How Future Leaders can Learn from the Past to Achieve Greatness Now

Wanna be great at your craft? Study the great ones before you. Basketball great Michael Jordan learned from the greats – and then set out to beat them. “I built my talents on the shoulders of someone else talents. Without Julius Erving, David Thompson and Walter Davis, there would have never been a Michael Jordan. “I evolved from them”, Jordan wrote in his book, “For the Love of the Game.”

Those guys presented a challenge, something to improve on. I had the idea I had to be better than Julius Erving, Magic Johnson. “Those were the guiding forces in my development, and I used them as motivation.”

Overcoming Obstacles

A great turnaround came for Jordan when he conquered his greatest failure, fear – fear of failure, fear of looking bad, fear of disapproval. “I think fear sometimes comes from a lack of focus or concentration, especially in sports. If I had stood at the free throw line and thought about 10 million people watching me on the other side of the camera lens, I couldn’t have made anything,” he recalled. So I mentally tried to put myself in a familiar place. I thought about all the times I shot free throws in practice and went through the same motions, the same technique that I had thousands of times. “You forget about the outcome. You relax and perform.”

If you can see fear of failure as a mirage then you’ve cleared half the hurdles, he says. You may think something is standing in your way, “but nothing is really there,” except a chance “to do your best and gain some success.”

For Jordan, failure is fuel. “Sometimes it actually just gets you closer to where you want to be,” he said. “When I got cut from the varsity team as a sophomore in high school, I learned something. “I knew I never wanted to feel that bad again. I never wanted to have that taste in my mouth, that hole in my stomach,” he recalls. I decided to become a starter on the varsity team. “That’s what I focused on all summer. When I worked on my game, that’s what I thought about. When it happened, I set another goal, a reasonable manageable goal that I could realistically achieve if I worked hard enough,” Jordan said.

He was determined to be # 1, but he wasn’t in a hurry to get there. “I approached everything step by step,” he said. He boosted his confidence by setting and achieving short term goals. “Each time I visualized where I wanted to be, what kind of player I wanted to become. I gained a little confidence every time I came through.”

It’s no wonder that so many business leaders can relate and take these messages into their company, their department, their teams. I know I can take these messages into my work environment and motivate me and my coworkers by staying focused on small wins to achieve ultimate goals.

Vinay Singh is a leading consultant in the field of workforce development and talent acquisition strategy and has been a trusted adviser to over one hundred companies. He is a graduate of OSU, NJIT and NYU. Vinay currently studies digital marketing at the Wharton School and has just been accepted to Columbia University for Human Capital Management.