Player & Coach Development: Don't Let Early Success Ruin Your Future
Why early success can be a curse rather than a blessing
One of the worst things that can happen to a person is to experience early success. It’s a classic paradox. Success can lead to overconfidence in one’s ability or current talents that can evolve into a better future.
When people find early success, they often need a person to challenge them to keep improving, tinkering, and finding new ways to utilize their skills or acquire new skills for the next level of competence.
As a Player
Everyone knows that player who starts out faster than every other player. They find success skating around defenders and continue to go back into that again and again.
Sooner or later, the other players catch up and start to neutralize that player’s advantage. At this point, it’s an adapt-or-die moment. Those players need to find new ways to deploy existing skills or add and/or evolve skills.
Maybe it’s using their speed via a change of speed and finding speed differentials.
As a Coach
In the strongest militaries across the globe, military officers think about the “Commander’s intent” and then act upon what they read in front of them. This culture of stressing decentralized initiative within an overall strategic framework is highly effective at encouraging creativity and exploiting opportunities. This command structure has many times led to opportunistic landslide victories.
As time passes in conflicts, people tend to be hamstrung by top-down hierarchy. A classic example is when early successes lead to future failure. Often leadership went back to the same tactic long after it had been shown ineffective.
This success feedback effectively becomes the rule-of-thumb for leaders at the top… “I see success, if I do this again it’ll be successful again.” When there is someone on the other side competing and making adjustments, we can see where this simple line of thinking can go spectacularly wrong.
This might be shortening the bench or chewing your team out.
Reasonable Expectations
If you feel like you’ve arrived, you’re toast. This is a person against themselves battle where every day is a battle to improve.
“You need to continually be a guy on the rise. That is a reasonable expectation, as opposed to coming in here putting in time.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that the things that made you viable in the past aren’t going to be the things that make you viable moving forward.“
Summer Challenge
Think about ways to evolve skills and new ways to tinker.
If you listen long enough to stories from those who were good vs those who were great, the great ones are always tinkering and developing new ways to be successful. They are diversifying their proverbial portfolio of solutions to be available for the competition, making deposits in the bank to be withdrawn from later.
How are you going to adapt, evolve, and improve?
Further Reading