Nick Saban on Choice
I came across these 9 principles for success from Nick Saban (link below) and wanted to share it because of its crystal clear bottom line:
Your Daily Choices x Time.
Here are the 9 Saban principles:
- Excellence has a price. We can complain about that, but it’s a fact of life.
- Most people don’t want to pay that price. They just haven’t admitted it to. themselves.
- Saying you want to be excellent is easy. Becoming excellent is hard.
- There may not be one way to become great, but there are very few. And they all have discipline and consistency in common.
- Every action we take is a choice. We’re choosing to make progress, or we’re not.
- The formula for becoming successful: Your Daily Choices x Time. It’s simple, but we make it complicated. Sometimes we learn more by making the wrong choices. Reflect on them, pull out the lessons, and move on.
- You have to choose what you do every day. Don’t follow your feelings.
- Choose to do what will make you better.
- There are no long-term hacks. It takes what it takes.
Now I would alter the phrase - Your Daily Choices x Time - a bit. I would remove the word successful (which usually implies money and status) to:
The formula for living the life you want to live, for doing what will bring you fulfillment, for doing what brings you energy and enthusiasm, all of which will lead to success (money and status) as a byproduct: Your Daily Choices x Time.
On second thought, based on this quote from Naval Ravikant:
"The currency of life, people think it's money. Yes, money is important, and it does let you trade certain things for time, but it doesn't really buy your time. Ask Warren Buffett, how much time money can buy you. Or Michael Bloomberg, you can't trade money for time. Money is not the real currency of life. Time itself doesn't even mean that much, because a lot of times can be wasted because you're not really present for it. You're not paying attention. So the real currency of life is attention. It's what you choose to pay attention to and what you do about it. And so back to the point about the news media. You can put your attention on the news, but that's how you're spending the real currency of life, if you want to, that's fine, no right or wrong here. Like maybe it is your destiny to pick something in the news, learn about that problem, adopt that problem and solve it. But just be careful, because your attention is the only thing that you have, and that can also be captured by your own past. Yes, you can filter it away on anything you like."
Based on this profound insight I would modify even it a bit further to:
The formula for living the life you want to live, for doing what will bring you fulfillment, for doing what brings you energy and enthusiasm, all of which will lead to success (money and status) as a byproduct:
Fulfillment = Your Daily Choices x Attention = Success
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