Founders - #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football)

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

What I learned from reading My Turn: A Life of Total Football by Johan Cruyff.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----[0:01] I always say you play football with your head; you just use your legs to run.[1:09] I'm not capable of doing something at a low level.[8:45] I'm definitely cunning. I'm always on the lookout for the best advantage.[13:16] To be able to touch the ball perfectly once, you need to have touched it a hundred thousand times in training.[14:00] My father died in 1959, when he was forty-five and I was twelve. His death has never let go of me.[21:07] Winning was the consequence of the process that we had concentrated on.[45:30] It doesn't work without full commitment.[55:17] The experiences I have been through have given me a vast store of knowledge that needs to be shared so that others can profit from my experiences.[56:09] I've led a full life and can look back on it the way you're supposed to. It's been so incredibly intense that I feel like I've lived for a hundred years.[56:21] A setback is probably a sign that you need to make some adjustments. If you learn to think that way, all experiences are translated into something positive.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

I'm not a person with college degrees. Everything I've learned, I've learned through experience. After I lost my father at the age of 12, my life was defined by IACS. First by my second father, who was the club's groundsman, and later by my trainers. Thanks to IACS, I didn't just learn to be a better footballer. I learned how to behave. Through my father-in-law, I gained financial experience. When I started out, no footballer in the world had ever heard of marketing,

and dealing with business was something completely new. But someone came into my life who would help me with that and bring me up. Because every time I thought I could do it on my own, things immediately went wrong. It doesn't matter. It's part of life. In the end, it's more important whether you learn from it or not. I want to stress how important my family is. Not just my parents, my in-laws, wife, children, and grandchildren, but also all the people who took me by the hand at IACS in a phase of my life when I was very fragile. Family has defined who I am now. Someone who has one shortcoming

when it comes to football. I can only think about being at the top. As a player or a coach, I am not capable of doing something at a low level. I can only think in one direction, upwards, to be the best possible. That's why in the end, I had to stop. I was no longer in a physical condition to do what needed to be done at the top. And once that's the case, you have no business being on the pitch. But because I was in a good mental state, I became a coach. Above all, I want to say that my life has always been lived with a view of doing things better and getting better. I've translated that into everything I've done. Those words were written by Johan Cruff the month he died of lung cancer at the age of 68.

And it's an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is My Turn, A Life of Total Football. It's the autobiography of Johan Cruff. And this is another example of a book that I would have never found on my own. One of the benefits of doing this podcast is that people send me, I've probably received hundreds of fantastic biography and autobiography recommendations. And so this was sent to me by a listener named Nicholas. I want to read part of the message he sent me because I think it's a great introduction as to why this autobiography fits into everything else that we talk about. So he says, I know you're always looking for inspiring biographies. Perhaps you'll find

Johan Cruyff interesting. He had changed the game of football as a player in the 1970s and continued to do so as a coach after his career. When reading his biography, you'll quickly realize that he's a misfit. That definitely jumped out at me. Here are a few quotes from the last two pages of his book. What is interesting is I just went to pull up this message right before I sat down and talked to you and actually underlined this, what he's about to point out to us here. This comes at the very end of the book. It's actually from the last few pages of the book. And this is Johan talking. He says, I haven't always been understood as a footballer and as a coach and also for what I did after that. But okay,

Rembrandt and Van Gogh weren't understood either. That's what you learn. People go on bothering you until you're a genius. That's why people like Court Coaster. These are a bunch of names I'm probably mispronouncing. Horst Dazzler, Peter something, and all the others have been so important to me. This is the main reason I'm reading this to you. They didn't just help me avoid mistakes. They also helped me to think differently. And so as I started reading the book and started doing more research, two things jumped out that were really inspiring to me about Johan Cruyff's life and the way he approached his work. The first thing was that he gained an advantage. Football is obviously a physical sport, and his main advantage, he thought, came from his mind. So here's just a quote about

some other research I found. He says, Kroff was never the strongest or the quickest, but he showed how intelligence could rule the game. And so I went back and watched a few interviews with Johan, and he even said, he's like, I think my main advantage was my tactics, my strategy, what I figured out with my mind. And that relates to the second thing that I found most inspiring is the fact that people have been playing football for a very long time.

And Johan was able to come into an already existing game, something that people have been playing for much longer than he was even alive, and found a better way to do it. It reminded me of Albert Lasker in the book, The Man Who Sold America, where he starts out in the advertising industry in the early 1900s. And he realizes every single other person in the industry doesn't realize the full potential of what advertising could be. At that time, they were just brokers. All they would do is contact businesses and the businesses would produce their own ads. They'd use an advertising agency to place the ads in the best publications. And for that service, they'd get about 5%. And Albert realized this doesn't make any sense. Why aren't we finding ways to make these ads more effective? If we can sell more of our clients product or help them sell more of our clients products, they will pay us more money. And that one insight caused Albert to unlock. They started making 10 times as much per each client as they did before. He realized, hey, we can actually do both. And if we do both, if we place the ads, if we create the ads and place them, not only will our clients spend more money in advertising, but we get a larger percentage. And that is what, in David Ogilvie's words, is why Albert Lasker made more money than anybody else in the history of the advertising business.

And if you haven't listened to that, that's episode number 206. And before I jump back into the book, just one more quote from Johan, which I think is fantastic. He says, football is played with the brain. The legs are just there to help. Okay, let's get into the book. This is from the very first chapter. Everything I've done, I've done with a view to the future. Concentrating on progress, which means that the past is not something that I think about too much. Continually looking forward means that I can only concentrate on getting better at whatever I'm doing. And I only really look back in order to gauge what I can learn from mistakes. Those lessons can be taken from different points in your life

and you don't necessarily see how connected everything is until later. So that insight that he's picked up on through experience, the fact that you can only connect the dots looking backwards, not forward, something I learned from Steve Jobs as well. There's a fantastic quote I want to read to you that Steve said. You can't connect the dots. It's very similar to the thought that Johan's telling us in his book. You can't connect the dots looking forward, and you can only connect them looking backwards.

So you have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. So now we go back to Johan. This is the philosophy that defines my feeling for football and for life. It has always been about progress and never, ever stopping getting better. And this next sentence is a main theme, maybe the main theme actually in the book. Football has been my life from the beginning. My parents owned a shop a few hundred meters away from Ajax.

I got to remember it's Ajax. It's spelled Ajax phonetically. So everything in me wants to just keep repeating this word is Ajax. It's Ajax. Okay. So I grew up, my parents had a shop a few hundred meters from the stadium. My father never missed a game. My father told me, so what's happening here is the fact that he's obsessed with football from a very early age. He lives right next to the stadium. He's completely obsessed. This is all he wants to do, and I'll talk to you a lot about that today.

But a lot of this is going to echo what we just learned about Estee Lauder, the podcast that just released last week. And a lot of it ties into that talk I was telling you about, the talk by Bill Gurley called Running Down the Dream. And something that Bill says in that talk that I feel a lot of entrepreneurs that we study on the podcast have in common is the fact that it's your responsibility to know the history of your industry. You should study the pioneers. You should consider it an obligation. And so Johan definitely understood that. My father told me about players like Alfred Stefano, who understood everything about how to use space on the pitch, as well as Fahs Wilkes, these are all Europeans, so I'm most likely mispronouncing your name, who was a phenomenal dribbler of the ball. Everything for me started in the street. The area where, and this is fantastic, because one big theme, another thing that Johan repeats over and over again is the fact that you learn how to flip a seemingly disadvantage into an

advantage. And so, well, I'm just going to read this to you because he can explain it better than I can. Everything for me started in the street. The area where I lived was nicknamed the Concrete Village, an experiment in building cheap housing after the First World War. We played football everywhere we could. It was here I learned to think about how to turn a disadvantage into an advantage. You see that the curb, so this big concrete curb, right? It isn't actually an obstacle. You could turn it into a teammate. Thanks to the curb, I was able to work on my technique. When the ball bounces off different surfaces at odd angles, you have to adjust in an instant. Throughout my career, people would often be surprised that I

shot or passed from an angle they weren't expecting. But that's because of how I grew up. So this idea of flipping a disadvantage into an advantage is exactly what entrepreneurs do. And they also have this trait, how he's about to describe himself. I'm definitely cunning. I'm always on the lookout for the best advantage. And so he's going to tell us a little bit more about his childhood. And there's going to be a lot of themes that you and I have talked about over and over again. The idea that if you can find work that feels like play, you just have a massive advantage. And just an example of that. From a very young age, I was soon well known as the boy with the ball.

Every day, I took my ball into the class with me, placed it under my desk, and passed it between my feet throughout the lesson. Sometimes the teacher sent me outside because I was too much of a nuisance. I was doing it so instinctively that I wasn't even aware I was busy kicking the ball from left foot to right. And so when I read that paragraph, the note I jotted down to myself is another line from that Bill Gurley talk, Running Down a Dream. It's one of my favorite things he says. It's just, you can't fake it. Somebody else has a deep passion for whatever career path you're going down and they're going to smoke you. Meaning if they actually have the passion and you're faking it,

he's, you know, five Johan's five years old at this point. And he's always with his soccer ball. I remember the first time we went to IX as if it was yesterday. I was about five. My father asked if I wanted to go with him to deliver baskets of fruits for the players who were sick or injured.

It was then that I met Hank angle, a friend of my father who was working as a groundsman there. So Hank, another big theme in Johan's life is the fact that his dad passes away really young. He's 45 years old. He has a heart condition. And Johan is 12 when his dad dies. And his best, his father's best friend, Hank, this guy right here, that's the groundsman at the stadium, actually marries his mom. And so this becomes his stepdad and like his second father as well. Hank asked me if I wanted to give him a hand and I started the very next day. So at the age of five,

my life with IAX began. I think back on my childhood with great fondness. I have known nothing but love. And so that last line, the fact that I look back on my childhood with great fondness, I've known nothing but love. There's a few sentences in this book that I double underlined that Johan is extremely fortunate to have experienced. You know, that's extremely rare. The second part being the fact that he had a good marriage. He's married to his wife for 48 years. He had a happy marriage. Again, something that's extremely difficult to do. And then towards the end of the book, he's just like, listen, I live life fully. I live life in it. Like he got the most. He treated life as an adventure that it is. And even though he's writing this book when he knows he's dying, he had used the time before that

fully. So I'll go over more of that later. I just want to point that out. I think back to my childhood with great fondness. I've known nothing but love. That's fantastic. So he's still talking about the fact that every day, even from the age of five, he's constantly at the stadium. He says, I sat, I sat there and there's just ideas that we can use in our own lives. I sat there listening. He's talking about anybody at the club, from the people doing the changing room to the actual 11 players. I sat there listening to them day after day, soaking it up like a sponge. The stadium became my second home.

I was there every spare moment from the age of five. So he opened up the book telling us how important family is. A family is everything to him. He talks about at this point in the book, he's met his wife. He gets married rather early. And he says, no wonder we're still together after 48 years. Our marriage was good twice over. And in this section, it just seems like every page I'm making a new highlight with the same theme.

Fine work that feels like play. So it says, and here's an example of that, I just did what I'd always done, which was spend all my free time playing football, either at the club or on the street with my friends. What has been important to me is not only playing football, but enjoying it. On the very next page, another example of work that feels like play, the note I wrote down to myself as I'm reading this section is if you don't love it you won't do it all the time and if you don't do it a lot you'll never master it as I always said if you work in football it's not work you have to train hard but but you have to have fun as well this way the this way of training has always remained the

standard for me it led me to realize that the easiest way is often the hardest. So another thing that he talks about over and over again, and he compares like some of the people that he, some of his managers that he'd worked for, some of his coaches or trainers, like he seemed to think more fondly of the people that required the team to train extremely hard and to adhere to, like to have discipline about it. I saw an interview with him later in life when he's a coach or after he was a coach, but he was describing what a coach he was. He's like, listen, I was way harder on them

in training than I was in the game. And there'll be more highlights about that later. So it says this way of training has always remained the standard for me. It led me to realize that the easiest way is often the hardest. This is a lot of like, I feel fundamental knowledge in what he's saying here.

Led me to realize that the easiest way is often the hardest. To be able to touch the ball perfectly once this is some like Bruce Lee shit here to be able to touch the ball perfectly once you need to have touched it a hundred thousand times in training so again I think the way to think about that is if you don't love it you won't do it a lot if you don't do it a lot you'll never master it so then he goes into detail about the death of his father and the impact that it had on him. And this is something we've seen over and over again, the latest James Dyson's, James Dyson, James Dyson autobiography I read. That was published, I think last, this year,

actually. And he's writing those words 60 years after his father passed. And so in this case, the note I left myself here is never underestimate the impact you have on your kids, the way you feel about them, or excuse me, the way you feel about your children is obvious, but the way they feel about you is not. Maybe not as obvious, but the impact that you have on them is profound because what I'm about to read to you, keep in mind as I'm reading these words to you, he's writing these words 56 years after his father died. My father died in 1959 when he was 45 and I was 12. He died of a heart attack because his cholesterol was too high. His death has never let go of me. My father is buried in Amsterdam's Eastern Cemetery. Not long after he was buried, I started talking to him. Whenever I walked, cycled, or drove past the graveyard.

I did this for a long time after he died. To start with, I talked to him about school. Then later, when I was playing for Ajax, I talked to him mostly about football. What a dick the referee was. How I had scored my goals. That kind of thing. Over the years, our conversations changed, but never ceased. I always went to talk to him to ask his advice every time I had to make a difficult decision in my life.

So what do you think, Dad? Then I got up the next morning and knew what I needed to do. I still have no idea how it worked, but he was there every time I had to make a decision. And after I talked to him, I knew exactly the right thing to do. So after his dad dies, he gets support from soon to be stepdad, his trainers, his father-in-law when he gets married. But he does have people that try to help him. And he talks about the fact that he can never do anything in life alone. That's actually something he repeats over and over again.

This is more about his life from the time his dad dies until he gets signed by Ajax when he's 18. So this is from like 12 to 18. We see the same exact thing. This is just another, I feel like every note I'm leaving in this book is the same work that feels like play. I was just a kid who had the ball every waking minute of every day. I was at the stadium all day, every day. I was a kid having fun. And for the first 15 years of my life, there was no philosophy and no analysis. It was just fun. I had no feeling of failure. I just took everything as it came and loved it. So after his father dies, his mom has to find work.

She winds up clean. Like they did help her find work by cleaning people's houses. And she also did. She was also cleaning like the locker room and everything at the stadium. And so he signs the contract and he retires his mom. He says, I signed the contract in the presence of my mother. And when we left the office, I immediately told her that she'd cleaned the changing rooms for the last time. And that right there, like imagine how good that would feel.

It makes all the hour, tens of thousands of hours that he's putting in all the hard work he's doing. His father, like not only did he lose a father, but she lost a husband. You know, your spouse dies at 45 years old. You're having to do jobs you don't like. And the fact is that your son came and just feel, just imagine how good that would feel. Everything's going to be okay, mom. I got it. So now we get into Johan's mindset as he's a professional player. He talked about this earlier in the introduction. He's like, I'm not a big fan of looking back. I only look back to analyze mistakes, but I'm always keeping my eye going forward and constantly improving.

This is going to remind me of what Jordan, Michael Jordan said about Tiger Woods in that book I did a few weeks ago, Driven From Within. And so this is what Johan says. What I learned was that football is a process of making mistakes, then analyzing them to learn lessons and not get frustrated. At the end of each game, I was already thinking about the next and what I could do better. And that goes for whether he won or lost. So at the end of each game, I was already thinking about the next and what I could do better. Jordan says in the closest thing we could ever get to an autobiography by him. Look around. Just about any person or entity achieving at a high level has the same focus the

morning after tiger woods rallied to beat phil mickelson at the four championship in 2005 he was at the gym by 6 30 a.m to work out no lights no cameras no glitz or glamour uncompromised and so it's important to point out that johan's approach michael jordan's approach tiger woods approach you do that whether you win or lose you're learning from both in both cases like if you lost it's very obvious that you can get better but it's it's hard for people to understand okay i won but you can still there's always room for improvement another way to think about this is if you go to sleep on a win you wake up with a loss this is an example of that this paragraph that brought that thought to mind by the end of my time at IACS, I'd won the European Cup three times, been named European Player of the Year in 1971, 1972, and I think in 1974,

but he didn't mention that here, which was nice, but really what, this is so funny, listen to his response, like, yeah, I won, basically, I won everything you could possibly win, but which was nice, but really, what are trophies and medals other than memories of the past? At home, I have nothing on my walls about football. When I was awarded an honor, the medal I was given disappeared into my grandchildren's toy box. Those are the words about from a person that's deadly serious about always improving. But listen to that. But but which was nice. But really, what are trophies and medals other than mementos of the past at home i have nothing on my walls about football so you go to sleep on a win you wake up with a loss and so then johan also goes into the people that probably the most important person

in his football career this is going to be very similar to what we learned with jordan with the importance of phil jackson and tex winter So one of the greatest managers, one of football's greatest managers is this guy named Renis Mikkels. I've heard it Michels too. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. But the important part is the fact that Renis and Johan share a lot of the same philosophies. They're the ones that are going to develop total football together. I actually watched a couple of videos on this to try to have like a deeper understanding of it. And what was so fascinating was that there are ideas that were collected over a generation or two. So Renus was older than Johan. He was influenced by people he had played for, people that came before him. He took pieces of their ideas, pushed it forward down the generations.

And then once he finds Johan, they're the ones that are able to develop the system. It's not that all... We've seen this over and over and over again i mean kind of the point of the podcast right where when i bring up the fact that hey we should all be setting sole price like this he's the most influential retailer no one's ever heard of but if sam walton uh jim sinigal the founder of costco jeff bezos and the founders of of home depot are all learning from this guy like we should go like clearly he has valuable information. We should find out. So the same way that you saw people use sole prices ideas many generations later, it's analogous to what's taking place here,

where you have Renis and Johan developing a philosophy that, yeah, they're instrumental in developing, but it's not at all clear that they could have done so without the influences of the people that came before them. I guess that's my point. What's taking place at this point in the story is developing their own philosophy, their system, whatever you want to call it. And so this is what Johan says. Winning was the consequence of the process that we had concentrated on. So I have a quote from General Patton that I'm going to read to you here that reminds me of what like their approach to football is almost like his approach to combat. But that quote before I get there, but that

sentence right there is really could have came out of the mouth of Bill Walsh. I think that's founders number 106. He's the one that wrote the book, The Score Takes Care of Itself. And that's his whole thing. Winning was the consequence of the process that we'd concentrated on. That is a main theme of Bill Walsh's career. And I think what a lot of startup founders and entrepreneurs get out of reading that book, because that book has become, you know, legendary. And it's that idea that it's the winning is just the consequence of the process that we concentrated on. And so now this is Johan talking about what he learned from Renis, what I learned from Renis left an indelible mark on how I understood the game. Like his belief that defense is a matter of giving your opponent

as little time as possible. And so just like Renis and Johan had developed their own unique philosophy that they decided to apply to their craft, which was football, Patton came up with his own unique philosophy, which applied to his craft, which was combat. And so he's going to reference this boxer that was famous at the time named Joe Lewis. And he says, and this is very similar to what that one belief that Johan learned from Renis, that defense is a matter of giving your opponent as little time as possible. And so this is a quote from George Patton. By God, I could lick Joe Lewis if he wasn't permitted to attack me.

The way to prevent the enemy from attacking you is to attack him and keep right on attacking him. This prevents him from getting set. Death in battle is a function of time and effective hostile fire. You reduce the hostile fire by your fire and you reduce the time by rapid movement. Okay, so let's go ahead to something that he points out over and over again. He's constantly developing mentors, people that can help him, guide him, and he's constantly giving them credit. One of the people that becomes like another father figure for him is actually his father-in-law. So his wife's dad, and his name is Cor Coster. He mentioned him earlier, the fact that, you know, I'm really bad with money. I don't know anything about business. I needed help. He winds up getting scammed later. He loses millions of dollars on a pig farm, if you can believe it or not.

And so it says he's still at this point in the story. He's still a young man. Most of the highlights I have actually come from him as a player when he's extremely young because I thought his approach to his craft was actually the main lessons, the takeaways that you and I could have, actually. But he says, I hadn't a clue about anything. That's why the arrival of Cora Koster in my life was a gift from God. Danny's, this is his wife, Danny's father was a diamond dealer and a hardheaded businessman. And he started looking after my affairs. He was always keeping me out of trouble. That was why his death in 2008 has such a

huge impact on me. has been he has been enormously helpful in my life and not just for not just for me as a footballer but also as a father figure father-in-law the grandfather of our children and simply as a human being and so his father-in-law is going to be the one helping him uh negotiate his contracts making sure that you know not only does he is he making as much money as possible and his father-in-law has some really interesting ideas where, where Johan's actually going to get a percent of, if I could, if let's say you have 10,000 fans come to the stadium, you sign me, and I, now you have 15 or 20,000 fans, I want a percent of the, those ticket sales,

which was really interesting. He's going to say something, so money's obviously a large part of professional sports. He's going to say something here. That's very similar to what Steve jobs told us about how it's very easy to flip the priorities. And so it says, this is Johan. In my view, money is very important in football, but it should always come second to the game.

If money comes first, you're doing things the wrong way around. So tell me, this is not the same exact thought that Steve jobs left in his, his biography. The one that he wrote with Walter Isaacson. My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it's great to make a profit because that was what allowed you to make great products.

But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Scully flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It is a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything. The people you hire, who gets promoted, and what you discuss in meetings. And so now he gives us an example of how his philosophy or the philosophy he helped develop Total Football is very similar to family. At home, I received a lot of support from Danny. And the more I think about it, the more I've come to the conclusion that shaping my family played a part in the origins of total football. This was a style of playing that could only be carried out by footballers who could play not just for themselves, but for the rest of the team too. 10 players

needed constantly to be aware of what the man with the ball was doing and anticipate what he could do next. That's exactly what happens in a family. Everything one person in the family does affects the others. And my experience as a husband and father proved invaluable when it came to football. So then he goes into more detail about how he thinks about total football. And really, I just want to pull out two paragraphs here because I think there's a lot of good lessons. It's the fact that you need this, like, it's nice that you've designed a system. Right. But you need discipline to adhere to the system. And so this is what I think he respected about about Renis is because it Renis was a disciplinarian. He made sure he held the players accountable. Johan talks

about playing for other managers that were just that were not that were too lax. And he just did not respect that total football requires talented individuals acting in a disciplined group someone who whines or doesn't pay attention is a hindrance to the rest and you need a boss like renis to to nip that in the bud total football is aside from the quality of the players mostly a question of distance and positioning that's the basis of all the tactical thinking when you've got the distances and the formation right, so he's describing the system they're building, right? Everything falls into place. It also needs to be very disciplined. You can't have someone striking out on their own. Then it doesn't work. But then he has just a one sentence that this is where the

magic happens. If you think about it, you're adhering to, you have the discipline to adhere to the system and you have the quality players and you have good managers. This is just a well-functioning machine. He says it was world-class talent combined with professionalism. Another highlight from this section, I think it's particularly applicable today because we live in this age of nearly infinite leverage. It's the fact that you should be focusing on quality and technique. That philosophy was actually very simple and remains so today. There's a ball and you either got it or they've got it. And if you got it, they can't score. If you use the ball well, the chance of a good outcome is greater than the chance of a bad one. This shifts the focus. This is the whole point of the paragraph that I'm reading this to you.

This shifts the focus to quality and technique, whereas before it was all about effort and hard work so at this point in the story he's already moved uh he switched teams he's in barcelona and then he just had something crazy happen to him this actually happened to a friend of mine i actually went down we went to argentina together a few years ago and then he'd go back every year two years after the trip i took with him he was actually held at gunpoint um and they were robbed the same house we stayed in same restaurant we went to it just literally i could have been there that could happen to me if it was two years if i had gone two years later luckily they just took the money and took off but it had to be terrifying this is going to happen to

johan and his family then something awful happened i was at home in our apartment complex in barcelona watching a basketball game on television when the doorbell was rung by what looked like a courier delivering a package. Once I opened the door, though, I got a gun pressed against my head and was ordered to lie on my stomach. Everyone was at home. The children were in their room and the man told Danny to lie on the floor as well. I tried to talk to him. Do you want money? What do you want?

I was tied up to a piece of furniture to do that he had to set the gun down briefly and at that moment danny got to her feet and ran out of the room out of the building the bastard ran after her i was able to free myself and grabbed his gun to make sure he didn't get a hold of it again there was so much screaming that doors were were being opened over the whole apartment complex and he was quickly foiled a van with a mattress in it was later discovered outside our flat, so everything pointed to a kidnapping of the kind that was a common occurrence in Spain at the time. I don't know anything about his motive,

and I wasn't interested in it. I never tried to find out. Only one thing mattered, and that was that the guy was out of our lives. That's absolutely crazy. Before we get to another surprising thing, where he retires. Retires really young.

This is going to wind up being his first retirement, but it really caught me by surprise. Just one sentence I want to pull out because this is a good summary of his entire career. Football took up every waking hour. And so this is where we get to his first retirement and where he makes the gigantic mistake of leaving his circle of competence. I decided to retire in 1978. After that, I became a businessman. That decision was one of the most important lessons in my life, perhaps the most important. So he says, up until this point, I had spent 80% of my time training or playing football. But from that moment on, I stopped playing. That 80% was spent in other ways. I also began to use

the pigheadedness that had served me so well in football in the completely wrong way. And so he's thinking about he's super famous. He's got a lot of money. So he's constantly getting approached with business ideas. And this is where he's going to lose millions of dollars on this pig farm. And this is actually really common. I have a friend of mine who works for a nonprofit. And it was set up because originally the people that set it up had played in the NFL. And I forgot the stats, but it's like 90 percent of NFL players go bankrupt. And so they set up a nonprofit. It was like kind of like a financial literacy.

And they do all kinds of other stuff now. But that was the main focus. And what they learned was that, you know, people think, oh, you know, they go broke because they're buying Ferraris and mansions. And of course, some of them do that. But the leading cause of their bankruptcy was bad investments. People coming to them say, hey, give me $50,000, give me $250,000. I'm going to start whatever restaurant or whatever the case is. That's what caused their bankruptcy. It's a lot easier to go bankrupt after bad investments than it was spending on, you know, jewelry or clothes or stuff like that. That actually surprised me. But this is an example of that here.

One of them came up to me with an investment suggestion that sounded great. Unfortunately, it was an area of business I knew nothing about. Plus, and this is the stupidest thing, something I had absolutely no connection with. His point is like I'm a world famous footballer. Like, okay, let's design a line of jerseys or something that has to do with the sport. Why are you getting involved? And I think the pig farm was in America at this point. It's just this thing I had absolutely no connection with. My ignorance was being exploited. I had money and where there's money, you'll find rats running about.

Believe it or not, I invested in a pig breeding venture. How on earth did I get involved in that? So he winds up doing it without consulting his father-in-law. And he says, for a little while, I thought I was on a good thing until my father-in-law visited us. What have you done? He demanded. I told him I'd bought three plots of land that we could build on. He immediately asked to see the deeds to the land. Then he tore into me. I had paid money, but I never asked to see any papers. I wasn't used to that kind of thing. To cut a long story short, it seemed there were no deeds. Core was very firm and he said to me, get that whole business out of your head, accept your losses, and then go and do what you're good at. And so this is another example of turning a disadvantage or an

unpleasant experience into a positive. Being the person I am, the mistakes I made back then were quickly out of my system. Not least of all, because I believe that everyone has a destiny, a fate of his or her own. Mine was probably to leave the game at a young age, do something phenomenally stupid, and then find my feet as a footballer again. In fact, that's the whole story of my playing career in three lines. Having retired at 31, I was still young enough to put things right by going back to work playing football. And some of the best experiences of my life came after my 32nd birthday. If I hadn't made those mistakes, I'd have missed out on some fantastic things. And so it's also going to lead him to realize, hey, I'm just going to stay within my circle of competence.

It is far better to learn from your mistakes. My brief career as a businessman was one-off. It also gave me an excellent reason to reconsider my decision to stop playing football. I also realized that, and this is always the right realization, I also realized it might not have been such a good idea to abandon the unique talent

I had been given at such an early age. Since then, I've known my place. It is in football and nowhere else. And so he's actually going to make the decision to play football in America. I opted for America in order to make a completely new start far away from my past and an ideal place to build something big out of a situation in which I'd gone from 100 to zero. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. America was where I discovered new ambitions and how to develop them. And that's one of my favorite things about Johan. He just had a great mentality. It's like, yeah, bad things are going to happen. That's inevitable. Let's learn from them. Let's keep moving on. But it's not going to deter me. I found this quote

in another, doing some other research. And he says, I'm an ex-player, ex-technical director, ex-coach, ex-manager, ex-honorary president. A nice list that shows that everything comes to an end. And so the reason I bring that up now is because in America, he feels like he learned what it meant to be like to have a professional organization, not just be a great football player, but have a professional organization. Something he talks about and criticizes later on when he's a coach and a manager and a technical director and so he says america is about top level sport the top level way of thinking is in their genes and so it's in america why he's playing in america that he's going to discover what becomes like his main focus so when he dies his son writes like a eulogy for a public memorial and And he says like everybody talks about, you know, his football career.

He was a player, a manager, everything else, a coach. The fact that he helped create Total Football and influences how people play to this day. But his main focus was his foundation. And this had to do with helping children, especially children with disabilities, as we're about to see, become active in sports and play. Like, there's just not a lot to dislike about this guy. Like, I found him very admirable, and I loved his approach to life and work. So this is a little bit about that. The seed was my found was the seed for my foundation was planted in my first season with the Washington diplomat. So I think he starts his foundation when he's 50. And I think right now he's 32. So this idea germinated for a while. As part of my job, I was doing something that ended up being

one of those things so worthwhile that you would have done it anyway. But in all honesty, I can't take all the credit. See how he's constantly giving credit to other people around him. When I joined the Washington diplomats, I was told that at every away game, I would have to run a training session for disabled children. At first, I found this very hard. After a few months, I said I wanted to give it up because it was absolutely pointless. Every time I told them to kick the ball one way, they fired it off in the opposite direction. When I told the organizers that, they asked me to watch a video that they'd made of me taking a session. They told me to forget. This is so, really the lesson here, what he's about to teach us is like, make sure you're

focused on the right thing. You're focused on the ball. That's not the right thing. They told me to forget about where the ball landed, but instead to look at the eyes of the child, the eyes of the mother and the eyes of the father, and to see the happiness that I was giving them when they had simply kicked the ball, something they had never managed to do before. That explanation really opened my eyes. Suddenly, I discovered the happiness that I had put in motion. Okay, eventually his stint in America ends, so he goes back to play in Europe,

and this is just really what I mentioned earlier about, well, the no-life myself is is get creative and we'll see that. But he mentions this a few times. I think this is the only time I bring it to your attention, but he's constantly concerned about tax rates. So he says by returning to the Netherlands, I found myself back in the land of 70% tax. I got a salary that was maximum wage in Dutch professional football. Ajax couldn't pay me more than that. However, during negotiations, my advisors had told me that the club could help me build up a pension fund quite separate from my salary. So this is where his father-in-law comes back, comes into play. CORE came up with a beautiful plan.

This is what I meant about getting creative. Based on the fact that my presence on the team would increase attendance suppose ix usually got a crowd of say 10 000 for a particular match we propose that the gate receipts above that 10 000 figure would be shared between the club and me so he's going to get a percent of anything sold above that number it's going to be a phenomenal amount of money and it says we won the championship that first year drawing huge crowds and earning me a huge amount of money. I couldn't spend it. And of course, that was for later on because they sent it up in his pension fund.

But the pension plan was an enormous success. So eventually he moves on. He doesn't stay in places for very long. And there's a lot of conflict in this book. So I'm actually surprised how much conflict is in this book. But so he's eventually he's going to go back uh to barcelona if i'm not mistaken this is his last year before he retires permanently from being a player it's going to remind me because it starts out they wind up winning everything you could possibly win but it starts out getting his ass kicked

and there's a there's a great um one of my top 10 highlights from that almost 700 page biography of michael, I saved. Let me read it to you. And it talks about, you know, the years of struggle that Michael Jordan and the Bulls had to try to get past Detroit because they had a philosophy called the Jordan Rules that were very effective in stopping him. And it took learning from that defeat to actually get to the next level. This is a quote from Tex Winter. It says,

The Jordan Rules succeeded against the Bulls so well that it became textbook for guarding athletic scores. The scheme helped Detroit win two NBA championships, but it also helped, in the long run, by forcing Jordan to find an answer. I think that Jordan rules defense, as much as anything else, played a part in the making of Michael Jordan.

So this is what Johans talks about here. This is my last year as an active footballer. I had started the season with the intention of showing my new club something a bit special. That's what happened and not just by a bit. When I think back, I still can't quite grasp it. How in God's name was it possible? Particularly when you think that we begun losing the season eight to two and all the mockery we got for that but people forget that something like that is often the start of a resurrection meaning a humiliating defeat is the start of a resurrection that is just how it is after that eight after that eight to two loss we won everything really everything the cup the league and for me the golden boot for the best footballer and so he's comparing his this retirement with his first retirement so if those two disastrous

farewell matches in 1978 that was his first retirement were strong indications that my departure from the game wasn't going to go doing that as a coach and a manager. And really what he's writing here, this sounds a lot like Bill Walsh. off. Luckily, thanks to my experiences in the American soccer, I'd acquired sound insights into how things worked in professional sport, and I could apply my experiences to the situation at Ajax. That was vital. The first step was to assume responsibility over the complete footballing environment, from the professionals to the trainees. It's this kind of leadership structure I had to form, or should be in this kind of leadership structure, I had to form a team with all of the footballing staff. I'm not the kind of leadership structure, I had to form a team with all of the footballing staff. I'm not the kind of person who sets people working from his ivory tower.

Football is my subject, so I'm at home on the pitch. And this is where we just see that he learns from every single experience. The whole organization of the first team was based on the American model. That meant using specialists. I'd already realized that no single person can be the best footballer in every position on the pitch. See what he thought? He's constantly reiterating on what he started the book with, the fact that you can't do anything. You're not going to accomplish anything great alone.

You've got to, first of all, learn from every experience, but then find the people that have the knowledge that you don't. I realized that no single person can be the best footballer in every position on the pitch. That's what i told my technical staff as well later i worked with internal and external scouts as well i delegated the training sessions the scouting and so on to others simply because they were better at it than i was i've never pretended i could do anything i couldn't and so this is what I meant about Johan gets creative. He's constantly coming up with ideas no one else is using. And he's obsessed with this idea of

thinking differently. And so one of his main points is like, you need stamina to win at football. And he's like, why don't we like see if we can improve the breathing techniques of our players. And he does something really creative. I suggested that we use Len Delfero, an opera singer who specialized in breathing techniques to help the players get the maximum return on every inhalation and exhalation. This is so similar. We've seen this before. Arnold's first autobiography, Arnold Schwarzenegger's first autobiography he wrote when he was 30. It's Founders No. 193. It's called The Education of a Bodybuilder. Arnold was the only bodybuilder, or the first one, and then soon people copied this, to hire, as a trainer, he hired a ballet dancer to make his movements on stage more graceful. So I think Arnold's idea of hiring

a ballet dancer and Johan's idea of hiring an opera singer to improve breathing techniques is a perfect example of the benefits of thinking differently from the people that are in your industry they're in your field and then i just want to bring to your attention that he was obsessed with details i said to uh he's got actually some really interesting thoughts on it i said to work first by minimizing the small mistakes. Problems seldom or never come from big mistakes. It's often the small ones that count. So he talks about just observing and constantly watching. Other times I sat on the ball by the side of the field and watched. If I'm sitting still, I see more than if I move around. Sitting like that, I can analyze something better

and see the details more clearly. Often these are details that 99% of people don't know, don't see, or don't understand. Something that he talks about over and over again in the book that I haven't mentioned is the fact that because of his father's early death, he was convinced that he was going to die young. Something that helps him get over this fact, this fear of dying young, or this premonition that he had that he was going to die really young, is the fact that he almost did die young. He was a smoker his whole life. He winds up quitting. Unfortunately, the smoking led to heart problems, but also led to his eventual death with lung cancer about 20 years after the fact. And so this is a little bit about that. And really the highlight is that you can't expect to

have poor habits and have good outcomes from poor habits. During that time, I was getting stomach complaints more and more often. Sometimes I would just start sweating or suddenly throw up. I'd already cut down on my smoking, but in late February 1991, my wife intervened. She urged me to go with her to the hospital. In a three-hour operation, I was given two heart bypasses. Luckily, I hadn't been having heart attacks. Rather, it was the thickening of the arteries. And so this is his main takeaway from this brush with death that he had.

The main lesson I've learned from that is that you can't do anything that's bad for you and not expect to be punished. I thought a lot after my illness about my smoking addiction. I wondered why I'd smoked so much for so long, especially after the doctors had told me that 90% of my heart problems was caused by my smoking addiction. I wondered why I'd smoked so much for so long, especially after the doctors had told me that 90% of my heart problems was caused by my smoking. Then you start thinking about it. I knew that smoking could cause cancer. I knew it was bad for my heart, and I still kept on fooling myself, using the excuse that it was a good way of fighting stress. I had absolutely no trouble coming up with reasons not to quit. After that operation, I gave up smoking overnight. And he's got a bunch of just fantastic sentences in this

book. And this is one of them. It doesn't work without full commitment. It doesn't work without full commitment. So he's also got variations of this quote uh he says the same idea a couple different ways and it's the fact that simple football is the most beautiful but playing simple simple football is the hardest thing and so he's describing uh this is now later in his life he's describing his approach to the game of football they were making formation an ever greater problem while in fact it is so simple when you have really think about his philosophy is very simple, simple, but not easy. OK, when you have possession, you make the field big. And when you lose the ball, you make it small again.

That is a fundamental principle that you can learn in childhood. A lot of his experience that he talks about later in the book when he's dealing with, he's almost like drowned in bureaucracy. It did not seem like a pleasant environment to work in. He was constantly saying football is being overtaken by people that actually don't know anything about it. This is going to, I'm going to just read you, I'm not going to, I mean, he goes on and on about this. I'm just going to read you one paragraph to convey this idea across to you.

It's going to remind me a lot about what the founder of Vance, when he wrote in his memoir, Paul Van Doren, he was realizing that the quality assurance was being run by executives with no factory experience paul had done every single possible job in the manufacturing of shoes like he knew it backwards and forwards and showed that like the people that were that they would come in in in either buy or take over uh shoe companies but they didn't actually know like they didn't even take the time to to educate themselves about the process. And then for some reason, they thought they should be the ones ahead of the quality assurance department. He runs this test where it's like, this is bogus. He sends the same shoe through the quality assurance review and multiple

executives give different grades to the same shoe. He's like, so this clearly demonstrates that you're just, this is a big waste of time time you don't actually know what you're doing i feel that johan had that thought about a lot of the people and there was a lot of conflict in the book a lot more than i was i was surprised how much conflict uh that he experienced dealing in management there's board of directors and in some cases what took me by surprise and like iax being an example it's like they're that's a it's a sports team that's on the stock exchange. Like it's an individual club that's publicly traded. And you just have I think it's an example of just having way too many.

What's the phrase like too many cooks in the kitchen or too many chefs in the kitchen? A lot of this does have to do with there's just not one single individual that's actually responsible for all this. So it says no one needed to tell me how complex the solution to the problem would be, but I found that out later. Essentially, though, it wasn't all that difficult. If you looked at who represented the club, you immediately saw that there was a lack of football knowledge there. There wasn't a single former first team player on the commissioner's council,

the board, the member's council, or the club administration. So look at all this. Essentially, it's just a series uh layer after layer of one committee after another that he has to deal with so of course when you have an environment like that whether it's a football club a business a homeowner's association doesn't matter like that is a an environment that's going to produce conflict not one so it wasn't at all surprising that the club was failing to play decent football the administrators didn't have the first clue about tactics and techniques that the club had been built on.

And the whole time I'm reading about this, I thought this is not an environment that I would ever want. One, I wouldn't want to work in it. And if I was forced to, I wouldn't succeed in that kind of environment. And it made me think of what Robert Oppenheimer. So I read about Steve Jobs. Reading about Steve Jobs led me to J. Robert Oppenheimer because Steve Jobs had studied him and said, hey, the way he was able to recruit the top level talent for Los Alamos, for the Manhattan Project is what I tried to do when I came back to Apple. Reading about J. Robert Oppenheimer led me to reading about General Leslie Grove.

So a few weeks ago, I read this book called The General and the Genius, Groves and Oppenheimer, the unlikely partnership that built it out of a bomb. And one of the things that stuck out in my mind that I feel has come over and over again, whether it's David Ogilvie, Charles Kettering, all these legendary founders and entrepreneurs of the past talk about committees are useless. Avoid them. Search all the parks in your city. You'll never find a statue for a committee, right?

They seem to hate it. They understood that formidable organizations are led by a single individual. And what was most surprising is that Leslie Groves. So I read the book thinking I'm going to learn about J. Robert Oppenheimer. You saw that 70, 80, I don't know, maybe 90 percent of my highlights was about Leslie Groves. I just found him to be if you want to learn about leadership, like it's really smart to study. Let's read that book or listen to that podcast because Leslie Groves was a fantastic leader and manager. And so Oppenheimer, I wasn't the only one studying Groves. Oppenheimer, when he worked for Groves, was studying him closely.

And so when the project was about to be wrapped up, Oppenheimer was in charge. He was a single person in charge of Los Alamos, even though he had a report to Groves, right? So they're talking when Oppenheimer's leaving, Groves is still going to be in charge. And they're like, hey, maybe we'll get two people to replace Oppenheimer, maybe we'll do three, maybe it'll be like a committee or something like that. And there's a quote in the book, it says, Oppenheimer insisted that Los Alamos should have one director. He had learned enough about management from studying Groves to believe that while consensus was important, an organization needed a single leader. And I think if you study the history of entrepreneurship, you realize that what Oppenheimer said is true. And I think when you observe environments that

don't have that, you're observing an environment that you're just not going to get a lot done. This is a great summary of what he's experiencing says they got drowned in bureaucracy and johan's opinion about what's going on is like listen everything like you guys are fighting your there's power struggles there's disagreements about this nothing matters except the first 11 the 11 players on the team are the most important thing everything should be there to support them it's not about you and your ego and so he, it isn't the managing director who's the most important part of the club. It's the first 11. If the team performs well, it earns money. Every facet of the club must be supportive of the first 11. And this is going to let me finish reading this because this applies not just to football,

but applies to companies because this is there's a great quote that Sam Walton has in his autobiography that says exactly what the same exact idea that Johan's telling us here. Every facet of the club must be supportive of the first 11, whether you're a trainer or a steward, a director, a groundsman, a commissioner, or a laundry worker. Everyone works in such a way so as to be of service to the first 11. The result is one club and one Ajax. If you haven't got that sort of mindset, you shouldn't bother involving yourself in the business of football.

And so at the same part in this book where he's saying we're being drowned in bureaucracy, he's telling you, no, no, you're not understanding why you're here. You're here to serve the first 11. If you read Sam Walton's fantastic autobiography, which has influenced generations of entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos being one of them, he'd hand out copies with his own highlights to people at the very beginning of Amazon. But Sam was talking about this. You're always struggling because you have to constantly, you don't aim for your bureaucracy. It just happens. And you constantly have to know that you have to keep beating it back. And then next year you have to do the same thing.

You have to keep pushing it back. It's just going to grow on its own. But I really feel he has one sentence in that. And Sam has one sentence in his book that is that is a way to think about the idea that Johan is trying to teach you and I at this point in his book. If you're not serving the customer or supporting the folks who do, we don't need you. And then later on we see Johan, like other masters of their craft, they all say the same thing, that you need to master the fundamentals.

I always give you that example. One of the last interviews Kobe Bryant gave before he died, he was talking about the fact that he was texting with Michael Jordan and he was talking about he had a 12-year-old daughter really into um so i guess this is right the year before she died uh in the tragic helicopter accident with him but he was talking he's like why are these these coaches are just getting way too fancy with these 12 year olds like they're trying to teach him all these tricks he's like i don't so he's talking to michael jordan he's like i'm having a hard time remembering what i was doing at 12.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't doing all this fancy stuff. Right. It was just master the fundamentals. And so he's texting back and forth to Jordan. Jordan's like and Kobe's like, what were you doing when you were 12? He's like, I was playing baseball. And so the interview, if I'm not mistaken, I think it was Alex Rodriguez. The baseball player was the one that was actually interviewing Kobe. And so Kobe was relaying the story to Alex. the one that was actually interviewing Kobe. And so Kobe was relaying the story to Alex. And he said, think about that. Think about what Michael's saying.

The greatest basketball, arguably the greatest basketball player to ever live, wasn't even picking up the ball when he was 12. And you're telling me my 12-year-old daughter needs to know all this fancy stuff? No, stick to the fundamentals and just do it over and over again. Johan is saying the same thing. I'm mostly trying to explain how important it is that new talent should work on the ground rules from a young age. The sooner they master those, the more they learn later on.

And to be honest, there isn't much point moving on if you haven't sorted out the foundations. Only then can you start talking about putting the ideal team together, formed with players who aren't just unusually talented, but who have all mastered the basics of football? And then he says two things that I think is a great demonstration of why books like this are so important. This is also going to echo what Bill Gurley said in the talk, Running Down a Dream, the fact that you should be the best informed person in your field you have to consider that an obligation you don't have to be the smartest but you can learn more and go and collect more information anybody else and so johan says there is no one in football who knows more

about tactics technique and training than i do and so that's going to relate to another idea on the same page or sitting on a different page rather about why write this book the experiences i have been throughout through in sport have given me a vast store of knowledge that needs to be shared so that others can profit from my experiences and this is him reflecting on his legacy and i think this is just absolutely fantastic i was once asked how i'd like to be remembered in 100 years time if i had to give an answer i'd say as a responsible sportsman. While others were off to work, I just went off to play. I've been lucky that way.

I haven't always been understood. As a footballer, as a coach, and also for what I did after all that. But okay, Rembrandt and Van Gogh weren't understood either. That's what you learn. People go on bothering you until you're a genius. And then I'll close on what I mentioned earlier, the fact that he was extremely fortunate to live, to actually enjoy his life, to have a life with no regrets and to live with intensity, to make the most out of this unique experience that we call life. I've led a full life and can look back on it the way you're supposed to. Indeed, it's been so incredibly intense that I felt like I lived for 100 years.

I've lived it with authenticity. I've taken things as they've come, including beautiful moments and setbacks. A setback is probably a sign that you need to make some adjustments. If you learn to think that way, all experiences are translated into something positive. I've overcome all setbacks. That didn't happen by chance. I'm an attacker. And I think that's a great way to end it.

Let's go on the attack. Let's use the lessons that we learn in these books to get what we want out of life. I will leave a link in the show notes if you want to buy the book. You obviously get the full story. You got to read the book. If you buy the book using the link,

you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. Got a lot of messages about gift subscriptions. I should probably maybe put this at the beginning of the episode instead of the very end. I leave a link in the show notes for gift subscription. From now until the end of the year, if you buy a gift subscription,

I'll automatically extend it for your friend, family member, whatever the case is. So they'll have lifetime access. But also got a couple, some people want to buy more than one. So the gift subscription link is if you want to buy one or maybe two, there's some people that are buying group subscriptions. So the two most common examples is founders buying it for co-founding people or executives in their company, and also venture capitalists wanting to buy them for founders in their portfolio company. So that, I'll also leave a link in the show notes for group subscriptions. So that's just easier if you want to buy four or more at a time. Group subscriptions is a way to do that.

And then gift subscriptions is obviously you know one two three people whatever the case is so that is where are we at 217 nope 218 books down 1000 to go and i'll talk to you again soon