Too many people obsess over their salary, bonus, or job title, or for their business revenue numbers and targets. They’re staring at the scoreboard instead of watching the game being played right in front of them. The football coach Bill Walsh said that “the score takes care of itself” and it’s a fundamental truth about how sustainable success actually works in business and in life.
Walsh understood what most people miss, which is that outcomes are the downstream product of hard work. As you build your business, if you focus in the moment, execution will become your default setting. and you’ll have created an environment where success is possible. It means you need to work with your team, caring about how they communicate, how they prepare for meetings, how they handle setbacks, and how they show up when nobody’s watching. These aren’t the big dramatic moments but daily decisions and actions that separate individuals and organizations on the road to something bigger.
What hurts most professionals and businesses is an accumulation of sloppy execution, shortcuts, and a tolerance for mediocrity in the name of moving fast. The irony is that obsessing over the score actually makes you less likely to achieve it because you’re optimizing for the wrong thing. You start making decisions based on what moves the needle now rather than what builds into the future. Instead, reinforce behaviors and systems that generate sustainable performance.
The businesses and professionals that sustain long-term success are all meticulous about process and relentless about maintaining standards even when it would be easier to let things slide. When you stop chasing the score and start building the systems that focus on excellence, something interesting happens-the score shows up anyway. But then it keeps showing up because you’ve built something that doesn’t depend on heroics or luck to function. That’s not just better business, it’s a better way to live.
