The Score Takes Care of Itself
The last words from the amazing coach known as "The Genius"Bill Walsh was perhaps the most influential and successful coach in NFL history, transforming the San Francisco 49ers from the worst franchise in sports to a dynasty that won five Super Bowls. He is acclaimed not only for his strategic brilliance but also for his advanced approach to leadership. His teams sustained a consistency of excellence rarely seen in sports or anywhere else. Drawn from a series of deeply revealing conversations with coauthor Steve Jamison, The Score Takes Care of Itself offers Walsh's best leadership principles illustrated by anecdotes from his entire career. Additional insights and perspective are provided by his son, Craig Walsh. The book will delight football fans and guide the vast business audience eager to learn how Bill Walsh motivated individuals and crafted winning teams. A sample of his wisdom:* Believe in people: No one will ever come back later and...
Stats for nerds
13recommend
18mentions
18people
2013–2020years
72% recommend28% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- [0] The Score Takes Care of Itself.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Score-Takes-Care-Itself-Philosophy/dp...
- “Score takes care of itself” By Bill Walsh
While not necessarily a “tech” book, the parallels to leading high performing teams are incredible. For me, this was the book that changed the way I think about leading my team.
- I like books which are sort of lessons within a biography format. Points pulled from real experience. For me, this adds context and makes a book readable. If you don't learn anything, then at least you might get to read a good story.
The hard thing about hard things, by Ben Horowitz
The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh (49ers Coach)
Creativity, Inc, Ed Catmull (Ran Pixar)
To Pixar and Beyond, Lawrence Levy (CFO of Pixar with interesting different POV than Ed Catmull)
Otherwise for any dumpster fire of a subject I want a book on, I'll try to trace the "lineage" to see where the starting points were. The trash today won't be a thing 50 years from now. So, maybe look at books from 50 years ago or more.
- The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
- My discipline comes from a lifetime of sports and has carried over to my work life (even though I now do martial arts as a hobbyist instead of competing as a college athlete); many of these can be read as workout / health points but are actually applicable across your life.
It starts from the long-term goal: if you want to be extraordinary, you need to do things differently than the ordinary. People are going to give you a hard time about some of the changes you're making, so you need to be ready to ignore them and accept the fact that if you want to have a different level of discipline than others you need to do things differently.
Discipline is compound interest in your life - you are doing the little things the right way every day, and all those pennies are eventually going to add up into millions. This applies to food, working out, pushing on projects, learning new skills etc.
The best advice is to make it easy for yourself - pick a FEW, SIMPLE, things that you can control and start from there. Stop eating the same snack or having a glass of wine after work. Start waking up at 6 am. Then evolve to going to the gym from there. Build habits.
You also need to accept that you're not perfect, and no man is an island. This part was the hardest for me - I built up walls around myself (thinking that I needed to keep my habits exactly as they were since they had gotten me this far) and thus cut off opportunities and other people. Eventually I was able to be a bit more chilled out while still keeping the discipline in the right areas. I found that 7 habits of highly successful people really helped me; I also recommend "Wooden on Leadership" and "The Score Takes Care of Itself" as examples of champions putting this bottoms-up approach into practice over years and reaping the rewards.
There is no shortcut. There is nothing fancy. Control what you can control, don't worry about the rest of it, and trust in the process. Feel free to message me if I can be helpful
- > To accomplish this, I decided to fly to New York to hole up in a hotel room for three days to read a few highly-recommended management books.
> I decided to focus on growing Gusto’s engineering team, and not our code. The technical books on my desk starting getting replaced with books like Mindset, High Output Management, and The Score Takes Care of Itself — still three of my favorites today.
If the three books listed in the latter excerpt were not those three books you read in the hotel, can you please tell us what books they were?
