THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
Nick Saban is widely regarded as one of the great coaches in the history of sports. His teams won a record seven college football national championships, including six in the 17 years he spent leading the University of Alabama Crimson Tide. When it comes to high performance, his brutally honest leadership approach has always had a way of cutting through the clutter, and getting right to the truth.
For many years, Saban’s weekly media sessions and postgame press conferences were a must listen. Of course he was typically talking about his team's execution on the football field, but those conversations often covered concepts that apply to anyone's pursuit of success, including people like you and I here today. One of Coach Saban’s most famous soundbites came from a 2015 press conference, where he spoke about what he called “the illusion of choice.”
“They (young players) all think they have this illusion of choice. Like, I can do whatever I want to do. And you kind of have this younger generation now that doesn’t always get told no. They don’t always get told this is exactly how you need to do it. So they have this illusion that they have all these choices.
“But the fact of the matter is, if you want to be good, you really don’t have a lot of choices, because it takes what it takes. You have to do what you have to do to be successful, so you have to make choices and decisions to have the discipline and focus to the process of what you need to do to accomplish your goals.”
Those words serve as an important reminder for each of us here today. They highlight the reason, if we’re serious about becoming our best and serious about winning in any meaningful area of life, why our discipline is critical. Each of us are responsible for recognizing that despite what we say we want or what we can sometimes convince ourselves to believe, it’s a narrow road that leads to success, and it’s our discipline - our ability to do what winning requires, even when we don't feel like it - that determines whether or not we stay on it.
Building that discipline starts with clarifying what Saban so deftly describes as the “illusion of choice.” That illusion he references is the voice in our head that distorts the truth. It tries to convince us that the road to success should be easy. It tries to justify that doing it our own way is good enough, and that we don’t need to change or improve our approach. It tries to rationalize taking the easy way out or settling for something less than our best, and it tries to defend our lack of discipline with flimsy excuses and fragile explanations.
But what is an illusion, really? It’s a lie. A trick. A deception. That’s what that voice in our head is doing every time it tries to convince us we can take the easy way out - that we can settle for something less than our best - and still do the big, important things we say we want to do. We can try to justify it. We can try to rationalize it. We can try to defend that delusional belief all we want, but it doesn’t change the truth. If we really want to become people worthy of the success we say we're after, then we have to clarify that narrow road before us here today, and then muster up the discipline it takes to stay on it. If we really want to win, Nick Saban reminds us, that's really the only choice we've got.
