Getting it Done When it Matters

A constant debate in sport is about how much Champions are born or made. Some people believe that it’s virtually all down to natural talents that you are born with, whereas others, including myself, believe that hard and smart work can go an awfully long way. Often players who give the impression of being outrageously gifted are actually just showing off the results of thousands of hours of hard work. Michael Jordan the Basketball legend who most experts still class as the best of all time, would at first glance appear to be a good case study of evidence for those in the natural talent camp. Not only was he exceptional at all the basic basketball skills and made them look so easy, he also had that extra factor of being able to do physical things that no other players could, namely his magical ability to hang in the air and change direction whilst off the ground. Anybody making that argument would be ignoring an incredible work ethic that would put most humans to shame. Most people see an all-time great like Jordan and assume that everything has always been easy for him and that’s he’s always been outstanding. In this particular case the fact that Jordan got dropped from his high school basketball team completely flies in the face of that assumption. Successful people aren’t people who have never failed, they are people who have responded well to failure. Jordan himself is more than aware of this, he is quoted as saying: ‘I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.’

Jordan’s willingness to be prepared to fail was never more clearly illustrated than when he retired from basketball whilst at the peak of his powers, and took up baseball. By professional standards it would be polite to call his baseball abilities ‘poor’. He knew even though he wouldn’t play in the major leagues that the media spotlight would be on him for every step of his baseball journey, so not only was he prepared to fail he was prepared for the world to witness it and at a time when he was the most famous sports star in the world and dominant in another sport.

He went on to launch a legendary comeback in basketball, adding to his NBA Championships with the Chicago Bulls taking his tally to six. Being on six NBA Championship teams is incredibly special, being named as the Most Valuable Player in all six of those final series of matches stands Jordan out as not only an incredibly skillful performer but one who without a shadow of a doubt knew how to get the job done when it really mattered. I’ve already mentioned his incredible work ethic that would have allowed his skills to become so ingrained they would repeat under the highest of pressure, add to that how much of a great competitor Jordan was and it’s little wonder he was at his best on the biggest of occasions. A true competitor is someone who takes on challenges that they know they might fail at, someone who is prepared to lose in the quest for the ultimate victory, someone who will take the responsibility to change a game when it’s going wrong for his team rather than shy away and absolve himself from blame, someone who will put his hand up to take the potentially game winning shot every single time his team need to even though they know a miss will result in the team losing and someone who is prepared to start all over again and play a sport where he knows there are many people better than him at that sport.

Was Jordan better than the rest merely because as Lady Gaga might say he was born this way? Or was it that he worked that little bit harder, little bit smarter and was prepared to fail in order to get to where he really wanted to be?