The score takes care of itself

3 days until the new year properly starts. Great time to think about what’s next. I’m writing this to avoid doing that … and to frame my thinking.

A thought that keeps coming up for me is Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care of Itself. Walsh is a legendary NHL coach who took the 49ers from a failing team with empty stadiums to a money printing superbowl winning machine.

I don’t understand sportsball but the book was great.

The anecdote that sticks with me is about filling stadiums. NHL teams are businesses and they need to fill seats to make money. No audience, no team.

But the 49ers sucked and nobody came to see their games. They couldn’t even sell season passes to core fans in the city (San Francisco)! So they came up with a plan: Family day. Throw a big party full of fun events and perks and prizes and do a spiel about how much fun this is and fans will buy tickets.

They didn’t. Nobody cared.

At that point Walsh decided this was dumb and he was never going to follow a marketer’s or sales exec’s lead again. They’re fine folk doing fine things, but his job is winning games, not twirling around hoping for pennies.

He focused on the game and the team. Doing lots of things from the book.

Guess what – the more games the 49ers won, the more full their stadiums got, the more money rolled in, the higher price their season tickets became. It all stems from winning games.

Because that’s what people want: To be fans of a winning team. The side-show is nice, but you pay for the steak.

In your work this translates to the concept of luck surface area. You can’t control the opportunities that come your way, but you can control how likely they are to come.

Luck surface area is the rectangle between results and who-knows. The better/bigger results you get and the more people know about it, the luckier you get.

You can optimize for who-knows:

Or you can optimize for results:

Now here’s the thing – everyone loves a good story, but they pay for results. Nobody would read Walsh’s book if he hadn’t won 3 superbowls.

Your job is to win games. The more you achieve, the easier it is to sell.

Cheers,
~Swizec

PS: like I told a reader recently – the thing that looks good on a resume or while networking sounds like “Results achieved or problems solved for company that looks like yours”