Win Forever: Live, Work, and Play Like a Champion

By Pete Carroll

Pete Carroll is one of the most successful coaches in football today. As the head coach at USC, he brought the Trojans back to national prominence, amassing a 97-19 record over nine seasons. Now he shares the championship-winning philosophy that led USC to seven straight Pac-10 titles. This same mindset and culture will shape his program as he returns to the NFL to coach the Seattle Seahawks.

Carroll developed his unique coaching style by trial and error over his career. He learned that you get better results by teaching instead of screaming, and by helping players grow as people, not just on the field. He learned that an upbeat, energetic atmosphere in the locker room can coexist with an unstoppable competitive drive. He learned why you should stop worrying about your opponents, why you should always act as if the whole world is watching, and many other contrarian insights.

Win Forever is about more than winning football games; it’s about maximizing your potential in every aspect of your life. Carroll has taught business leaders to face tough challenges. He has helped troubled kids on the streets of Los Angeles through his foundation A Better LA. His words are true in any situation: “If you want to win forever, always compete.”

The energy and optimism appear to flow naturally, but in fact, Carroll is always conscious of his supply of positive energy. If he feels the needle moving toward half-empty, Carroll says he “cranks it up,” psychologically refueling himself out of concern that his appearing sluggish or down could have a negative effect on others. Why Carroll feels a responsibility to invigorate, not dampen, the human spirit gets to the core of his leadership style

Uncovering his Coaching Philosophy

• What Coach Wooden had done that so impressed me was to pull together his own vision, philosophy, and belief system into a detailed plan for winning. Once he had it, he went on, year after year, to build teams that were almost unstoppable. I needed to come up with a plan of my own. I needed to develop my own winning philosophy and design a plan for implementing it.
• I embarked on a process of discovering who I was, not only as a football coach but, more importantly, as a person.
• The process was long and difficult, but the more I wrote, the more powerful the experience became. Finally, I made a breakthrough. I realized that at the core of my being, I was a competitor. I had been competing my entire life at everything.
• Competition would become the central theme of the program, and our day-to-day thinking would be driven by this single thought: to do things better than they had ever been done

THE POWER TO WIN FOREVER 7 PHILOSOPHY AS THE FOUNDATION

• After that first title, in his sixteenth season as UCLA head basketball coach, Coach Wooden went on to win ten out of the next twelve national championships before retiring. He fell just one very close game short of winning nine in a row. For some reason, I had never realized it had taken sixteen years to get his UCLA team to that level. Coach Wooden’s real breakthrough came the moment he had developed his philosophy in a full, complete, and systematic way.
  • If you want to take the next step in life, create and distill down your philosophy.

• Even more important, he had done more than just become aware of all those details inside his own mind. He had refined them to the point that he could explain them to the people around him. I think a great part of his genius was that he was able to explain his beliefs and tie them back into a clear vision that brought it all together into a single team effort.  
• My life in the next weeks and months was filled with writing notes and filling binders. For years, I had ideas about coaching, always challenging the position groups, defensive squads, and teams that I coached to do things in an extraordinary way. But while I had a sense inside me of what we needed, I hadn’t articulated it very well. I didn’t have the details worked out clearly in my own mind so that I could lay them out clearly to someone else.  So, in the fall of 2000, I forced myself to go through the process of nailing it down, and it was the discipline of working at it that made it happen. By December I finally had a clear, organized template of my core values, my philosophy, and—most important—my overarching vision for what I wanted to stand for as a person, a coach, and a competitor. 
• If I ever coached again, I promised myself, I was going to build an organization that could win forever. I would build it on the foundation of a single, basic vision where everything we did was centered on wanting to do things better than they have ever been done before. Rather than thinking of different parts of the team as different groups with different styles, cultures, or goals, I wanted this basic competitive thought to be the foundation of everything the most high profile performances to the details that no one but us would ever know about. 

I knew that in order for any program I developed to achieve this, it would have to come from within me. It would have to be built on my experience, my core instincts, and my beliefs. So I had to start by looking within myself. 

• I always wanted to do really well at whatever I was doing. Then it hit me. I had always competed to be the best I could be: a great son to my parents, a great brother, a great friend, a great player, a great team member, and now a great husband and father. When I asked myself when I was happiest and most fulfilled and what I stood for, the concept of competition was connected to every one of my responses. Then, in a flash, it hit me: I am a competitor! 
• It was a great personal truth for me, and from that point forward, everything started to fall in line. It became a way to define myself and it was clear that I needed to make competition the central theme in my approach.

At the base of the Win Forever pyramid, the foundation is philosophy. I collected all of the things that I believed were important in my life and in football and from that, I derived the philosophy for Win Forever. 

• What Win Forever means to me is aspiring to be the best you can be, or as I like to refer to it, “maximizing your potential.” But Winning Forever is not about the final score; it’s about competing and striving to be the best. If you are in this pursuit then you’re already winning. 
• Also at this foundational level, my philosophy has this vision: Do things better than they have ever been done before. 

Rule 1. Always Protect the Team Rule 2. No Whining, No Complaining, No, No excuses. Rule 3. Be Early 

• I also added behaviorally, or style, elements: We would perform with great effort, great enthusiasm, and great toughness, and play smart, all while respecting everything and everyone involved in the process. 
• And if I were ever to find myself in an organization where competition didn’t play a central role, then I should immediately recognize that I was in the wrong place. I knew that any program that didn’t embrace competition had better look for another coach. Other coaches might be successful with an entirely different theme at the center of their programs, but I knew I could only be successful if I focused on what was true to me.  My programs would be built on the concept “Always Compete.” In line with this, every member of my program would have no choice but to perform in a relentless pursuit of a competitive edge. 
• The third level of the pyramid is about the importance of practice. After decades of coaching football at different levels, I was prepared to boldly state that “Practice Is Everything.” By placing practice on a high level of the pyramid, I was making a statement. We would never accept having a poor practice or taking a day off. 
• With consistently competitive practices, players would ultimately reach a point where they could perform in the absence of fear, due to the confidence they had gained by practicing so well. Ideally, they would then learn to trust the process, themselves, and their teammates. 
• When a performer has supreme confidence in himself and can trust all the people around him and the schemes they are running, he is finally free to totally focus and become immersed in his performance. This is where great performers and great teams acquire a most cherished characteristic… They know they are going to win. When you know you’re going to win, you don’t doubt or worry. You can actually perform with a “quieted mind,” in the absence of fear. It is my job to orchestrate this “knowing” throughout the entire process in every aspect of my next program- a responsibility I would welcome. 

8 ALWAYS COMPETE

• Competition to me is not about beating your opponent. It is about doing your best; it is about striving to reach your potential; and it is about being in relentless pursuit of a competitive edge in everything you do. 
• Competition is typically defined as a contest between individuals, groups, teams, or nations; it is a test of skills. In my world, however, competition is much more than that. It is a mentality, an outlook, and a way of approaching every day.
• My competitive approach is that “it’s all about us.” If we’ve really done the preparation to elevate ourselves to our full potential, it shouldn’t matter whom we’re playing. Once I understood that we were competing with ourselves, it changed my view of future opponents. Many people confuse “opponent” with “enemy,” but in my experience, that is extremely unproductive. My opponents are not my enemies.
• My opponents are the people who offer me the opportunity to succeed. The tougher my opponents, the more they present me with an opportunity to live up to my full potential and play my best. At the end of the day, that opponent is the person who makes you into the best competitor you can be.
• That doesn’t mean that we don’t think about our opponents. Of course, we do. We think about them a lot. But what we do is try to understand their makeup and nature. We want to center our focus on what we can control, which is us. We have no control over what our opponents do; we can only control what we do.

Jerry Rice

• Among all of those people, the greatest individual competitor I have come in close contact with is Hall of Fame wide receiver Jerry Rice.
• As a great competitor, Jerry understood that by staying in the mindset of always competing he could develop the awareness to capture the “opportunities within opportunities” that other people might miss. In other words, he was constantly seeking a competitive edge. It helps to always be searching for that tiny edge in whatever you’re doing—even if it’s small, silly stuff—because that’s how you are going to catch things that someone else might not when it really matters. It’s an extremely powerful tool.
• Just as important as that competitive intensity was the fact that you could see without a doubt that Jerry was really competing with himself. He never allowed his success or failure to be defined by anyone else.
• Jerry Rice’s ability to maintain his competitive focus made him into one of the great figures in the history of sports.

9 PRACTICE IS EVERYTHING

• It is my belief that how we practice makes just as important a statement about who we are as how we play the games. How we practice defines who we are. It is not only something we have to do in order to compete, but our practice is a competitive activity in and of itself. Practice is something we want to be the best at for its own sake.
• I realized that coaches are ultimately responsible for maintaining a high level of intensity for every practice session. Once I realized it was our responsibility to establish the tone and energy of practice, I had a newfound vision about how important it would be to motivate my next staff on a daily basis.
• I learned that if you want to have great practice sessions, you have to prepare your staff to have great days.
• The passion and the excitement that coaches bring to the field will transfer directly to the players and will allow you to create a competitive practice environment, not to mention a fun one. I declared forevermore that in my coaching career, we would practice with more energy and more excitement than anyone else in football.

PART THREE-WIN FOREVER AT USC 10 GETTING THE JOB AT USC

11 LAYING GROUND RULES

• In our first workout with our players that spring, we tested them. For two hours our staff put them through the grinder. Sprints, drills, up-downs, agility tests, and more were part of our workout. The only goal was to make it so difficult that the players would never forget that day. But we were not done with that day’s work. I told the players to meet me at the fifty-yard line in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum at 10:30 P.M. and we would finish our work out there. As the players left the Howard Jones Practice Field, I could hear them asking one another, “What are we doing at the Coli?” The funny thing is, I didn’t know the answer either, but my instinct told me that we had to be there.
• At the time, I knew only a few players by name, so I called out to Carson Palmer and Troy Polamalu: “Carson, Troy—give me your best eleven on offense and your best eleven on defense. We’re having a tug of war.” Back and forth they went, with extra players from the defense eventually jumping in to help them try to claim victory. The players were howling and cheering support for one another. Neither side could dominate, and the whole team fell together into a heap of bodies. I called everyone together and asked Carson one question: “Carson, what did we just learn?” so I said, “Carson—didn’t we learn that if we’re pulling in opposite directions we all can’t win as one?” Then I told them to huddle on the fifty-yard line, everybody back to back, looking out, and with everyone touching. I wanted us leaning on one another totally connected, so close that nothing could come between us. Standing in the middle of our team, I told them that if we remained as tight as we were at that moment, it didn’t matter who came over the walls of this great coliseum to challenge. I told them their coaches were looking for their commitment to this new program, and that we wanted each player, when he was ready, to declare, “I’m in!” Imagine a clear, dark night inside the Coliseum, with only a few lights illuminating a space that holds more than ninety thousand screaming fans on game day, however tonight this place belonged to us alone.
• I told them that when they were ready, truly ready, to commit to being a Trojan, then I wanted them to stop by my office, send me a message, or leave me a note with two simple words—and to firmly understand the importance behind those words, what they meant, and the competition those two words stood for. Day by day, player by player, it happened. I’m in…. I’m in…. I’m in….

Every year, as you build your team, there always seems to be a critical moment when things either come together or go south. If a coach is lucky enough to sense this moment, he captures it and puts it into proper perspective for his players, and they become stronger and more connected as a result. 

• Every year, on the first day of our monthlong spring practice, we would begin with a team meeting. My message was that there was no room for anybody to be thinking that last year’s success guaranteed anything for the upcoming season. If they wanted to compete at an uncommon level and live our philosophy, they needed a brand-new perspective on the upcoming season; by changing their seats, at least symbolically, they now found themselves with a new perspective. They could take that DVD and put it in their back pocket. By finding a new seat, they would recommit to capturing the work ethic that would allow them to maximize their potential.
• That’s why, in spite of my pride in our accomplishments as an organization, I never wanted to get too excited about wearing our championship rings or making a big deal about our past success. Why? Because we can’t do anything about what has already happened. All we ever really have is the very next moment we are facing.
• Of course, we always can celebrate, learn, and grow from past experiences, but the very next step we are about to take maybe the most important one and we don’t want to miss it.
• We sought to instill a way of looking at not just football but everything in life as a series of opportunities to become the best versions of ourselves—not according to anyone else’s definition of success but according to the one we set for ourselves.
• Protecting the team was all about our players’ consciences. We wanted them to be fully aware of what they were doing at all times and to understand that for every decision they made there would be a result that affected the team and ultimately everyone who depended on our success. We wanted them to seek outcomes that would protect their family, their teammates, and their university. It’s a great rule, I think because it’s both open-ended and uncompromising.

Rule #2 was almost as simple: “No Whining, No Complaining, No Excuses.” Where Rule #1 was about recognizing the consequences of our actions, this one was about our language, or what we refer to as self-talk—and how important it was to take responsibility for yourself and make no excuses.

• I strongly believe in the power of intentions and wanted everyone in our program to speak in the affirmative. Whereas a negative mentality attracts negative thoughts, a positive approach creates the power of possibilities.
• As coaches, we would prefer to deal with issues head-on instead of burying them and would discourage members of our program from complaining or making excuses. By encouraging our players to communicate in such ways, we developed a positive mentality for the entire team.
• “Carson, you never, ever, get to talk that way again.” It was a great example of the power of Carson’s negative self-talk. Rather than accepting the challenge to compete to get the best of his self-doubt, he had given in to a negative expectation and expressed it as fact.
• Self-talk can be powerful and ultimately can create anticipated outcomes. In Carson’s case, it helped to create a negative outcome. But it can also be used to create positive outcomes, and I was determined to help Carson alter his language.
• The third and final rule in our program, “Be Early,” was all about being organized and showing respect. At USC, we wanted our players in meetings before they started, and more important, we wanted them there with their playbooks open and minds ready to learn. To be early, you must have your priorities in order. You have to be organized to the point where you have a plan and can execute it effectively.
• Rule #3 was also an opportunity for new arrivals to understand the uncommon level of performance we expected from them in every aspect of their lives. This could be an issue with freshmen in particular.

12 COACH YOUR COACHES

• Right down to the core of our being, we believe that our success depends on ensuring that everyone is completely engaged, committed, and in a relentless pursuit of a competitive edge. A big part of my job is creating an environment where this will happen.
• As head coach, I set the vision and the philosophy, but it is the coordinators and other coaches who are charged with implementing it on the ground with the players every day. They have to be comfortable with the plan, confident in themselves and armed with a competitive spirit to do their jobs better than they have ever been done before.
• We work to ensure this by empowering our coaches and putting them in positions where they are given the opportunity to succeed. I put great emphasis on making sure that I coach our coaches and that our success also helps them develop their own vision and teaching styles.
• I even use many of the same methods that I use with our players to stir up my coaches’ competitive energies. I love to stoke little rivalries between the coaches of various position groups. If I do this effectively, the energy trickles right down to the players.
• Our program has its message and its way of speaking, but our staff has great latitude to deliver that message in the way that makes the most sense for them. I’m constantly making suggestions, but they teach the message in their own ways, in their own voices. If I want them to coach to their full potential, I have to not only allow them to be authentically themselves but insist upon it. For them to maximize their players’ ability, I explained, they would have to teach from inside themselves, because that was what would make them the most authentic and effective coaches possible.
• Ultimately, the most critical point in coaching our coaches is to understand that we don’t want every coach to have the same style. What we need on our staff are unique competitors who can each find a way to deliver the same message with one heartbeat.
• The coaches need to internalize the message and then convey it in their own voice. When each person does that, we get a diversity of styles and approaches that makes the whole team stronger.
• Putting together a staff may be the most important part of any head coach’s job, and I have always enjoyed it. I am often asked what I look for when hiring coaches. The first thing I look at is a person’s competitiveness and work ethic. I also like to hire young and promote them from within.
• The other critical factor we look for when hiring new coaches is their willingness and ability to grow. Leadership development is critical in any organization.
• If a leader is clear and consistent about his philosophy’s core values, it frees everyone up to do their best. It frees the top leadership to treat its middle managers in a whole new way. When everyone understands the vision, the goals, and the overall system, they don’t need the top boss always telling them what to do. They can figure it out for themselves. And for the middle managers, this means that instead of being mere instruments for relaying instructions delivered from on high, they can get creative and share their own ideas.
• Once they have the chance to find their own voices, their identity is now at the forefront. The door then opens to competing not merely for the next promotion but to maximize their own potential. Imagine how much energy this generates. When everyone gets to contribute his maximum effort, it is transformative for the whole organization.
• Just as our football players do everything to prepare for practice, our coaches do the same. For instance, there’s a staff meeting I like to have with all of my position coaches before the start of spring practice. At the meeting, they are asked to deliver to the entire staff the speech they are going to give at their first players’ meeting. I’ve always thought it’s really important to have a great first meeting with each position group, so at USC we came up with a way to practice that. I made it clear that I put a lot of value into these meetings, so the guys spent a lot of time preparing their speeches before we all got together.
• At the conclusion of each person’s presentation, the rest of the staff critiqued it and offered to coach on content, delivery, props, performance, anything else we noticed that could help him do a better job. We filmed each presentation for him to be able to review, just as a player reviews his practice film. The two major areas we critiqued were how true each coach was to the approach of the program, and how authentic he was to his own personality and style. As long as the coaches satisfied these two criteria, they were encouraged to be as creative and entertaining in their delivery as they could. Invariably, the coaches who exuded the most passion and sincerity had the best results.

13 COACHES ARE TEACHERS

• I’ve never understood why so many coaches take a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to their leadership style. What many people fail to realize is that flexible and open communication is an incredibly powerful leadership tool. It is through effective communication that we are able to reach the ultimate goal of helping others perform at their very best.
• To Win Forever as an organization, we must find a way to approach each unique individual in a manner that maximizes his or her potential.
• To me, failure to communicate is unacceptable for a parent, a coach, or a leader. It is easy to get frustrated when we see someone we are responsible for fail to make progress, and especially frustrating when we see a lack of effort.
• We are the ones with something to communicate, so it is up to us to figure out how to communicate it effectively to the person we want to learn it. As parents and coaches, it is up to us to compete to find ways to connect with our children and players.
• One of the most important principles in our approach to being effective teachers is to strive to develop a deep understanding of each individual student or player. Every player in our program is a unique individual from a specific background, and before we can effectively reach and connect with him we must develop a relationship. Then we must formulate an approach that will enable the teaching and learning process.
• productive methods are through consistent and watchful observation. We can glean a wealth of information by paying close attention to the actions, mannerisms, and traits of our players. By taking note of the clothes they wear, the hairstyles they choose, their personal interests, and the people they choose to hang out with, we get mountains of information.
• We wanted to observe our players in as many situations and scenarios as possible. We needed to see them in their comfort zones as well as outside their comfort zones.
• That’s why I work so hard to instill in my coaching staff the importance of learning your learner. A teacher, coach, or manager who knows his learner is able to accurately communicate in a manner that best suits that learner, and the more effectively a leader can communicate his or her expectations, the better the results are going to be.
• He taught me to use my peripheral vision, so to speak, to observe my players at every opportunity. He taught me that if you learn to become a good watcher and listener, you’ll be rewarded with a wealth of information that you can use to compete more successfully. I learned from him that the best teachers, coaches, and leaders are often the best observers.
• His keen insight into human behavior taught me the importance of not drawing a line between the places where you compete and the places where you don’t. Because really, that line doesn’t exist: You’re either competing at everything or you’re not.
• To maintain the flow of information, I need to be available at all times. So my door is always open and I’m watching and listening to stay in constant contact with my team. This is why we spend so much time together, going to a variety of events and sharing experiences in small groups and as a team. The art of creating an environment of open communication is of paramount importance to me.