Becoming the Smartest Person in the Room
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
- Ben Franklin
Have you ever stepped into a job opportunity, thinking that you would slide right in with the knowledge you had compiled during your life, only to discover that you were way out of your element?
I did that in 1992. I went from a high school football coach into a job as a Graduate Assistant in the weight room at the University of Arkansas. I figured I had lifted weights my whole life and had called myself the “Strength Coach” in my previous coaching jobs.
How hard was it going to be to be a college strength coach?
Here’s what I found out: I was standing in front of a Grand Canyon full of information while holding a thimble full of what I knew.
How did I bridge that gap? How did I go from knowing nothing to becoming the National Strength Coach of the Year in 13 years?
Here is what I did:
1) 10 Questions:
The first thing I did was to bury my ego. I had gone from the smartest guy in a high school weight room to the dumbest guy in a college weight room. To gain ground on the second dumbest guy, I needed to gather foundational information.
Foundational Information (FI) is the basics of every profession. These are the tools you use daily as you work in your environment. FI allows you to speak to people in your industry who may not work in the same building. It’s like knowing addition, subtraction, and multiplication before you move into division. In your profession, it may be vocabulary, equations, analytics, rules, fundamental ideas, or anything you need to know to “act” like you know what you are doing.
Every day, I would write down 10 questions—things that I thought I knew or outright didn’t know. I would go, hat in hand, to either the head strength coach, the assistant, a fellow GA, a trainer, a doctor, a secretary, a coach, a coach of a different sport, or even athletes with a deeper knowledge base than I did.
Out of these 10 Questions, there would be new questions, new answers, new ideas, and contrasting answers. You may have paused at “contrasting answers,” so here is an example: A track and field coach may see speed (linear speed) in a different way than a football coach sees speed (burst speed/change of direction speed). All are speed, but they are perceived differently depending on who you are addressing.
Now, I had to learn the “nuances of knowledge.” Speed was not just speed. Power was no longer just power. Essentials were no longer essentials. The nuances were maddening. I would think it was like a foreigner learning English. (See Gallagher Explains Pronunciation)
On a normal day, that list of 10 Questions became 50 questions with 75 answers. These answers led me to ten new questions. For two years, I felt overwhelmed. The answers I was getting did not give me any traction to understand the profession. And there came the “moment where I started to know the answers before I asked them. I found I was asking questions to reassure myself that I knew what I was talking about. From that point on, I began to see my profession in a different light! Instead of looking at the “what,” I began to ponder, “What do others think?”
Thirty years later, I still ask questions. It’s now one or two a day. Which quickly turns into ten!
2) Understand Your World:
Now that I had my FI taken care of, I could speak to people outside my small world and hold my own in a conversation. Instead of asking random questions, I started to seek out the best in the world and asked them pointed questions about how they taught this movement or dealt with different situations. I needed to find out how the best, most successful people in my industry thought
I traveled to speak with Mike Woicik, who won six Super Bowls with two different teams, about what he did to prepare his athletes. I also found Vince Anderson, a track sprint coach, about the fundamentals of speed. I spoke with Jimmy Radcliffe, author of the book “High Powered Plyometrics,” about how he taught power and explosiveness. I could drop names of people you have never heard of all day; my point is that I found the people who were the best at what they did and asked them specific questions about how they taught and how they developed their philosophy.
As I learned more, I started to see a line between what was needed to develop the top athletes and what was not. I began to compartmentalize the information that I had collected. Before long, I had more ideas than questions.
3) Be Different:
The problem I was having was that the answers I was coming up with on how to develop the best athletes for football were not like anything anyone else was doing. I returned to my questions and answers to find out where I went wrong. I must have made a wrong leap of thought to get this far off track.
I had just returned from a strength and conditioning clinic. All the successful coaches were speaking the same way. It was regimented that the only way to be successful was to train your athletes like this or that. And then I heard a quote by George S Patton, “If everyone is thinking the same, then someone isn’t thinking.”
Maybe I wasn’t wrong. Maybe I was the one who was thinking differently.
Over the next seven years, I went on to three jobs, putting my ideas to work. Each step was higher than the last: High School to Junior College and then to a Division I Power 5 Conference job. And I won at each level using these “radical ideas.”
I then became the Head Strength and Conditioning coach at the University of Southern California. I began implementing my ideas and programs, and you know what? We won there, too. Then I moved up to the NFL; no longer was I tasked with just developing athletes, but now I had to facilitate extending older athletes' careers without a substantial drop-off.
My program was pliable enough to be successful in this organization.
You might say it was a coincidence. “They would have been fine without me,” maybe, but after I left, the teams never climbed to the level I had helped them obtain. The same football coaches were still coaching when I left, but they could no longer prepare their athletes to play at the level my staff and I had been able to do. As a result, they all got relieved from their positions a few years after my departure. Maybe that was a coincidence, too.
David Weinberger's quote, “The smartest person in the room is the room,” is both right and wrong, depending on the chair you are sitting in.
If you sit in the chair or a CEO or the Head Coach, Weinberger might be right.
But if you are one of the people seated in that room, you are paid to be the smartest in your area. Then Weinberger is dead wrong.
Your job is to be the smartest person in your field and share insight and knowledge from your area of expertise. The room will never know more than you in your area of expertise. Though some think they know more, they only know what they read in an article or heard at a convention, which has no foundation or context for the discussions in your meeting room.
I went from not knowing what I didn’t know to setting the bar for the profession. In my last 25 years of coaching, I won 16 football championships and became the only coach to win championships at every level.
It wasn’t easy. However, the steps to becoming the smartest person in the room when speaking about preparing athletes to play at the highest level were well worth the climb.
As I said earlier, tuck away your ego. Ask the smartest people the hard questions. Understand what being the best looks like. Then, be unique in the way that you construct your world. If you follow these steps, you will be on top of whatever profession you want to venture into.
By the way, I did this without any academic background in my profession. I believe I was able to accomplish all this because I didn’t learn from a book or a professor who never set foot on a field or an active weight room. I learned it from those who did it every day. Theory, most often, does not work in the real world. Get your education from those who have learned the hard lessons, and you will soon become the smartest person in the room!
Have an amazing day!
