It’s because they emphasize the wrong thing.
Listen to the next Super Bowl champs as they start next year’s training camps. Here are the things they’re going to talk about, because they’re the same things every champion talks about as they get into the next year. Every champion plans on repeating. They know champions almost never do, and they are determined to be the exception.
Here are the things they focus on as they organize themselves for what they think is going to be a return to the top:
• We’re not going to have a let down
• We’re not going to things for granted
• We’re going to continue to work hard.
And then they go out and fall right on their faces – shocked, amazed and frustrated that they did not repeat as champions.
What went wrong what goes wrong.
Why is it so hard to repeat? What’s the mistake they all make? Here it is, loud and clear:
They focus on not letting down instead of focusing on improving
You can’t win next year doing what you did to win this year. They know that, and they may even say it out loud, but they don’t really take it serious. They don’t really appreciate how hungry everyone else is going to be this year to beat them. They don’t realize that every single game they play they’re going up against someone who has more motivation to beat them than they had the year before. It’ll be more of a priority to beat them. They’ll be more focused, prepared and determined to beat them. As a result, somebody is going to beat them.
However, the sleep walking champs don’t know they’re sleep walking. They think they have their act together. They think they know what it takes to win. They’ve done it once, they can do it again. Just because you know how to do it doesn’t mean you’re going to do it. It’s one thing to know how to do it, it’s another thing to do it. Any team that wants to repeat has got to take the approach that they’re going to have to double down on effort over the year before. They’re going to have to appreciate the enormity of the task and know that there’s absolutely no way of repeating doing the same things they did last year. Everybody they play is going to be improved and they’re going to focus all of that improvement on knocking off the champs.
