A recent 60 Minutes interview highlighted the “McVay Way” as the driving force behind NFC West contender and 2021 Super Bowl Champion Los Angeles Rams. Head Coach Sean McVay believes that emphasizing relational connection, transparency, open communication, and putting people first are the vital elements in building and sustaining a culture of continuing growth, expectancy, accountability, and success.
I watched with interest because the McVay Way is far from the only way coaches and leaders have claimed to guide an organization. For example, there’s IBM executive Buck Rodgers and The IBM Way, Nick Saban and The Process, Jeff Bezos and the Day 1 Mentality, or Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots organizational mantra, Do Your Job. Through experience, observation, education, trial, and error, each of these successful coaches and leaders have developed a philosophical approach that they consider the most effective “way” to maximize individual performance and, thus, organizational outcomes.
Having an undergraduate degree in business management with a minor in marketing, and being a sports chaplain for nearly 40 years—15 of those with Texas Tech football—I have long held a keen interest in the driving forces behind successful teams, businesses, organizations, and the varied methodologies and approaches taken to create value and buy-in for every individual within any given system, especially those of sustained preeminence.
When success isn’t enough
Within every one of these “success” stories, however, lurks the underlying fallacy that achieving a desired end, such as winning the Super Bowl, the National Championship, or being regarded as an industry titan, will bring sustained gratification and fulfillment. And that’s what made Sean McVay’s interview so interesting.
Sean McVay knows otherwise. Winning the Super Bowl in 2021 didn’t have the effect he anticipated. “The lies I told myself were, ‘I won’t be happy until I…until we win one.’ Or, ‘Until I win one,’” McVay said.
Expressing embarrassment for the selfishness of those words, McVay continued, “It revealed a lot of insecurities that I had. My identity was so tied up in winning and losing games, and that was where I felt like my self-worth lied. It was very revealing how fragile I was and all the insecurities that I did have.”
McVay is not alone. Testimonials abound of those who have labored and driven themselves with unrelenting discipline and sacrifice to achieve the pinnacle of success in their respective field, only to find depression, anxiety, uncertainty, and crises at the end of their rainbow.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Olympic Gold Medal winner and world record holder Michael Phelps, comedian Jim Carrey, actress Nicole Kidman, along with many others from a variety of professions, have been transparent about the mental struggles they dealt with at what we would have recognized as their finest hour.
The irony is that every way designed by man to achieve success becomes, itself, an expression of human frailty and man’s inability to attain the transcendent longings of the human heart. In other words, every man-made construct is bound to the earthly. As such, we should long for more. We are certainly designed for more.
Ambition isn’t the problem
As C.S. Lewis stated in The Weight of Glory: “Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.”
Perhaps this is one reason why the Wisdom writer offers this counsel: “There is a way which seems right to a person, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12).
While some would identify an ambitious drive or a competitive spirit as the culprit in these unexpected outcomes after achieving success, I would not. Whether it’s building a profitable company, winning a championship, discovering a cure, scientific advancement, parenting well, being a good friend, or being a loving spouse, even working out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12-13), nothing of significance is ever accomplished apart from an ambitious determination to see it done.
Even McVay stated in his interview, “We are wired to achieve.” Indeed, we are.
When the disciples were discussing which of them was the greatest (Matthew 18:1-4; Mark 9:33-37; Luke 9:46-48), Jesus didn’t condemn their ambitious nature but redefined true greatness as a humility made evident in a life of serving others and redirected their energies toward that end:
“If anyone wants to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35).
Kingdom objectives, then, become the greatest ambition and the highest good to which we aspire as believers, to make manifest the power and presence of Christ in all things.
Who’s “way” are you pursuing?
Jesus, certainly, wasn’t lacking in his ambition and determination to see the Father’s will accomplished, expressing the necessity of diligence in fulfilling the work of the kingdom:
“We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when now can work” (John 9:4).
It is a deliberate, disciplined, and determined task to work out the salvation God is accomplishing; that is, outwardly making evident the inward reality of Christ in you. As such, I find detrimental the often-recurring form of spirituality that perpetuates the notion that to be a follower of Christ is to be without drive and determination.
James Bryan Smith, professor of theology at Friends University, in his 2009 book The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love With the God Jesus Knows, wrote, “The number one enemy of Christian spiritual formation today is exhaustion.”
While intuitively, I would have guessed sin to be the greater factor, my question to his declarative statement would be, “Exhausted from what?”
In the history of the church, there is an insidious form of spiritual expression that, at different times, raises its head and preoccupies itself with rest and an aversion to anything associated with drivenness, and what might be called a work ethic. While normally associated with the Academy, monastic orders, and High Church traditions, it is too often co-opted by the lazy and unmotivated, and spiritualized as some noble and virtuous discipline.
Scripture makes a far more compelling argument for industry, contributing, and building, even calling on the sluggard to consider the industrious ways of the ant (Prov. 6:6-11).
Paul certainly set the standard, saying he worked harder than all the other apostles (1 Cor. 15:10).
Perhaps the exhaustion, of which so many complain, comes not from having worked too hard, but from having worked so hard on things that were never worth doing.
“Therefore,” Paul writes, “my beloved brothers and sisters, be firm, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58).
“No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him” (2 Timothy 2:4).
As followers of Christ, holding to a biblical worldview, ours is a Way of unwavering resolve to do all things as unto the Lord and not man (Colossians 3:23). Instead of chasing after the outcomes that please the subjective whims, opinions, and preferences of fickle humanity, the believer’s sole ambition should be to please him (2 Corinthians 5:9), the One who will say to his faithful children, “Well done good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21).
In this pursuit, God’s Way has proven superior to the ways of man.
