What's the Reason?

"When an umpire has a bad night, he goes back and looks at it.  There has to be a reason you missed the call. Three ways you can miss a call: lack of concentration, lack of positioning, lack of timing"

          - Joe West, longtime Major League Baseball umpire (44 years). See full ESPN article by Tim Kurkjian

          - https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29812877/major-league-baseball-umpire-joe-west-never-missed-call-just-ask-him

No matter what your sport or industry is, there are fundamentals to peak performance.

Part of what separates an ordinary performer from a great performer, and great from spectacular, is one's willingness to examine critically what went wrong, when things go wrong.  It will always be easy to chalk it up to bad luck and random factors: we had an off night, we didn't have enough time, the client went with someone else, and so on.

But if you can look with eyes wide open, and notice what you could have done differently, without deprecating yourself, you might discover factors that could be incredibly useful for building a system of higher performance.

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P.S. - I found the article mentioned above about Joe West to be unusually entertaining and eye-opening.  Countless zingers.  West is a controversial umpire, and his perspectives on what it takes to consistently make calls correctly when millions are watching gave me a fresh perspective on many topics.  Worth a read.