The Legendary John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” and Why YOU Can Reach the Very Top

Matt Karamazov
17 min readApr 18, 2024

John Wooden’s teams won more often than anybody else — and yet he NEVER talked about winning

Image: CoachWooden.com

If you won the game (or the contest, or the fight, etc.) but you didn’t do your best, then you’re still a loser.

And if you did do your best, you’re automatically a winner, no matter what the final score.

That’s my belief, and also the belief of John Wooden, one of the most successful basketball coaches of all time, and the coauthor of The Essential Wooden, a leadership playbook packed with 200+ of his maxims and principles.

I was such a big fan of this book that I wrote a free, complete breakdown of The Essential Wooden for the Stairway to Wisdom, highlights of which I’ll share with you here in this article.

It’ll only take you about 35 minutes to read the whole thing, and in it, you’ll learn all about Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success, the idea of “Competitive Greatness” and how it’s available to each of us, how to squeeze every second out of every minute of practice time, and more to help you become exceptional at whatever it is you choose to do in life.

You can read the full breakdown here, but I’ll give you a little preview in this article so you can decide whether to check out the…

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Matt Karamazov
Matt Karamazov

Written by Matt Karamazov

🥇 The Most Disciplined Man on the Planet 📚 Read 1,302 Books in Just 10 Years 💪🏻 Strong Believer in Human Potential ⤵️ https://thereadinglife.beehiiv.com/