John Wooden's 9 Promises for a Successful Life

Today we're exploring John Wooden’s famous “Nine Promises” and why they still matter today. We explore themes like emotional steadiness, relationships, self-talk, personal growth, leadership, comparison, peace of mind, and sustainable success. More than achievement, this conversation is about the internal commitments that shape the quality of our lives and help us win more without losing ourselves in the process.

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We live in a world or a culture that's oftentimes obsessed with early achievers. Think of how often you see a 30 under 30 list, or we praise those that are like the viral overnight successes that kind of ascend the stardom very quickly. But one of the questions that I find myself asking more and more, especially lately, is what allows somebody to do meaningful work for a very long time without losing themselves in the process? Because I think there's a big difference between just being successful and building a life that's sustainable and meaningful. Now, John Wooden, the famous UCLA head men's basketball coach, had something that he called the nine promises. They were commitments for living a successful and meaningful life. The more that I've come back and revisited these, the more I realize that these aren't just great ideas about achievement. They're ideas about creating more room and space for fulfilling relationships or becoming the type of person that we aspire to be and not just achieving the goals that we set out to. So today on the podcast, we're going to discuss what John Wooden's nine promises can teach us all about winning more without losing ourselves along the way. Hey coaches and leaders, I got a quick question for you. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callendly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callinly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. Now, as I mentioned at the start, one of the things that I admire greatly is longevity. People that have been successful for a very long period of time in whatever their giving craft is, people that have produced sustained excellence over multiple decades, people that have also stayed grounded amidst that excellence pursuit and that path to mastery. And just people that have remained healthy, connected, um, purposeful, or just even emotionally steady while navigating uh that pressure to achieve or the expectations that are often attached with it and really the responsibility wrapped around it. A lot of people can sprint into relevance, but far fewer can build a life that's truly sustainable, that's successful, both by societal's lens as well as their own. Now, John Wooden's promises are really about the internal commitments that shape the quality of our lives over time. So today, what I wanted to do is share them with you or re-present them to you in case it's something that you're already aware of or you've heard of. But regardless, my hope is that you can use at least one of these to start showing up in a way that more closely aligns with your own values and the person that you aspire to become in this beautiful thing that we call life. So the first promise is to talk health, happiness, and prosperity as often as possible. One of the things that I appreciate about this promise is I don't think Wooden is simply talking about outcomes here. Outcomes come in that form of health, happiness, prosperity. Those are outputs. Those are often downstream reflections, though, of something more important, which is our habits, our ability to set boundaries, how we take care of ourselves and how we recover, uh, the relationship quality that we nurture in the course of our lives, or even our self-talk, um, and how we keep things in perspective irrespective of circumstances. In other words, do your daily behaviors align with the version of yourself that you claim you want to become? Because some people build lives that look successful externally, but they slowly deplete themselves on an internal level. Others build lives that actually energize them. And I think part of what Wooden is getting at here is what you repeatedly speak about, or in essence your inputs shape what you eventually produce in your outputs. So the second promise is to make all your friends know there is something in them that you value. And I love this one. One of my mentors, Ken Crenshaw, that I worked with uh during my time in Arizona, uh, he used to always say, like, he really likes the Nike slogan, just do it. But then he would always say there's one added word that we have to include, which is just do it now. Uh and I think that's a great leadership reminder. When you think of somebody, don't wait. Send the text, write the note, make the introduction, express your appreciation and tell them what they mean to you. People are carrying a lot of things that we can't always see. And sometimes it's the simple moment of acknowledgement that will land exactly at the right time for somebody that can really help propel them forward. This was actually one of my favorite stories and moments from my conversation on a previous guest interview with Erin Matson on my own podcast with a wonderful, uh, she shared this great story about a wonderful 30-second voicemail that she received from legendary basketball coach Roy Williams, just simply saying how proud he was of her. It's moments like that that may feel small to you as the sender, but they will rarely feel small to the person receiving them. And I think we can all benefit and make the world a lot better place if we act on those and we do so now. The sec the third promise is to think only of the best, work only for the best, and expect only the best. Energy, I think, attracts energy. Growth will attract growth, and intentional people will tend to sharpen intentional people around them. The people that you surround yourself with will shape many facets of your life. What you start to accept, what you start to tolerate, what you become expectant of from others or in certain circumstances. And it can't be overstated enough how much our environments and the people in them will shape the trajectory of our lives. Most of us have heard this common phrase that you become the average of the people that you spend the most time with. There's a lot of truth in that. And so I think part of what I love about this third promise is to make sure that we're intentional with this, not just in direct ways, but also in indirect ways too. The fourth promise is to be as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own. Now, there's a great book called Help the Helper by Kel uh Kevin Pritchard, and in the book he talks about this concept that uh stems from Buddhism that he calls Modita. Modita is often described as finding joy in the success of others. In other words, it's called vicarious joy. This is becoming, I think, a lot harder for people in our culture today because comparison makes the admiration of others very difficult for all of us. Social media has conditioned us to subconsciously interpret someone else's success as the lack of our own progress or the lack of our own success. But emotionally mature people can celebrate others without interpreting that success as evidence of their own inadequacy. This skill is even more crucial, I think, in competitive spaces. Can you genuinely root for other people? Can you celebrate their growth? Can you support their wins without needing them to diminish your own worth? And I think that says a lot about somebody's uh internal security along the way. The fifth promise is to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. Now, where comes to mind for me here is that there's an old Buddhist parable about two arrows. The first arrow is one that represents pain, challenge, disappointment, criticism, adversity, or circumstances that hit us hard that we can oftentimes not control. But the second arrow is our reaction to the first one. And often it's the second arrow that we forget is optional. Peace is the ability to remain grounded without letting every circumstance own your attention, to disrupt your emotions, or to puncture your identity. Especially right now, I think so many people are living reactively. Everything becomes uh very emotionally consuming, everything starts to feel urgent. And I think what Wooden's reminder here really is about is can you develop enough internal steadiness that not everything gets access to your peace? Uh and not everything deserves a reaction that disrupts your own peace. Uh now the sixth promise is forget the mistakes of the past and press on to greater achievements in the future. And I don't think this means pretending mistakes don't matter. I think it means refusing to let your past permanently define your future. One of my favorite words is grace. And I don't know about you all, but I oftentimes notice that it gets discussed a lot more than actually practice. Can we extend ourselves grace to be imperfect? Can we extend ourselves grace to be works in progress? I once did a um professional development like workshop, and one of the uh the gals in my group at one point, she's like, Oh, I'm I'm a total hipster, and I was like, Oh, that's interesting, and uh I didn't really know exactly what she was getting at. And then she further explained that she's uh I'm a human in progress, so I call us a hipster, which I thought was a nice play on words with that idea of hip and and being a hipster. So I love that. And I think that's all of us. We're all just humans in progress, but most people spend so much time replaying their mistakes that they never actually move forward from them. But the goal here is not to ignore or to think that we could erase our past, it's just to stop handing it authority over whatever comes next and whatever is happening uh are unfolding in our lives here in the future. The seventh promise is to wear a cheerful appearance at all times and give every person you meet a smile. Now, I think this one requires just a touch of nuance here. I don't think Wooden is advocating for that like surface level positivity, but I do think there's a reminder here that even when life feels heavy, we can still choose warmth, we can still choose to be kind and give somebody our presence. One of my favorite clips online, uh and you can find this on YouTube, is an old trick uh Chick-fil-A training video, and in it shows uh the restaurant and all these different people in it, and it hovers over each person, kind of giving them kind of giving you a snapshot as to what has just transpired or what is unfolding in their life, what's happening behind the scenes that as you're serving that individual, you may not even be aware of. Um, and I love it because it's really about understanding that every person you encounter has that invisible baggage that we're all carrying. Some of it's frustration, some of its grief, some of its pressure, exhaustion, or fear. And sometimes their reaction to whatever's happening has very little to do with you as much as it does what to whatever it is that they're carrying or whatever, um whatever the heaviness of it is. And I think about this a lot in org settings too, because there's a lot of just drive-by moments, moments that you pass someone in the hallway, you make eye contact, um, you nod, and maybe you just carry on. And I think we underestimate often how much culture is going to be shaped in these micro interactions. So never waste an opportunity to positively impact someone, even in a seemingly very ordinary moment. Now the eighth promise is to give so much time to improving yourself that you have no time to criticize others. It is a lot easier to criticize than to contribute. It's easier to analyze somebody else and their own mistakes than confront our own. This doesn't mean that accountability necessarily will disappear. We all still need standards, but there's a difference between being accountable and judgment becoming part of our identity. So I think secure people spend way much more time uh trying to build the energy of others versus getting stuck trying to belittle them. And then the last promise from John Wooden is this be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit trouble to press upon you. Now, I'll be honest, I don't know that I interpret this literally here, because all of us, I think, experience worry, as we've talked about on previous episodes. As card-carrying members of the human race, most of us, if not all of us, we encounter fear, anger, stress, difficulty, and everything in between. Even Wooden did. So I don't think the goal here is to be um emotionally invincible. I think the deeper point is to not let temporary emotional states become permanent identities for us. We can feel our emotions, but we don't have to necessarily think that we have to surrender ourselves to those emotions. And I think that's ultimately where all nine promises can be connected or interwoven here. They're really about cultivating this internal steadiness, doing this inner work, the ability to remain aligned with who we want to be, even when life gets difficult, emotional, uncertain, and demanding. So as I revisited these nine promises, I started to think about okay, which one do I want to kind of step into more in my own life? But what I would also do is invite you all to what's the one that you feel like might most improve your life right now or help you move closer to who you want to be? Which one might help how you lead, how you think, how you treat others, um, or just how you're experiencing life. And and then I want to add one last thing to this. John Wooden's promises are great. They're timeless. Um, and I love the thoughtfulness of each. But what would your list include? What promises or commitments do you believe are essential to a life well lived? Because ultimately, whether we realize it or not, all of us are building our lives around certain promises. The question is simply are we creating and building intentional ones? And then the next step is are we following through on them? Thanks for listening.