Yesterday our beloved and inspiring Iowa women's basketball team played in the NCAA National Championship game for the second year in row. After four years of bringing so much joy and inspiration to the University, our state, and young fans, the seniors hung up their jerseys. We will all be talking for decades about what Caitlin Clark did for this game. And Coach Lisa Bluder is becoming known on a wider stage for being as upstanding as they come. I love her post-game talk below. This is what it is all about. In the locker room of life, it is about the journey. Who you become and who others become watching you along the way is the real reward. How can you apply what these young ladies have done to your own life?
Find something you love doing. If you love doing something, you will naturally put in more time and energy to it. If you work in a job doing something you love, it won't feel like work.
Find the right people. Caitlin Clark says the best decision she ever made was deciding to join Lisa Bluder's team. Find those who inspire you, lift you up, encourage your unique gifts, and coach you constructively. Caitlin Clark's teammates all praise her for making each of them better. Find someone who has high expectations of you.
Face your fears. Be nervous and do it anyways. Growth comes from doing things you think you cannot do. Very successful people do not have less fear than the average person. They have more determination to continue doing things while feeling and processing fear.
Recognize your strengths and weaknesses. Put yourself in a position of working within your area of strength as much as possible. And additionally work on your specific points of weakness to increase your overall game.
Stay humble and give time to those who want to give you the gift of letting you know what you mean to them.
Celebrate your victories. Really take time to relish and celebrate achieving a milestone. Share those victories with your teammates and loved ones.
Learn from your losses. Ask yourself "what's the lesson here?" You are always either winning or learning.
Lavish those around you with praise and recognition. No one succeeds on her own. Recognize the village it takes to lift you up and keep you going.
Look at the bigger picture. What is the product's product's product? In marketing, advertisements are rarely selling us on the chemical composition of deodorant or sports drinks. They are selling us not even on what those things allow our bodies to do. They sell us on an aspirational image of ourselves. Gatorade is composed of a combination of fluid and electrolytes that hydrate the body. This allows bodily maintenance and recovery during and after physical exercise. An exponential amount of physical exercise, focus, practice, and perseverance may just turn you into the next Olympic gold medalist (cue an image of an Olympian drinking Gatorade in a commercial). You can walk through this exercise with yourself. Your goal may be to run a marathon. A product of that goal is a healthy and physically fit body. A product of that is overall wellness, vitality, and discipline to achieve new goals. Training for a marathon may just set you up to win a teaching award at work. You may set a goal of building up to doing a certain number of surgeries per day. The product of this is a certain number of people have restored vision per day, extrapolated then to per year. A product of this is the overall positive ripple effect on your community by improving the vision, health, and abilities of your community members. By focusing on the efficiency and precision of your individual procedures, you lift your community. It is not achieving the goal itself that makes the difference. The effect of the effect of the goal is really what matters. In fact, you don't even have to achieve the actual goal to achieve the much greater positive ripple effects that the work towards achieving the goal actually produces.
Seek inspiration. Look for it. In sports, music, books, parents, teachers, friends, nature. Then pay it forward. Uplift and inspire those around you.
We change the world not by getting a trophy. We change it by who we become and who we inspire others to become in the process of attempting great achievements.
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