"It’s all about making each other good"

When I was a kid I followed football (or soccer as some would have us believe it’s called), and as any kid I was cheering for my local team - Rosenborg. As faith would have it Rosenborg was by far the best team in Norway, and I’m not saying that just because it was my team, they actually won the Premier Division every year from 1992 – 2004, exactly when I was growing up. They were world class, yet they were comprised of mainly local heroes. It would almost be an exaggeration to say they were a professional team, I mean Norway is small and the town I’m from even smaller, so that the pool of players that could be recruited locally were limited. In fact it’s said that when Rosenborg played Milan (a game which they won 2-1) in the 1996-97 season of the Champions League, that the captain of Rosenborg were so psyched to meet these “real” players that he asked them all for their autographs before the game started. So how could this little team of local heroes win against teams such as AC Milan, Olympiacos or Borussia Dortmund?

The coach of this particular team was another local hero that had in his days been a pretty good player and had played for Rosenborg and Vålerenga in the 1960’s. To this day I’m convinced that it was he that made Rosenborg so great and that it to a large part was two things that he firmly believed. Firstly he believed in always being offensive, under his reign Rosenborg consequently followed a 4-3-3 formation, which for those of you who don’t know the sport that well is a fairly offensive set-up. Secondly, and maybe more importantly he believed in having each individual tone down for the good of the team, he meant that if everyone tried to get the team better the team would be better than the sum of the talent. I remember hearing him speak once, I must have been about 10 years old, and he said this, he said “It’s all about making each other good”. And that’s a sentence that has resonated with me ever since. A week or so later I saw a game they played and I noticed that two of their players had played their way past the goal keeper, which had given up about 10 meters or so behind them. They were both at the goal line and one of them has the ball and could easily have put it in, but he didn’t, he passed it to his friend and let him score the goal. This so drove home the idea that it’s all about the team and not about individual glory.

I think we all have something to learn from this, if you make those around you shine they might shine on you next. In fact it’s inevitable. I try to make this my philosophy to, when we have exams at school I don’t mind sharing my thoughts on how to read or how to write assignments, when I work somewhere I don’t mind sharing my expertise with others and when I have a business idea I tell everyone I know about it. And if someone asks if they can have it, or use it, or even just tell someone else about it, I say “of course – go crazy”. Why do I do this? Well, firstly I don’t think anybody will steal my ideas without my permission (they’re honestly not -that- great), but more importantly I wouldn’t mind it if they did. How could that be bad for me?

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