Beyond Basketball: Coach K’s Keywords for Success by Mike Krzyzewski with Jamie Spotola. Business Plus. 193 pages. 2006
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In this book, Coach K, one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all time, shares forty words that are important in his life. In addition to an explanation of the meaning of each word, he offers a story from his life to accompany each word. He writes that the stories encapsulate not only a definition but a moment in his life in which the word’s true meaning became abundantly clear. The way the book is structured with short chapters is similar to how I organized my book A Leader Worth Following: 40 Key Leadership Attributes and Applications to Master.

The short chapters are such that you can read one or a few a day, almost like you would with a daily devotional.

I enjoyed this book. Here are twenty helpful leadership quotes from the book:

• Adversity can teach you more about yourself than any success, and overcoming an obstacle can sometimes feel even better than achieving an easy victory.
• As a leader and a career-oriented individual, you must take care not to allow one aspect of your life to so consume you that you neglect the others.
• Effective teamwork begins and ends with communication.
• Having courage means boldly pursuing your dreams, no matter what the consequences may be.
• Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined. We all have the capacity to imagine amazing things, but you need courage to take those often-frightening steps toward making your dreams a reality. Your time will come.
• Dependability is the ability to be relied upon. To always be there trying to do your best.
• When you are enthusiastic, you are a catalyst to those around you.
• Define your own success and failure; only you know whether or not you have given it your all. The persistent pursuit of excellence determines winners, not the score of the game.
• Progress is impossible if you only attempt to do the things that you have always done.
• Failure cannot be your final destination; rather, you can use it to shatter limits. It is merely a stepping-stone on your journey to greatness.
• To help turn fundamentals into habit requires intensive, intelligent, and repetitive action. If any one of these elements is missing, something will be missing from the foundation of your team.
• Integrity means doing what is right whether you are alone or with a group, doing the right thing no matter what the rewards or the consequences may be. It means putting your base of ethics into action.
• Whatever you have just done is not nearly as important as what you are doing right now.
• When you are passionate, you always have your destination in sight and you are not distracted by obstacles.
• Poise requires maturity. It’s about remaining mentally and emotionally balanced all the time, no matter what is taking place around you.
• Pride means ensuring that anything that you do, anything that has your name on it, is done right.
• Keep your standards intact, keep the bar set high, and continue to try your very best every day to meet those standards. If you do that, you can always be proud of the work that you do.
• Trust is developed through open and honest communication and, once established, creates a shared vision for a common goal.
• Ambition alone is not enough. That ambition must be coupled with hard work for success to be achieved.
• Work is a necessity if you want to improve. It is the road you have to follow to become better.