YouSaid · the spoken record

Johan Cruyff

lines on the record: 48
first: 2021-11-25
most recent: 2021-11-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And then I'll close on what I mentioned earlier, the fact that he was extremely fortunate to actually enjoy his life, to have a life with no regrets, and to live with intensity, to make the most out of this unique experience that we call life. I've led a full life and can look back on it the way you're supposed to. Indeed, it's been so incredibly intense that I felt like I lived for a hundred years. I've lived it with authenticity. I've taken things as they come, including beautiful moments and setbacks. A setback is probably a sign that you need to make some adjustments. If you learn to think that way, all experiences are translated into something positive. I've overcome all setbacks. That didn't happen by chance. I'm an attacker.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is him reflecting on his legacy. I think this is just absolutely fantastic. I was once asked how I'd like to be remembered in 100 years' time. If I had to give an answer, I'd say, as a responsible sportsman. While others were off to work, I just went off to play. I've been lucky that way. I haven't always been understood. As a footballer, as a coach, and also for what I did after all that. But okay, Rembrandt and Van Gogh weren't understood either. That's what you learn. People go on bothering you until you're a genius”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he says two things that I think it's a great demonstration of why books like this are so important. This is also going to echo what Bill Gurley said in the talk running down Dream, the fact that you should be the best informed person in your field. You have to consider that an obligation. You don't have to be the smartest, but you can learn more and go and collect more information anybody else. And so Johan says, there is no one in football who knows more about tactics, technique, and training than I do. And so that's going to relate to another idea on the same page or sitting on a different page rather about why write this book. The experiences I have been throughout through in sport have given me a vast store of knowledge that needs to be shared so that others can profit from my experiences.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Kobe was relaying the story to Alex. And he said, think about that. Think about what Michael's saying. The greatest basketball, arguably the greatest basketball player ever lived, wasn't even picking up the ball when he was 12. And you're telling me my 12-year-old daughter needs to know all this fancy stuff? No, stick to the fundamentals and just do it over and over again. Johan is saying the same thing. I'm mostly trying to explain how important it is that new talent should work on the ground rules from a young age. The sooner they master those, the more they learn later on. And to be honest, there isn't much point moving on if you haven't sorted out the foundations. Only then can you start talking about putting the ideal team together formed with players who aren't just unusually talented, but who have all mastered the basics of football.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be supportive of the first eleven. Whether you're a trainer or a steward, a director, a groundsman, a commissioner, or a laundry worker. Everyone works in such a way as to be in such a way so as to be of service to the first eleven. The result is one club and one ayax. If you haven't got that sort of mindset, you shouldn't bother involving yourself in the business of football. And so at the same part in this book where he's saying we're being drowned in bureaucracy, he's telling you, no, no, you're not understanding why you're here. You're here to serve the first 11. If you read Sam Walton's fantastic autobiography, which is influenced generations of entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos being one of them, he'd hand out copies with his own highlights to people at the very beginning of Amazon. But Sam was talking about this. You're always struggling because you have to constantly, like, you don't go, you don't aim for bureaucracy.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True. And I think when you observe environments that don't have that, you're observing an environment that you're just not going to get a lot done. This is a great summary of what he's experiencing. Says they got drowned in bureaucracy. And Johann's opinion about what's going on is like, listen, everything, you guys are fighting. There's power struggles. There's disagreements about this. Nothing matters except the first 11. The 11 players on the team are the most important thing. Everything should be there to support them. It's not about you and your ego. And so he says, it isn't the managing director who's the most important part of the club. It's the first 11. If the team performs well, it earns money. Every facet of the club must be supportive of the first eleven. And this is going to, let me finish reading this because this applies not just to football, but applies to companies because there's a great quote that Sam Walton has in his autobiography that says exactly what the same exact idea that Johan's telling us here. Every facet of the club.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult. If you looked at who represented the club, you immediately saw that there was a lack of football knowledge there. There wasn't a single former first team player on the Commissioner's Council, the board, the members council, or the club administration. So look at all this, essentially just a series, layer after layer of one committee after another that he has to deal with. So of course you have an environment like that whether it's a football club, a business, a homeowners association, it doesn't matter. That is an environment that's going to produce conflict. Not one. So it wasn't at all surprising that the club was failing to play decent football. The administrators didn't have the first clue about tactics and techniques that the club had been built on. And the whole time I'm reading about this, I thought it's like, this is not an environment that I would ever want. I wouldn't want to work on in it. And if I was forced to, I wouldn't succeed in that kind of environment. And it made me think of what Robert Oppenheimer. So I read about Steve Jobs, reading about Steve Jobs, led me to J. Robert Oppenheimer because Steve Jobs”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of his experience that he talks about later in the book when he's dealing with, he's like almost like drowned in bureaucracy. It does not seem like a pleasant environment to work in. He was constantly saying football is being overtaken by people that actually don't know anything about it. This is going to, I'm going to just read you. I'm not going to, I mean, he goes on and on about this. I'm just going to read you one paragraph to convey this idea across to you. It's going to remind me a lot about what the founder of Vance when he wrote in his memoir, Paul Van Dorn. He was realizing that the quality assurance was being run by executives with no factory experience. Paul had done every single possible job in the manufacturing of shoes. Like he knew it backwards and forwards and showed that the people that were that they would come in and either buy or take over shoe companies, but they didn't actually know, like they didn't even take the time to educate themselves about the process. And then for some reason, they thought they should be the ones ahead of the quality assurance department. He runs this test where it's like, this is both.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's got a bunch of just fantastic sentences in this book, and this is one of them. It doesn't work without full commitment. It doesn't work without full commitment. So he's also got variations of this quote. He says the same idea a couple different ways. And it's the fact that simple football is the most beautiful, but playing simple football is the hardest thing. And so he's describing, this is now later in his life, he's describing his approach to the game of football. They were making formation an ever greater problem, while in fact it is so simple. When you really think about his philosophy, it's very simple. It's simple but not easy. When you have possession, you make the field big. And when you lose the ball, you make it small again. That is a fundamental principle that you can learn in childhood.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“especially after the doctors had told me that ninety percent of my heart problems was caused by my smoking. Then you start thinking about it. I knew that smoking could cause cancer. I knew it was bad for my heart, and I still kept on fooling myself. Using the excuse that it was a good way of fighting stress, I had absolutely no trouble coming up with reasons not to quit. After that operation I gave up smoking overnight.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smoking led to heart problems, but also led to his eventual death with lung cancer about 20 years after the fact. And so this is a little bit about that. And really the highlight is that you can't expect to have poor habits and have good outcomes from poor habits. During that time, I was getting stomach complaints more and more often. Sometimes I would just start sweating or suddenly throw up. I had already cut down on my smoking, but in late February 1991, my wife intervened. She urged me to go with her to the hospital. In a three-hour operation, I was given two heart bypasses. Luckily, I hadn't been having heart attacks. Rather, it was, I don't know how to, it's the thickening of the arteries. And so this is his main takeaway from this brush with death that he had. The main lesson I've learned from that is that you can't do anything that's bad for you and not expect to be punished. I thought a lot about my illness about my smoking addiction. I wondered why I'd smoked so much for so long.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just want to bring to your attention that he was obsessed with details. I said to he's got actually some really interesting thoughts on it. I set to work first by minimizing the small mistakes. Problems seldom are never come from big mistakes. It's often the small ones to count. So he talks about just observing and constantly watching. Other times I sat on the ball by the side of the field and watched. If I'm sitting still, I see more than if I move around. Sitting like that, I can analyze something better and see the details more clearly. Often these are details that 99% of people don't know, don't see, or don't understand. Something that he talks about over and over again in the book that I haven't mentioned is the fact that because of his father's early death, he was convinced that he was going to die young. Something that helps him get over this fact, this fear of dying young, or this premonition that he had that he was going to die really young is the fact that he almost did die young. He was a smoker his whole life. He winds up quitting. Unfortunately,”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Techniques of our players, and he does something really creative. I suggested that we use Len Delfero, an opera singer who specialized in breathing techniques to help the players get the maximum return on every inhalation and exhalation. This is so similar. We've seen this before. Arnold's the first autobiography, Arnold Schwarzener's first autobiography he wrote when he was 30. It's founder's number 193. It's called The Education of a Bodybuilder. Arnold was the only bodybuilder, or the first one, and then soon people copied this. To hire, as a trainer, he hired a ballet dancer to make his movements on stage more graceful. So I think Arnold's idea of hiring a ballet dancer and Johan's idea of hiring an opera singer to improve breathing techniques is a perfect example of the benefits of thinking differently from the people that are in your industry that are in your field.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person can be the best footballer in every position on the pitch. See what he talks? He's constantly reiterating on what he started the book with. The fact that you can't do anything, you're not going to accomplish anything great alone. You've got to, first of all, learn from every experience, but then find the people that have the knowledge that you don't. I realize that no single person can be the best footballer in every position on the pitch. That's what I told my technical staff as well. Later, I worked with internal and external scouts as well. I delegated the training sessions. The scouting and so on to others, simply because they were better at it than I was. I've never pretended I could do anything I couldn't. And so this is what I meant about Johann Gets Creative. He's constantly coming up with ideas no one else is using, and he's obsessed with this idea of thinking differently. And so one of his main points is like, you need stamina to win at football. And he's like, why don't we see if we can improve the breathing technique?”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we also see that the creativity that he applied as a player, he's going to continue doing that as a coach and a manager. And really what he's writing here, this sounds a lot like Bill Walsh. Luckily, thanks to my experiences in the American soccer, I had acquired sound insights into how things worked in professional sport, and I could apply my experiences to the situation at Ajax. That was vital. The first step was to assume responsibility over the complete footballing environment from the professionals to the trainees. It's this kind of leadership structure I had to form in this kind of leadership structure. I had to form a team with all the footballing staff. I'm not the kind of person who sets people working from his ivory tower. Football is my subject, so I'm at home on the pitch. And this is where we just see that he learns from every single experience. The whole organization of the first team was based on the American model. That meant using specialists. I'd already realized that no single”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best footballer. And so he's comparing his retirement with his first retirement. So if those two disastrous farewell matches in 1978, that was his first retirement, were strong indications that my departure from the game wasn't going to go entirely to plan. Five years later, the fairy tale ended the way it should, at the top. So it was okay to end this way. It had been lovely.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It also helped in the long run by forcing Jordan to find an answer. I think that Jordan rules defense as much as anything else played a part in the making of Michael Jordan. So this is what he talks about, this is what Johan talks about here. This is my last year as an active footballer. I had started the season with the intention of showing my new club something a bit special. That's what happened and not just by a bit. When I think back, I still can't quite grasp it. How in God's name was it possible? Particularly when you think that we begun losing the season eight to two and all the mockery we got for that. But people forget that something like that is often the start of a resurrection, meaning a humiliating defeat is the start of a resurrection. That is just how it is. After that eight to two loss, we won everything. Really? Everything the cup, the league, and for me the golden boot for the best.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ended up being one of those things so worthwhile that you would have done it anyway. But in all honesty, I can't take all the credit. See how he's constantly giving credits to other people around him. When I joined the Washington diplomats, I was told that at every away game, I would have to run a training session for disabled children. At first, I found this very hard. After a few months, I said I wanted to give it up because it was absolutely pointless. Every time I told them to kick the ball one way, they fired it off in the opposite direction. When I told the organizers that, they asked me to watch a video that they'd made of me taking a session. They told me to forget, this is so really the lesson here, what he's about to teach us is like, make sure you're focused on the right thing. You're focused on the ball. That's not the right thing. They told me to forget about where the ball landed, but instead to look at the eyes of the child, the eyes of the mother and the eyes of the father, and to see the happiness that I was giving them when they had simply kicked the ball, something they had done.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's also going to lead him to realize, hey, I'm just going to stay within my circle of competence. It is far better to learn from your mistakes. My brief career as a businessman was one-off. It also gave me an excellent reason to reconsider my decision to stop playing football. I also realized that, and this is always the right realization, I also realized it might not have been such a good idea to abandon the unique talent I had been given at such an early age. Since then, I've known my place. It is in football and nowhere else. And so he's actually going to make the decision to play football in America. I opted for America in order to make a completely new start, far away from my past and an ideal place to build something big out of a situation in which I'd gone from a hundred to zero. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. America was where I discovered new ambitions and how to develop them.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Corps was very firm and he said to me, Get that whole business out of your head except your losses and then go and do what you're good at. And so this is another example of turning a disadvantage or an unpleasant experience into a positive. Being the person I am, the mistakes I made back then were quickly out of my system. Not least of all because I believe that everyone has a destiny, a fate of his or her own. Mine was probably to leave the game at a young age, do something phenomenally stupid, and then find my feet as a footballer again. In fact, that's the whole story of my playing career in three lines. Having retired at thirty one, I was still young enough to put things right by going back to work playing football, and some of the best experiences of my life came after my 32nd birthday. If I had made those mistakes, I'd have missed out on some fantastic things.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plus, and this is the stupidest thing, something I had absolutely no connection with. His point is like I'm a world famous footballer. Like, okay, let's design a line of jerseys or something that has to do with the sport. Why are you getting involved? And I think the pig farm was in America at this point. I had absolutely no connection with my ignorance was being exploited. I had money and where there's money you'll find rats running about. Believe it or not, I invested in a pig breeding venture. How on earth did I get involved in that? So he winds up doing it without consulting his father-in-law. And he says, for a little while, I thought I was on a good thing until my father-in-law visited us. What have you done? he demanded. I told him I'd bought three plots of land that we could build on. He immediately asked to see the deeds to the land. Then he tore into me. I had paid money but I never asked to see any papers. I wasn't used to that kind of thing. To cut a long story short, it seemed there were no.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he says up until this point, I had spent 80% of my time training or playing football. But from that moment on, I stopped playing. That 80% was spent in other ways. I also began to use the pig-headedness that had served me so well in football in the completely wrong way. And so think about he's super famous. He's got a lot of”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's absolutely crazy. Before we get to another surprising thing where he retires, retires really young. This is going to wind up being his first retirement, but it really caught me by surprise just one sentence I want to pull out because this is a good summary of his entire career. Football took up every waking hour. And so this is where we get to his first retirement and where he makes the gigantic mistake of leaving his circle of competence. I decided to retire in 1978. After that, I became a businessman. That decision was one of the most important lessons in my life, perhaps the most important.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another highlight from this section, I think it's particularly applicable today because we live in this age of nearly infinite leverage. It's the fact that you should be focusing on quality and technique. That philosophy was actually very simple and remains so today. There's a ball and you either got it or they've got it. And if you got it, they can't score. If you use the ball well, the chance of a good outcome is greater than the chance of a bad one. This shifts the focus, this is the whole point of the paragraph by meaning this to you. This shifts the focus to quality and technique. Whereas before it was all about effort and hard work.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“disciplined. You can't have someone striking out on their own, then it doesn't work. But then he has just a one sentence that this is where the magic happens if you think about it. You have the discipline to adhere to the system and you have the quality players and you have good managers. This is just a well-functioning machine. He says it was world-class talent combined with professionalism.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One person in a family does affects the others. In my experience as a husband and father proved invaluable when it came to football. Then he goes into more detail about how he thinks about total football. And really, I just want to pull out two paragraphs here because I think there's a lot of good lessons. It's the fact that you need it's nice that you've designed a system, right? But you need discipline to adhere to the system. And so this is what I think he respected about Renus is because Renus was a disciplinarian. He made sure he held the players accountable. Johan talks about playing for other managers that were too lax and he just did not respect that. Total football requires talented individuals acting in a disciplined group. Someone who whines or doesn't pay attention is a hindrance to the rest. And you need a boss like Renus to nip that in the bud. Total football is, aside from the quality of the players, mostly a question of distance and positioning. That's the basis of all the tactical thinking. When you've got the distances and the formation right, so he's describing the system they're building, right? Everything falls into place. It also needs to be very...”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He started looking after my affairs. He was always keeping me out of trouble. That was why his death in two thousand eight has such a huge impact on me. He has been enormously helpful in my life, and not just for me as a footballer, but also as a father figure, father in law, the grandfather of our children, and simply as a human being”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so let's go ahead to something that he points out over and over again. He's constantly developing mentors, people that can help him guide him, and he's constantly giving them credit. One of the people that becomes like another father figure for him is actually his father-in-law. So his wife's dad, and his name is Core Coster. He mentioned him earlier, the fact that I'm really bad with money. I don't know anything about business. I needed help. He winds up getting scammed later. He loses millions of dollars on a pig farm, if you could believe it or not. And so it says he's still at this point in the story. He's still a young man. Most of the highlights I have actually come from him as a player when he's extremely young because I thought his approach to his craft was actually the main lessons, like takeaways that you and I could have, actually. But he says, I hadn't a clue about anything. That's why the arrival of Core Coster in my life was a gift from God. Danny's, that's his wife, Danny's father was a diamond dealer and a hard-headed businessman.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“combat. And so he's going to reference this boxer that was famous at the time named Joe Lewis. And he says, and this is very similar to what that one belief that Johann learned from Renus, that defense is a matter of giving your opponent as little time as possible. And so this is a quote from George Patton. By God, I could lick Joe Lewis if he wasn't permitted to attack me. The way to prevent the enemy from attacking you is to attack him and keep right on attacking him. This prevents him from getting set. Death in battle is a function of time and effective hostile fire. You reduce the hostile fire by your fire, and you reduce the time by rapid movement.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deadly serious about always improving. But listen to that. Which was nice, but really what are trophies and medals other than mementos of the past? At home I have nothing on my walls about football. So you go to sleep on a win, you wake up with a loss.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now we get into Johann's mindset as he's a professional player. He talked about this earlier in the introduction. He's like, I'm not a big fan of looking back. I only look back to analyze mistakes, but I'm always keeping my eye going forward and constantly improving. This is going to remind me of what Jordan, Michael Jordan said about Tiger Woods in that book I did a few weeks ago, Driven from Within. And so this is what Johan says. What I learned was that football is a process of making mistakes, then analyzing them to learn lessons and not get frustrated. At the end of each game, I was already thinking about the next and what I could do better, and that goes for whether he won or lost. So at the end of each game, I was already thinking about the next and what I could do better. Jordan says, and the closest thing we ever get to an autobiography by him, look around. Just about any person or entity achieving at a high level has the same focus. The morning after Tiger Woods rallied to beat Phil Michelson at the four championship in 2005, he was at the gym by 6.30 a.m. to work out.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was also cleaning the locker room and everything at the stadium. And so he signs the contract and he retires his mom. He says, I signed the contract in the presence of my mother. And when we left the office, I immediately told her that she'd cleaned the changing rooms for the last time. That right there. Imagine how good that would feel. It makes all the tens of thousands of hours that he's putting in, all the hard work he's doing. His father, like, not only did he lose a father, but she lost a husband, you know, your spouse dies at 45 years old. You're having to do jobs you don't like. And the fact is that your son came. And just imagine how good that would feel. Everything's going to be okay, mom. I got it.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After his dad dies, he gets support from his soon to be stepdad, his trainers, his father-in-law, when he gets married, but he does have people that try to help him, and he talks about the fact that you can never do anything in life alone. That's actually something he repeats over and over again. This is more about his life from the time his dad dies until he gets signed by IAX when he's 18. So this is from like 12 to 18. We see the same exact thing. This is just another, I feel like every note I'm leaving in this book is the same work that feels like play. I was just a kid who had the ball every waking minute of every day. I was at the stadium all day, every day. I was a kid having fun, and for the first fifteen years of my life there was no philosophy and no analysis. It was just fun. I had no feeling of failure. I just took everything as it came and loved it. So after his father dies his mom has to find work, she winds up clean, like they help her find work by cleaning people.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father's buried in Amsterdam's eastern cemetery. Not long after he was buried, I started talking to him. Whenever I walked, cycled, or drove past the graveyard. I did this for a long time after he died. To start with, I talked to him about school, then later when I was playing for Ajax, I talked to him mostly about football. What a dick the referee was, how I had scored my goals, that kind of thing. Over the years our conversations changed, but never ceased. I always went to talk to him to ask his advice every time I had to make a difficult decision in my life. So what do you think, Dad? Then I got up the next morning and knew what I needed to do. I still have no idea how it worked, but he was there every time And after I talked to him, I knew exactly the right thing to do.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kids, the way you feel about them, excuse me, the way you feel about your children is obvious, but the way they feel about you is not. Maybe not as obvious, but the impact that you have on them is profound because what I'm about to reach you, keep in mind as I'm reading these words to you, he's writing these words 56 years after his father died. My father died in 1959 when he was forty five and I was twelve. He died of a heart attack because his cholesterol was too high. His death has never let go of me.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Training than I was in the game, and there'll be more highlights about that later. So it says this way of training has always remained the standard for me. It led me to realize that the easiest way is often the hardest. This is a lot of, like, I feel fundamental knowledge in what he's saying here. It led me to realize that the easiest way is often the hardest. To be able to touch the ball perfectly once, this is some like Bruce Lee shit here, to be able to touch the ball perfectly once you need to have touched it a hundred thousand times in training. So again, I think the way to think about that is if you don't love it, you won't do it a lot. If you don't do it a lot, you'll never master it. So then he goes into detail about the death of his father and the impact that it had on him. And this is something we've seen over and over again, the latest James Dyson's Dyson autobiography I read. That was published, I think, this year actually. And he's writing those words 60 years after his father passed. And so in this case, Denor Left myself here has never underestimated the impact you have on your”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me is not only playing football but enjoying it on the very next page. Another example of work that feels like play that note I wrote down to myself as I'm reading this section is if you don't love it you won't do it all the time and if you don't do it a lot you'll you'll never master it as I always said if you work in football it's not work you have to train hard but but you have to have fun as well This way this way of training has always remained the standard for me. It led me to realize that the easiest way is often the hardest. Another thing that he talks about over and over again, and he compares some of the people that some of his managers that he'd work for, some of his coaches or trainers, he seemed to think more fondly of the people that required the team to train extremely hard and to adhere to have discipline about it. I saw an interview with him later in life where he's a coach or after he was a coach, but he was describing what a coach he was. He's like, listen, I was way harder on them.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's still talking about the fact that every day, even from the age of five, he's constantly at the stadium. He says, I sat there and there's just ideas that we can use in our own lives. I sat there listening. He's talking about anybody at the club, from the people doing the changing room to the actual 11 players. I sat there listening to them day after day, soaking it up like a sponge. The stadium became my second home. I was there every spare moment from the age of five. So he opened up the book telling us how important family is, how family is everything to him. He talks about, at this point in the book, he's met his wife. He gets married rather early. And he says, no wonder we're still together after 48 years. Our marriage was good twice over. And then in this section, it just seems like every page I'm making a new highlight with the same theme, fine work that feels like play. So it says, I just, and here's an example of that. I just did what I'd always done, which was spend all my free time playing football, either at the club or on the street with my friends. What has been important”
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“His mom. And so this becomes his stepdad and like his second father as well. Hank asked me if I wanted to give him a hand and I started the very next day. So at the age of five, my life with IX began. I think back on my childhood with great fondness. I have known nothing but love. And so that last line, the fact that I look back at my childhood with great fondness, I've known nothing but love. There's a few sentences in this book that double underlined that Johann is extremely fortunate to have experienced. That's extremely rare. The second part being the fact that he had a good marriage. He's married to his wife for 48 years. He had a happy marriage, again, something that's extremely difficult to do. And then towards the end of the book, just like, listen, I live life fully. I live life in it. He got the most. He traded life as an adventure that it is. And even though he's writing this book when he knows he's dying, he had used the time before that fully. So I'll go over more of that later. I just want to point that out. I think back to my childhood with great fondness. I have known nothing but love. That's fantastic.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he's going to tell us a little bit more about his childhood. And there's going to be a lot of themes that you and I have talked about over and over again. The idea that if you can find work that feels like plague, you just have a massive advantage. And just an example of that. From a very young age, I was soon well known as the boy with the ball. Every day I took my ball into the class with me, placed it under my desk, and passed it between my feet throughout the lesson. Sometimes the teacher sent me outside because I was too much of a nuisance. I was doing it so instinctively that I wasn't even aware I was busy kicking the ball from left foot to right.”
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“So, this idea of flipping a disadvantage into an advantage is exactly what entrepreneurs do, and they also have this trait, what he's about to, how he's about to describe himself. I'm definitely cunning. I'm always on the lookout for the best advantage.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm just going to read this to you because he can explain it better than I can. Everything from you started in the street. The area where I lived was nicknamed the Concrete Village, an experiment in building cheap housing after the First World War. We played football everywhere we could. It was here I learned to think about how to turn a disadvantage into an advantage. You see that the curb, so this big concrete curb, right? It isn't actually an obstacle. You could turn it into a teammate. Thanks to the curb, I was able to work on my technique. When the ball bounces off different surfaces at odd angles, you have to adjust in an instant. Throughout my career, people would often be surprised that I shot or passed from an angle they weren't expecting. But that's because of how I grew up.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. So now we go back to Johann. This is the philosophy that defines my feeling for football and for life. It has always been about progress and never ever stopping getting better. And this next sentence is a main theme. Maybe the main theme actually in the book. Football has been my life from the beginning. My parents owned a shop a few hundred meters away from Aaks. I gotta remember it's Ajax. It's spelled Ajax phonetically. So everything in me wants to just keep repeating this word is Ajax. It's IX. Okay, so I grew up my parents had a shop a few hundred meters from the stadium. My father never missed a game. My father told me, so what's happening here is the fact that he's obsessed with football from a very early age. He lives right next to the stadium.”
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“And before I jump back into the book, just one more quote from Johann, which I think is fantastic. He says, football is played with the brain. The legs are just there to help. Okay, let's get into the book. This is from the very first chapter. Everything I've done, I've done with a view to the future. Concentrating on progress, which means that the past is not something that I think about too much. Continually looking forward means that I can only concentrate on getting better at whatever I am doing. And I only really look back in order to gauge what I can learn from mistakes. Those lessons can be taken from different points in your life, and you don't necessarily see how connected everything is until later. So that insight that he's picked up on through experience, the fact that you can only connect the docs looking backwards, not forward, something I learned from Steve Jobs as well. There's a fantastic quote I want to read to you that Steve said. You can't connect the dots. It's very similar to the thought that Johann's telling us in his book. You can't connect the dots looking forward. And you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust in something. Your gut.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right before I sat down and talked to you, and I actually underlined what he's about to point out to us here. This comes at the very end of the book. It's actually from the last few pages of the book. And this is Johann Talking. He says, I haven't always been understood. As a footballer and as a coach, and also for what I did after that. But okay, Rembrandt and Van Gogh weren't understood either. That's what you learn. People go on bothering you until you're a genius. That's why people like Cork Costa, I'm probably, these are a bunch of names I'm probably mispronouncing. Horst Dazzler, Peter, something, and all the others have been so important to me. This is the main reason I'm reading this to you. They didn't just help me avoid mistakes. They also helped me to think differently.”
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“And once that's the case, you have no business being on the pitch. But because I was in a good mental state, I became a coach. Above all, I want to say that my life has always been lived with a view of doing things better and getting better. I've translated that into everything I've done.”
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“I want to stress how important my family is, not just my parents, my in-laws, wife, children, and grandchildren, but also all the people who took me by the hand at Iax in a phase of my life when I was very fragile. Family has defined who I am now, someone who has one shortcoming when it comes to football. I can only think about being at the top. As a player or a coach, I am not capable of doing something at a low level. I can only think in one direction upwards to be the best possible. That's why in the end I had to stop. I was no longer in a physical condition to do what needed to be done at the top.”
2021-11-25 · Founders · #218 Johan Cruyff (A Life of Total Football) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not a person with college degrees. Everything I've learned, I've learned through experience. After I lost my father at the age of 12, my life was defined by IX. First by my second father, who was the club's groundsman, and later by my trainers. Thanks to Iax, I didn't just learn to be a better footballer. I learned how to behave. Through my father in law, I gained financial experience. When I started out no footballer in the world had ever heard of marketing in dealing with business was something completely new, but someone came into my life who would help me with that and bring me up because every time I thought I could do it on my own, things immediately went wrong. It doesn't matter, it's part of life. In the end, it's more important whether you learn from it or not.”
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