Many years ago, I was the Manager of Planning and Scheduling for the IBM manufacturing facility in San Jose, California. I had an annual department meeting coming up and I was looking for a guest speaker. I read in the paper that John Madden had recently retired from coaching football and was starting a new career as a motivational speaker. I called and was pleasantly surprised that Mr. Madden agreed to talk to my department of 133 people for forty-five minutes. I believe it was his first speaking engagement.
My group at IBM were probably the first to experience a fantastic presentation by John Madden. His presentation was titled “Five Traits of Successful People.” His contract with me and IBM, stated he would speak for forty-five minutes and receive $1,000.00. It was probably the only time John was paid as little as $1,000.00. He was so interesting and so enthusiastic he was on the stage interacting with my people for two hours. My employees and I were mesmerized by John insights, exuberance, and his message.
He would talk about a trait and then back it up with examples from his coaching experience. One of his five traits is Successful people see what they do not want to see. On Mondays it was customary to watch game films. Most of John’s players, if they made a great one-handed catch would ask to back the film up and show it again. He had a rookie who always sat in the front row, and he did the opposite. If he missed his block, he wanted to watch it over and over again.
That rookie understood that you learn more from your failures than your successes. He was All-Pro Center and Hall of Famer Jim Otto.
If you are going to improve you must learn from your mistakes. When you write a book you make lots of mistakes. Game films for authors are the feedback they get from people that have read their books. I would love to hear from people that have read “What Rotten Eggs.” If you read the book, please click on Contact the Author. Let me know your thoughts.
Daniel M. White 