The Only Thing Tougher

The only thing tougher in professional football than winning your first Super Bowl, is to win the next Super Bowl.

The only thing tougher in professional baseball than winning your first World Series, is to win the next World Series.

The only thing tougher than winning your first NBA Championship is winning the next NBA Championship.

By now you know where I am headed.

The best time to win is after you just won. Why then, does it so rarely happen? 

During my career I worked at several newspapers varying in publication frequency from 1 to 7 days a week. What I learned at the once a week publication is that you work like crazy to get the weekly edition out, then, the day after, you can hear a collective sigh from the entire staff as a full-day break was taken before getting ready for the next week's paper. 

Once we got the weekly edition out what we should have done, instead of basking in the victory, is used the less demanding time, the day after, to take urgent action and go places in business we had never been. 

The challenges lie in the challenge to challenge yourself and your team to do something different, to do more. That is the very reason that champions rarely repeat. They are not as hungry as they once were, they don't challenge themselves they way they did in order to win it all the first time. They have the same players and the same coach. What they don't have is that level of desire and commitment that got them to places they had never been. And most, will never return.

You can't quit before the victory and you shouldn't quit after the victory.