Those who can't do, teach

Those who can't do, teach. It's meant as an insult. It's also true. Most of the people who made someone great could not do the thing themselves. Everyone assumes that's the shameful part. It isn't. It's the reason it works.

Bill Campbell coached football at Columbia for six years. He won twelve games. He lost forty-one. He quit in 1979 and said it was his fault. To run a football team you have to be hard on people, and he couldn't be. He cared too much about his players. He was thirty-nine and finished.

Eleven years later he was the man Silicon Valley sent its founders to. Steve Jobs at Apple. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt at Google. Bezos in the early Amazon days. Sandberg. Dorsey. When he died, more than a thousand people came, and a lot of them thought of him as their best friend. Schmidt wrote a book about him and called it Trillion Dollar Coach.

The flaw that lost him forty-one games is the flaw that made him priceless later. Nineteen-year-olds needed someone to be brutal with them. He couldn't do it. Steve Jobs needed the opposite. Jobs had all the brutality one man can carry and nobody who would tell him the truth gently. Same man, same flaw, different room.

He wasn't secretly good at football. He was bad at it. He said so himself.

Arnold Sommerfeld was nominated for the Nobel in physics eighty-four times. He never won it. Four of his doctoral students won it. Three of his postdocs won it too. Seven Nobels out of one office in Munich, which nobody has matched. So the committee looked at him eighty-four times and said no, while handing the prize to the men he built. Einstein understood. He wrote to Sommerfeld that what he admired was how many young talents the man had pounded out of the soil.

We're not born equal. Some people win because they worked. Some win because they were handed something at birth that no amount of work produces. Both are true. Neither is fair.

A coach is the only correction anyone has found for that. Not a fix. A correction. Nobody can give you a gift you weren't born with. What a good coach does is find what you already have and stop you throwing it away. Which is what almost everyone does with it.

Nadia Boulanger stopped composing in her thirties. She told her old teacher she was done, and that her own music was useless. Then, out of an apartment in Paris, she taught Copland, Piazzolla, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass, Barenboim, Gardiner. Americans crossed an ocean to sit in front of her. Quincy Jones said she was the most astounding woman he ever met.

Her own music is barely played. Her name lives inside other people's biographies, in the same sentence over and over: went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. She swapped one career she thought was worthless for a piece of fifty she didn't.

Now the part that's hard to say without sounding like a greeting card. Watching someone else win feels good. Not as a consolation prize. It just feels good.

And when it's someone you worked on, you know how close it came to never happening. The crowd sees the win and assumes it was always coming. You saw the night he wanted to quit. Nobody else in the stadium has that. It's better than the trophy.

Then there's France.

In 1998 Aimé Jacquet took a team that had failed to qualify for three tournaments in a row and won the World Cup at home. For the two years before that, L'Équipe told the country he wasn't up to it. Wrong players. Timid football. Wrong man for the job. The night France won, he stood in front of millions of people and said the press had lied and he would never forgive them. He left days later. Four years after that, L'Équipe sued him for insulting them. Twenty-six years later he still wouldn't shake their hand.

France has no shortage of coaches. What France won't give them is status.

We only respect the man standing alone with the cup above his head. Anyone next to him goes into one of two boxes. Either he failed at the real thing and settled for helping, or he's helping so he can steal the credit. There is no third box.

So yes. Those who can't do, teach. Campbell couldn't. Sommerfeld never got his prize. Boulanger threw her own music out. One name goes on the trophy, and that's fair enough, because somebody has to cross the line first. It just doesn't record who was standing at the side of the road on the worst day. That person went home happy anyway. And he knew something nobody else in the stadium knew.