He had a mentor. Lunches twice a year, a LinkedIn endorsement, a standing offer to "make a call" if he ever needed it.

His team was falling apart and he had no idea what to do with it.

The mentor never helped with that, because the mentor wasn't in the room.

They brought his kids onto the ice.

That's the image that's going to last. Not the overtime winner. Not the gold medals being draped around necks. Not even the celebration itself.

It's Dylan Larkin and Zach Werenski skating to the stands, lifting two small children—three-year-old Noa and two-year-old Johnny Jr.—and bringing them onto the ice to pose with Team USA after defeating Canada for Olympic gold.

We celebrate these guys. We analyze their play-calling, debate their decisions, criticize their clock management. We watch their press conferences and judge their demeanor.

What we don't talk about is what they give up to be there.

If you’re doing excellent work and people don’t like you for it—if they make you wait, if they withhold recognition, if they find reasons to diminish what you’ve done—that’s data. But it’s not data about your work. It’s data about them.

When we lose, we do the post mortem. We analyze and examine the specific breakdowns and try to ensure they don't happen again...The problem is we tend to treat all wins the same way—with a quick pat on the back and then it's on to the next thing…We don't stop to ask why we won or how we won.

Making a public commitment feels like progress. It triggers a little dopamine hit. You get the likes, the encouraging comments, the "you've got this!" from people who will never follow up. And that feeling—that social validation—becomes a substitute for the actual work.

Think of culture as your organization's operating system. A great OS makes everything run faster and smoother. A poor one creates friction at every turn. When I worked in Baseball Operations, our culture wasn't about being nice—it was about being rigorous. We questioned assumptions, demanded data, and held each other accountable. That culture produced wins because it was designed to.

A common trap some organizations fall into is they view their top leader as the savior. They build everything around one personality — the “hero leader.”

Sometimes that works…until it doesn’t.

Most leaders operate like they have unlimited runway. We'll get to that hard conversation eventually. We'll address the culture issues next quarter. We'll take that risk when the timing is better.

Except the timing is never better. And eventually never comes.

The Greatest Generation is disappearing.

Every day, we lose about 131 World War II veterans. Do the math. In a decade, maybe less, they'll all be gone. The last person who stormed a beach, flew a mission over Europe, or rebuilt a shattered world will take their final breath, and an entire way of seeing the world will go with them

The man who would go on to win seven national championships—more than any coach in college football history—went 15-17 with the Miami Dolphins before retreating to Alabama with his tail between his legs. And it's the most instructive failure in modern coaching history.

Athletes have a different relationship with failure because we've been conditioned to it. We've struck out with the bases loaded. We've missed the game-winning shot. We've false started in the championship heat. And then we had to show up the next day and do it all over again.

Part of a leader's job is to help his team distinguish between what is really important versus what may feel important. Treating everything like a top priority exposes to your team that you can't actually tell the difference.

I've spent years in organizations where people talked about what they "deserved" – the promotion they were owed, the recognition they had coming, the success that was rightfully theirs. But here's what I learned in clubhouses, boardrooms, and everything in between: the scoreboard doesn't care about your resume. The market doesn't care about your tenure. And your competition sure as hell doesn't care about what you think you're entitled to.

I've had to tell players that they've been traded. It's hard…I've also welcomed newly-acquired players into an organization…The disappointment and subtle sense of failure that colors the first conversation is contrasted by the excitement and optimism of welcoming the newly-acquired teammate. Goodbyes can be hard. But more often than not, they lead to Hellos.

When you skip the gym for six months, your pants get tight. When you skip leadership development for six months, your decision-making gets sloppy, but you might not notice until it's too late. Your team notices, though. Trust me on that.

When we’re young, we’re told who the “leaders” are. Usually, they’re the loudest kid on the team. The one who can rally the group with a speech or a stare. That’s who we follow—partly because we don’t know better, partly because we’re drawn to confidence, even if it’s unearned. But the problem is, we carry that logic with us into adulthood.

Great athletes are able to stay in the moment and focus on present execution, knowing what happened in the past--whether that was 10 years ago or 10 seconds ago--has little to no bearing on what they're doing right now. But this was more than that. This was understanding, embracing, and appreciating that everything McIlroy did to prepare for the Masters actually worked.