I’m writing a business book. That’s one of my current projects.
Three reasons why:
- I’ve been asked a lot about business advice.
- Being a business owner is the toughest job I’ve ever had.
- I’m tired of reading the same old business bullshit that has no relevance to my reality.
My business book is extremely unconventional. It’s another soul-searching exercise that challenges popular myths. I’m trying to update my business playbook like I did with football. In my rookie season as a high school head coach in 1984, I went to a football coaching clinic. I used that pro team’s playbook. Hell happened. Instead of win-win, we won one. Winning one game out of eight is hell. Burning hell. The one game we won was a product of divine intervention.
We didn’t deserve to win that game either. I would much rather have gone winless because:
- we deserved it
- zero is an even number
- it would have made a better story. Because the next year we went undefeated. 10-0 championship.
Three reasons for the turnaround:
- I started my own system. The pro playbook that I learned had zero relevance to my team. None whatsoever. It was an act of insanity to believe that a pro playbook had any relevance to a hapless, hopeless highs school program that had never won anything ever.
- Lifting. My team was iron deficient. Weak. Weak bodies, weak minds. My team starting a 365 lifting program – year-round.
I romanticize the past. Just last week I told a fairy tale to a gym member about the past. He asked me how football was going. I said, “Man, kids today are lazy. They’re F’d up zombies addicted to Facebook and video games. And Tweeting. Man, it’s F’d up today. My team won’t lift like they used to. Never had this problem before.” What a foolish statement. In 1985, we won an undefeated championship with only 26 players. That’s it. That’s all who stuck it out. At the end of our first week in pre-season, I was urged by two people to fold the team because it looked hopeless. Lost cause. That was 26 years ago. When we didn’t lift the year before, our roster was packed – 51 players. And lost. When work had to be done, they cut themselves. They were no cell phones and no Internet to blame. It was the same then as it is now. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Hardcore 365 commitment to lifting in football was the same in 1985 as it is now.
My 1985 system evolved into the most unconventional football system and ideology in the world. That’s a bold statement but it’s true. I don’t have conventional playbooks on offense or defense. The offense is connected to the defense. The offense is an extreme limitless passing machine that operates at warp-speed, one play every 8 seconds, with the build built at the line of scrimmage using a decision-making model. And I don’t kick, we go for it. Always, anywhere, any time.
I never have and never will see what’s so complicated about one guy throwing a football to another guy and having other guys block for that guy. I don’t see the complexity of telling 11/12 guys to chase the guy who’s holding the football and then knock him down. And I never have and never will understand the greatest contradiction of all – not going for it despite all the tough-talk bullshit that coaches pile up about character and adversity and all the real-life hell that happens away from the insular artificial world of football. If coaches truly had balls, they would not have turned football into the game that so many like to dislike – soccer. I never have and never will understand the appeal of the guy wearing the cleanest uniform kicking the ball over the heads of the guys they couldn’t get through. One side tries to move a football forward across a line. The other guys try to stop it. The only issue really is who has the bigger balls and who stays stronger longer. That’s what it boils down to. Biggest balls, stronger longer. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how much money you have, how pretty you look, and how big your stadium is…no balls, no strength – no winning.
My football system is not a conventional playbook. I never have and never will understand the conventional wisdom of expecting players who are starting from scratch to memorize hundreds of pages of Xs & Os diagrams and then try to recall them when the shots are flying for real. My system is limitless. No playbook. It’s a system about basics, fundamentals, out-working, decision-making under pressure, and pressuring the other team until they break. That’s what my business book is about. No conventional playbook. A simple limitless system that solves real-life problems if you spill you guts by executing to perfection especially when you think you can’t go on.
Xs and Os don’t win in football. And they don’t win in business. The difference between winning and losing in football is the exactly the same as the difference between winning and losing in business – who has the biggest balls and who lifts the most.
Gino Arcaro has written 12 books. He started his writing career by writing 6 best-selling academic law enforcement textbooks. Then he changed his focus and wrote 6 non-academic books to compete on a new stage. The first book is Soul of a Lifter, available in paperback and e-book. The book is about how lifting is a life-saver – lifting others and lifting weight. Dual-purpose lifting. You can review all Gino’s books them by clicking here.
I’m not making this up.
July, 1983, 6:30 am. I was a uniform cop working midnight shift. Day 6 of 7 consecutive midnights. With 15 minutes left before off duty, I got a radio broadcast – “domestic.” The address was about 5 blocks from where my gym is now situated. I walked up to the back screen door. Two guys were yelling at each other in the kitchen. One guy was about 55, the other guy was about 30. Two ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts on the kitchen table. Too many empty beer bottles to count. The kitchen smelled like a backed-up sewer. Neither guy had showered in days.
The older guy said, “GET HIM THE FUCK OUT…NOW!!!”
I said, “Who are you?”
Older guy said, “HIS FATHER. I WANT HIM THE FUCK OUTTA HERE.”
I asked, “No problem. But out of curiosity what did your son do?”
Older guy screams, “HE CALLED ME A CATHOLIC!!!”
I said to the younger guy, “I’m Catholic. What’s your point?”
Younger guy answers, “I’M NOT FUCKING LEAVING!!!”
The decisions we make shape our lives. Nothing just happens. We decide what happens. My attitude had changed dramatically in less than eight years of being a cop. I resigned from policing exactly 7 years later, in 1990, because I couldn’t stomach the thought of having my professional career and my growth controlled by ivory tower occupiers. What used to be exciting and challenging became boring and repetitive.
I said to the younger guy, “Last chance…let’s go.”
Younger guys asks, “WHY DO I HAVE TO LEAVE MY OWN HOUSE JUST BECAUSE THIS MOTHERFUCKER CALLED THE COPS?”
I asked older guy, “Is this your house?”
Older guy answer, “NO” in a tone like I was stupid for not having known what he knew.
Dad visits kid. Kid calls dad names. Dad calls cops and wants kid kicked out of kid’s own house.
I told both of them that they should be ashamed of themselves for calling each other motherfuckers. “You’re family for fuck sakes. You gotta fight for each other, not with each other. What the fuck is wrong with you? Now shake hands and stop acting like assholes.” They did. I left.
My point is this:
- Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t make assumptions even if you see it with your own eyes.
- Ask questions. Get answers. What you see may not be what it appears to be.
- There are F’d up people around. Don’t try to figure them out. You’ll lose your mind trying.
- Studying psychology is nice but it will never give an answer about how all human minds really work.
- Conflict is the single biggest waste of time on planet Earth. Nothing comes close.
- To solve conflict, don’t beat around the bush. Get to the point.
- Unresolved conflict is the cause of all hell.
- Changing careers changed my life.
I am eternally grateful for the police hiring me just after my 18th birthday. I am eternally grateful for having been a cop for 15 years, between1975-1990. What policing teaches is tacit – it’s almost impossible to explain. But I’m more eternally grateful for having left. I’m more eternally grateful for having a business that’s working out right smack in the middle of fond memories from my police days. Across the road from my gym is an abandoned building. Every time I look there, I think of a 300-lb guy holding his senior citizen mother hostage with a butcher knife at her throat. Just down the street from my gym is an abandoned building where a bar used to be. Every time I drive past the side door, I recall a guy bleeding from a hole in his skull carved out by his brother’s pool stick. And they call Philadelphia the City of Brotherly Love.
Unresolved conflict is the cause of all hell – inner and outer. Think of whatever hell you can come up with and you’ll find that unresolved conflict is the cause of it. All hell starts with ignoring conflict instead of solving it right away… letting conflict slide. Turning your head away from conflict. Contrary to popular myth, conflict will never solve itself. It has to be resolved. The escape route from all hell is solving the conflict that putting you there. Face it and fight it. Running from conflict won’t let you run from hell.
If conflict seems to be following you around, try soul-searching. If hell is stalking you, try real, authentic, look-deep-inside you-guts soul-searching. I’m still not sure what true soul-searching is. I’ve given it a shot. Not sure if it’s my best shot. But I’m going to keep trying.
Hell doesn’t have to be final nor does the conflict that leads to it. The decisions we make at this very moment shape the very next moment. The decisions we make today shape tomorrow. The decisions we make tomorrow shape forever.
Gino Arcaro has written 12 books. He started his writing career by writing 6 best-selling academic law enforcement textbooks. Then he changed his focus and wrote 6 non-academic books to compete on a new stage. The first book is Soul of a Lifter, available in paperback and e-book. The book is about how lifting is a life-saver – lifting others and lifting weight. Dual-purpose lifting. You can review all Gino’s books them by clicking here.
“Throw ‘em up and let something shine.
Going out of my fucking mind.”
– Linkin Park, Bleed it Out
I use the word “fuck” several times in Soul of a Lifter. One of the many real-life characters in Soul of a Lifter is an informant I had when I was a detective in the 1980’s. That informant is an integral part of the philosophical message I’m trying to convey in Soul of a Lifter. But he was foul-mouthed. A professional. I used his verbatim quotes throughout the book for a distinct purpose. It’s deep. The informant said “fuck” a lot. Along with other vulgarities. I can’t go back and change it. The story would be F’d up if I left out his F-bombs.
“Hello.”
“I’d like to speak to the coordinator.”
“Speaking.”
“My son wants to know how he can make-up a missed exam. He has to go to the islands for his sister’s wedding.”
“Where’s your son?”
“Right here.”
“How old is he?”
“22.”
“Who are you?”
“His mother.”
“I can’t answer that question because it would be illegal. He’s a grown man. I can’t violate a grown-man’s privacy. It’s the law. I can’t talk to you without his consent. And you’ll be an accomplice.”
“Oh my!! I can get him on the phone to consent.”
“No. I can’t tell who he is over the phone. I need to see him in person with ID.”
“Ohhhh. Ok.”
“Good-Bye.”
My football team, the Niagara X-men, was contacted today by a representative of an NCAA Division 3 university asking us to play them at least twice each year. The purpose is to recruit Canadian players. The X-Men would act as a pipeline to their school. At the same time, our players and their junior varsity players would develop, benefitting from the all-important game reps.
I taught college law enforcement for 20 years, 13 years as program coordinator. My last year, a parent complained that I was the rudest person she’d ever met because I said NO. I said NO to her son, a grown man who wanted to be a police officer but couldn’t call me himself to ask for a make-up exam for a missed make-up exam. He wanted special considerations to do what hundreds of other students were doing without special considerations but missed his chance for his first make-up exam.
