by accepting the same behaviors of our past.

The alternative is to accept the outcomes of the past as learning opportunities to guide us in the future. It’s a completely different mindset on failures and set-backs and foreign to many of us. It’s not a mindset that comes naturally. Most of us must work at accepting our failures and learn from them. We need to ask ourselves, what did we do wrong that led to the unsuccessful outcome? What can we do differently next time? What did we learn and how are we growing from it? Can we seek the assistance of others and get their perspective? There are lessons in failures and success if we step back and reflect on them. For those that seek the lessons of our past there are great rewards.    

Another important lesson the 2019 Virginia basketball team provides us is to use the past as motivation for the future.  Motivation comes from many sources. Motivation from a loss or failure is as good as any. History is full of people that were motivated by failures.

Virginia used the critics, the questions, the haters as motivation to demonstrate what they were really made of and capable of. We can all have a bad day, a bad game, a bad paper, a bad (fill in the blank). Clearly Virginia did a year ago when they lost to the #16 seed. However, did that mean they weren’t a good basketball team? Only the Virginia basketball team could answer that and answer they did.  Virginia didn’t allow the loss to define them or keep them stuck in the past. Instead, they used the loss as fuel to be more focused, to work on the small things, to take advantage of opportunities, to keep their chins up and persevere when things looked impossible.

So where are you?  How do you take failures and set backs? Are you being defined by your past? Are you sabotaging yourself? None of us are perfect that’s for sure. Failures and setbacks do hurt, they’re difficult to overcome. Still, when life seems to be filled with more tragedies than triumphs, remind yourself:  

• Failures and set-backs are normal events and need only be a part of your bigger story. Your choose how your story will be written, make that tragedy the pivotal turning point.  
• Failures should be accepted as learning opportunities. All of us, including many of the most important figures in history, faced tragedies and learned to do a course correction and move on to triumph, you can too.
• Use failures and set-backs as motivation.  There is nothing wrong in using a failure as motivation unless it is with malicious intent. Sometime its just the fuel we need to finally make that change.  

Remind yourself of these bullets the next time you face the tragedy of a failure or a set-back. Remember, tragedies are common, positive responses to them are not and will help set you apart.  

I just returned from a conference where I heard several inspiring speakers. On this particular occasion I heard from a former lead fighter pilot for the Blue Angels, Super Bowl winning NFL quarterback, world champion boxer and brand icon, a couple of CEOs and board chairmen. They all delivered impressive messages, some inspiring, some insightful.

As I sat and listened to these speakers and looked around the large audiences, I asked myself, what are the people in the audience getting from these messages? How will these messages change the way they live, work, and play? Afterall, we are not fighter pilots, or NFL quarterbacks, or heavy weight champs, or CEOs or Board Chairs. These speakers have achieved incredibly success and have reached heights many of us have only dreamed of. Their presentations are about high performing teams, highly talented companies, and incredible situations that most of us will rarely find ourselves in. Can the mere mortals in the audiences use the same success formulas and expect the same results?

I emphatically say YES. There is one thing we all have in common with these speakers, a common denominator that runs through their messages but is sometimes hidden. There is one thing we all control as humans, one thing we all control that has the power to define our success.  

That one thing is Ourselves. 

You see, before these accomplished speakers could control their jets, control a huddle, control a company, control their board and investors, they had to learn to control themselves, exercising discipline and putting in the work to advance on their chosen paths. The same control that lies within each and everyone of us.  True many of them may have special talents, but special talent is rarely developed into greatness. They may have had fortunate timing and opportunities, but good timing and opportunities don’t come in nicely labeled packages. It’s only when preparation and hard work transform them into ‘big breaks’. Thomas Edison is famous for saying, “Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

We, like the performers on stage, have the same tools to control our destinies. We just need to know how to use them. What we see on stage is the finished product, the goal achieved, the objective met, the game won. What we don’t see are those speakers standing at the same cross-road we find ourselves at when we are short of a goal or deciding if a goal should be pursued. Do we keep pressing on and fight through the obstacle, the discomfort, the sacrifice? Or do we give up? We know those speakers did or they wouldn’t be standing on the stage.

If we all have this same ability to control our destinies by controlling ourselves what are the secrets that make the difference for some, that allow some to stand on a stage and tell their stories?  Here are the keys used by the successful that are available to all but used by few. They . . .

Trust the process

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable

Accept failures and setbacks as part of the process

Seek support and assistance

That’s it. They sound simple and they are. You see success isn’t complicated. It’s more about controlling yourself and putting in the work than fancy forumlas. If we all took advantage of these tools far more success would come our way. Each of these items needs to be discussed in more detail and and will in future blog posts.

For now, know that you too can stand on that proverbial stage and tell your story if you utilize these common denominators. 

To improve your judgement and decision making use Occam’s Razor:

Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

In my own words Occam’s Razor is: don’t overthink it, the obvious solution is almost always the correct solution. March Madness provides a great example of overthinking and proving the effectiveness of Occam’s Razor. Let me explain.

My family created a basketball pool for March Madness, the NCAA Division I basketball championship tournament played over the course of three weeks. Each participant in the pool completes on online bracket by predicting the winner of each game. The predicted winners advance to the next rounds where a winner is again predicted and advanced to the next round. This process repeats itself until you have predicted the winner. Considering there are 64 teams in the tournament, six rounds of play,
and the bracket/predictions need to be finalized before a single game of the tournament is played, this can be a very challenging tasks for the casual college basketball fan. Yet millions of people complete a bracket each year.

The task of predicting winners is made easier for the casual fan because a selection committee determines the teams in the tournament using objective metrics such as team record, strength of schedule, offensive and defensive efficiency, etc. They also use subjective information such as injuries that may effect a team’s competitiveness, how well a team is playing at the end of the season, wins and losses over common opponents, etc. The committee of experts uses all of this information to seed (rank) teams using the standard bracket rules where #1 plays #64, #2 plays #63 and so on.

Now, despite the exhaustive process used by the selection committee to seed the teams, many people believe they have additional information and insights that lead them to pick the #45 team to beat the #11 team. And while this does happen now and then, the overwhelming result of this match up is that the #11 team will beat the #45 team. As you might guess, the closer the team seedings the more likely the probability for an upset.

My family basketball pool serves as an interesting test bed for Occam’s Razor. We have family members who didn’t watch a game all season.
These family members generally use the least amount of information they have available to predict the winners, the numeric seeding. Interesting, or maybe not so interesting is you ask Occam, is that many of these family members outperformed other family member’s who watched hours of basketball and sports shows. Even more support for Occam’s Razor, is that many of these same family members, outperformed many of the “celebrity” brackets, those bracket’s completed by people who’s job it is to watch basketball, analyze basketball, and be an expert on basketball. While I don’t know the methods behind the “celebrities” bracket selections, I would venture to guess they believed they possessed more information and insights to pick a team where the obvious information, the team seeding, didn’t support their prediction.

March Madness and family tournament pools are all for fun and have low stacks. Occam’s Razor might help you submit a competitive or winning bracket for some bragging rights. But how can it be applied in more meaningful areas of life?

life if full a decisions requiring good judgement. We all know people who have poor judgement and their lives reflect it. Could Occam’s Razor help these people you know? Could it help you? Do you struggle with decisions where there seems to be an overwhelming number of choices, or decision points? Is it possible that the obvious choice is the correct choice? Occam’s Razor would suggest it is. If we take an honest look at our lives we will find many areas where Occam’s Razor would help us. Think of all the time and energy we could save if we trusted Occam’s Razor.

Joy to the World, the Lord has come.  Let Earth receive her king.

Let every heart, prepare in room,

and heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing,

and heaven and heaven and nature sing.

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