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Here’s where we are headed today:
Landon Donovan on teamwork⚡
Mike MacDonald’s advice to his team, plus other mental fitness posts 🥇
Favorite posts I found this week 🏆
Free mental fitness links 👇
Landon Donovan on Teamwork
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3 Things: Mike MacDonald’s Advice to His Team, How the Knicks Build a Resilient Culture, and How to be Optimistic
1. Mindset: Mike MacDonald’s Advice to His Team
Mike MacDonald just won a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks. He's 36 years old. And two lines from a recent podcast have been rattling around in my head ever since.
The first: "Luck is the marriage of being prepared and having an opportunity."
Most people think luck is random. Something that happens to you. MacDonald sees it differently. Luck isn't found - it's built. The preparation you do when no one's watching is what makes you ready when the opportunity appears. The opportunity doesn't create the luck. The preparation does. When those two things meet, people call it luck. But you know better.
I think about how many people are waiting for their opportunity without doing the work that makes them ready for it. The opportunity will come. The question is whether you'll be prepared when it does.
The second line hit even harder: "Earn the right to let it rip."
This is one of the best frameworks for performance I've heard in a long time. You don't just get to cut loose and play free. You earn that. Through preparation. Through doing the work in practice. Through building the habits and the reps that create real confidence - not the fake kind, but the kind that comes from knowing you've done everything required to be ready.
MacDonald built an entire Super Bowl culture around this idea. Get the inputs right. Do the work. Get on the same page. And then - go let it rip.
Most people want the freedom without the preparation. The best earn it.
2: Teams: New York Knicks and Resilience
The New York Knicks just won their first NBA championship since 1973. And almost nobody saw it coming.
New coach Mike Brown was hired last summer after being fired - four times - by four different teams. He wasn't the Knicks' first choice. He came in with questions around him and a roster built around a previous coach's system.
Then the season started. And something different began to emerge.
Where the previous staff ran their starters into the ground, Brown extended the rotation. He trusted the bench. He empowered players who had never been given a real role. And when the playoffs came, the results spoke for themselves - unsung heroes stepping up at exactly the right moments, starters graciously accepting reduced minutes, and a team that genuinely believed the next man up could deliver.
But what amazed me watching them was that they built a resilient roster and team. Each time they were down, they never let go of the rope and always kept fighting. Here were some things that got me thinking how you can build this toughness into the identity of your team:
Depth of identity over depth of roster - It means you know who you are and what you're there to do. When Karl-Anthony Towns was battling through injury, he said: "We've shown that resiliency all year. We felt like we could take it game-by-game." That's identity talking. Not talent. Not matchups. Identity.
Next man up is a culture - not a slogan - They had so many people step up at so many teams through games, series, and the season. When a reserve nobody had heard of became the difference maker in a playoff game, the team celebrated it. Resilience isn't built in the moment of adversity. It's built in how you prepare people before adversity arrives.
The coach's job is to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts - He looks to get more out of his players and looks to see what his team can actually accomplish. It means everyone is ready because everyone is prepared. Phil Jackson called it creating space. Brown is living it.
Resilience requires trust - and trust requires honesty - The Knicks came back from 29 points down in Game 4 of the Finals. That comeback didn't happen because they were more talented. It happened because they trusted each other enough to stay connected when it was falling apart. Trust isn't built in the comeback. It's built in every honest conversation, every hard practice, every moment the coach told the truth instead of the comfortable thing.
3. WHAT I’M CHEWING ON: What does pessimism get you?
WHAT I'M CHEWING ON
I keep coming back to a question I can't stop asking.
What does pessimism actually do for you?
Seriously…When you put a negative spin on something - a situation, a person, an outcome - what does it produce? Does it make you better? Does it make the people around you better? Does it move anything forward?
I'm not talking about being naive. I'm not talking about ignoring reality or pretending problems don't exist. There's a difference between being realistic and being negative. One helps you solve the problem. The other just makes the problem feel heavier.
You never hear about a pessimist who changed the world. Not one. Every person who built something, led something, or transformed something did it with a belief that things could be better. Not a guarantee. A belief. Optimism isn't certainty. It's a choice to move toward something instead of away from it.
I talk with coaches, athletes, and executives all the time who are carrying unnecessary weight. The weight of assuming the worst. The weight of expecting failure before anything has even happened. And here's what I've noticed - that weight doesn't protect you from disappointment. It just robs you of energy you need at times.
The optimist and the pessimist face the same challenges. The difference is one of them shows up with more energy, more creativity, and more belief that there's a way through.
That's not a personality trait. That's a competitive advantage. Not because everything is perfect. Because constant negativity is a losing proposition - and you have too much to do to carry it.
Free Mental Fitness Links 👇
For coaches and leaders:
For athletes and performers:
All of these posts and more are in the Coaching Vault.
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