It’s not the smartest people in the room who win, it’s the ones who care the most.
“You can know all the X’s & O’s.
You can be the smartest person in the room.
You can have a better strategy than anyone else..
But if you don’t deeply care about your people, and have the listening & communication skills required to reach them, none of what you know matters.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
I don’t want to say that consuming information and acquiring knowledge has a point of diminishing return because I think increasing intelligence will forever be a net positive.
However, I will say that if you’re in a “people” field (and more fields are people fields than you think) and your soul focus is “knowing more than everybody else” you’re in for a rude awakening if you’re looking for success.
It’s because, to be frank, people don’t care what you know. They care about how you make them feel.
I’ve always felt it best to know what you need to know (constantly refining your knowledge, sure) and then take the requisite information you need to know to your people and serve them with it.
I think far more of one’s time, (again in people fields) should be spent, 1) caring about people 2) listening to people 3) communicating with people.
I mean think about it, whether it’s coaching baseball or coaching strength and conditioning with youth athletes.. How complex does it need to get?
Is “knowing the most about baseball” going to help 14-year-old’s? Is understanding the fine details of the concepts outlined in “Supertraining” going to be applicable to a 13-year-old looking to improve his or her confidence and goblet squat?
Of course not.
Know what you need to know, know it better than anybody else (notice I didn’t say “more”, but better) and then spend your time caring about emotional human beings.
Learn them. Find out what they care about. What they like and dislike. When is their birthday? What is their dogs name? What other hobbies do they have? If appropriate, chat with them about their struggles. Be relatable. Just flat out listen to them.
Make them the main character of the story, and you’ll find you don’t have to know all the x’s and o’s. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. And hell, you don’t even have to have the best strategy.
I’ll take the guy who knows how to reach people over the guy who knows the most about training 100 times out of 100.
Care. Listen. Communicate.
That’s how you make a difference in the lives of others.
So simple it’s hard.
