Winning Every Day: The Game Plan for Success [Paperback]

Lou Holtz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 4, 1999

"Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it."

-- Lou Holtz

Meet Lou Holtz, the motivational miracle worker who revitalized the Notre Dame football program by leading the legendary Fighting Irish to nine bowl games and a national championship. During his twenty-seven years as a head football coach, Holtz garnered a 216-95-7 career record. Each new assignment brought a different team with different players, but, invariably, the same result--success. How did he do it? By designing a game plan for his players that minimized obstacles while maximizing opportunities.

Now he wants to pass his game plan on to you. In Winning Every Day, you'll discover ten strategies that will drive you to the top of your professional and personal life. Coach Holtz will reveal how you can acquire the focus and commitment it takes to be a champion. It won't be easy; it takes sacrifice to be the best. But now you'll have a proven winner alongside you in the trenches. Winning Every Day demonstrates how you can elevate your performance while raising the standards of everyone around you. Follow Coach's strategies and winning becomes habitual. You will learn to welcome sacrifice as you dedicate yourself to excellence. He will show you how to clearly define your short-term and long-term goals, to develop an unwavering sense of purpose without compromising flexibility.

Through it all, Coach Holtz will help you discover the courage you need to live a life of unremitting triumph. You couldn't have a better guide. He will provide you with the strategies he has shared with Fortune 500 companies, groups, and organizations. Voted the top motivational speaker two years running by a survey of speakers' bureaus, Coach is going to present you with all the Xs and Os, the basics of his game plan for success in life and business.

 

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A master motivator who guided Notre Dame to the 1988 national college football championship, Lou Holtz knows how to win big on and off the gridiron. For business leaders, for recent college graduates struggling on their first job, or for just about anyone who wants to get ahead, Holtz devises a game plan for success: dream, believe, and achieve. "Write down everything you hope to achieve in life," Holtz writes. "Then make sure you do something every day to realize one of your dreams. You are going to encounter adversity but you will also ... take big, satisfying bites out of life."

Holtz believes that people are capable of achieving just about anything if they learn to tap into the unrelenting powers inside themselves. He illustrates his points by drawing from moments in his rags-to-riches career as one of America's best college football coaches. Holtz's formula is simple: He calls it "WIN" or "What's Important Now." Holtz writes that if he can do it, anyone can. Despite being raised poor in a beat Ohio river town, later devastated by his parents' divorce, Holtz ended up with the best college football job in the country. Clearly, Holtz can get into the end zone. Follow his advice, and maybe you will, too. --Dan Ring --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

After turning around the fortunes of college football programs at several universities, Holtz landed the top job in his profession in 1986 when he was named head coach at Notre Dame. His 1988 Notre Dame team won the college national championship (a story chronicled in his book, The Fighting Spirit), and Holtz posted winning seasons until he retired at the end of the 1996 campaign. During his coaching career, Holtz was known as an exceptional motivator, and he translated that skill from coaching to professional speaking after his retirement. In this book, Holtz outlines the principles that he believes helped him achieve success, such as a positive attitude, dealing with adversity, adapting to new situations and making a commitment to excellence. Holtz illustrates his points with numerous anecdotes drawn from his coaching days and also includes a fair number of jokes. In the end, however, what Holtz has produced is a work no better or worse than most other motivational business books. Improvement-minded Notre Dame fans are the ones most likely to be motivated to buy the ex-coach's efforts.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness (August 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887309534
• ISBN-13: 978-0887309533
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,121 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #36 in Books > Business & Investing > Business Life > Motivation & Self-Improvement

More About the Author

After nearly three decades on the sidelines, Lou Holtz retired from coaching and now shares his strategies for success with Fortune 500 companies, groups, and organizations. He lives in Florida.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life & Leadership Tips from a Master Motivator, June 30, 2003

By 

Matthew Dodd (Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winning Every Day: The Game Plan for Success (Paperback)

Lou Holtz, currently the head football coach at the University of South Carolina, has written one of the best, and most enjoyable leadership books I have ever read. His game plan for success was largely told through his gridiron experiences, but this plan is about much more than just football-it is a proven, common-sense guide for succeeding in the game of life.

What makes Holtz's life and leadership insights so compelling and believable are his dynamic life experiences and his incredible list of accomplishments: parents were divorced; fiance' broke off their engagement, but they later married and remain so after 40 years; only coach to lead 4 different programs to top-20 finishes and 6 different programs to bowl games (William and Mary, N.C. State, Arkansas, Minnesota, Notre Dame, South Carolina); 23 of 32 college teams he coached have received bowl bids, with 18 top-25 finishes, 8 top-10 finishes, and one undefeated national championship; 3rd winningest active coach and 7th place all-time with 243 victories; wife's heroic battle with throat cancer; fired or let go as assistant coach more than once; polled as the best motivational speaker in the country two years in a row, and his motivational video "Do Right!" is the all-time best-seller; guest speaker at most Fortune 500 companies; and was invited to the Oval Office by four different presidents.

Holtz's game plan consists of ten steps. Each step is explored in detail in its own chapter. The colorful, real-world stories and humorous anecdotes Holtz used to present the steps' lessons perfectly complemented his conversational writing style. The final chapter is considered the "end-zone" of success-where you can be if you have the courage, desire, and character to apply the lessons described within the plan's steps.

The book is jammed full of common-sense, spiritual, philosophical, and motivational life and leadership perspectives. The most memorable passages for me as a father, leader, and follower were Holtz's thoughts about discipline:

"For me, a disciplinarian is someone who requires that people understand the consequences of their decisions. You use discipline to reinforce choices. Our athletes and my children knew that if they chose to misbehave, they were also choosing to pay the consequences...In each case, I never punished anyone; the offenders chose the punishment themselves by their actions."

He illustrated his commitment to being a disciplinarian by describing the circumstances that led to him suspending his top three Arkansas players before the 1977 Orange Bowl (against Oklahoma), and to suspending two of his best players before his top-ranked Notre Dame team played the second-ranked University of Southern California in 1988:

"[They] recklessly violated our Do Right rule, which governs personal conduct...These were not bad guys; they simply made a bad decision...I didn't want the keys to our offense to miss our biggest game of the year, but when they decided to break our rules, they also decided to miss the game. Now I had to support that choice."

Holtz is a master motivator and a proven true winner in football and life. My highest recommendation for this book is best captured by Holtz himself when he wrote, "As you know, the only things that will change you from where you are today to where you want to be five years from now are the books you read and the people you meet." I hope I someday get a chance to meet Lou Holtz and thank him for his outstanding book on life and leadership.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Winning Every Day, January 30, 2001

By 

Justin McDaniel (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winning Every Day: The Game Plan for Success (Paperback)

Lou Holtz gives you motivation tips and how to succeed in life. He breaks it down into direct on clear-cut. The power of your attitude, tackling adversity, sense of purpose, your friends, being the best you can be, competing, taking care of yourself, trust, committed to your obligations, and care for others are all phases of the book takes you through. The goal of this book is to make you feel that Lou Holtz is sitting in front of you discussing all issues in a humorous way.

Winning Every Day": The Game Plan for Success is a book for everybody that wants to become a winner in every situation that life throws at you. It is direct, concise, clear-cut, humorous, wise, and precise in its recommendations for how to win every day. The book will make you a winner. All you have to do is spend two hours on reading the book. It's funny and a great book to read if you want to get on track or continue staying on track.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learn important people skills and leadership lessons while you have fun reading..., May 31, 2006

By 

Lane Fox "MillionairesForJesus.com" (Tulsa, OK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winning Every Day: The Game Plan for Success (Paperback)

I happened to notice this book one day when I took my daughter to the library. A friend of mine is a personal acquaintance of Lou's so I decided to see what 'Ol Lou is all about for myself.

This is a book of (mostly humorous) stories that makes it a fun, easy read. At the same time, each story has powerful success principles and truths embedded within.

If you want to see powerful leadership in action, this is a great book.

If you want to get more from your interactions and relationships with people in every area of your life, this is a great book.

If you find yourself doubting your abilities and potential, this is a great book.

If you want to be able to learn from someone who started out as a nobody with nothing and ended up as somebody who had something, this is a great book.

If you weren't fortunate enough to have a parent or adult-figure who taught you how to win at the game of life, then I heartily recommend this book to help fill in that void.

If you don't see yourself in the preceding statements, or, if you have read all the success books and you are looking for something brand-new that you have never heard of before, then this probably isn't the book for you.