Belichick Reveals Life Lessons in New Book

Bill Belichick ’75, Hon. ’05, P ’07 knows what it takes to win a Super Bowl—something he has done more than any other NFL coach in league history. He believes it takes tremendous preparation, limiting distractions, creativity, and a love for football. It takes doing your job, and sometimes, it takes doing someone else’s, he said.

Belichick published The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football on May 6, a detailed look at his journey for constant self-improvement and the philosophies that led to his consistent success in the NFL.

As he details in his new book, on rare occasions, only on the precipice of winning a coveted Super Bowl, Belichick would open the Belichick Travel Agency for his players. For 48 hours in early February, he personally attended to whatever logistical problem his players needed to solve. That included every travel change, hotel room switch, or ticket request, among other needs.

“From my position, what I wanted to try to do was create something that would not take away from preparing for the game,” Belichick said “[I don’t want] the players to worry more about bus passes and post-game party tickets than the game.”

This attention to detail characterized his football coaching career, which began shortly after he graduated from Wesleyan, where he played football, lacrosse, and squash. Former men’s lacrosse and soccer head coach Terry Jackson’s open and conversational coaching style was influential for Belichick. He said Jackson listened to the players’ feedback about the ways the team and practices could be run and implemented changes when necessary.

“That taught me as a coach how to utilize players’ perspective and input and mold that with the coach’s vision and organization of the team,” Belichick said.

Tireless and thorough preparation is one of the main tenets of Belichick’s process—which was strengthened, in part, from discussions with his players, like legendary quarterback Tom Brady and running back Jim Brown, he said.

“I learned so much from the players that I coached, and I went to them for feedback throughout my career,” Belichick said.

Alongside the dozens of hours each week poring over film and data of their opponents, looking for weaknesses to exploit, a key to Belichick’s preparation was having his teams practice being uncomfortable. If the team was facing a defense adept at batting down passes, he would give his scout team paddleball racquets in practice to try to disrupt their offense. If the forecast called for rain, he would have the team practice with footballs covered in water, soap, and silicon spray to force the players to adjust. He said he tried to make practices harder than the games so when the lights were on, the players were confident they could perform.

“If there’s one thing everyone needs to realize about winning, it’s this: The price of success is paid in advance,” Belichick wrote. “Good preparation leads to winning—in general, the winner will be the best-prepared team.”

One advantage of preparing so thoroughly is it offers the benefit of thinking creatively to attack an opponent’s weakness, like when the New England Patriots under Belichick ran 25 straight passing plays against the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2002 season opener because the Steelers shut down the running game effectively the year prior. They went on to win and the game helped establish the team’s confidence, which carried through the next 20 years of success, Belichick wrote.

“Make sure you develop confidence in more than one thing,” Belichick wrote. “Have a plan B and a plan C. As good as the Steelers and Vikings were on defense, plan A wasn’t enough. Having just one plan prepared would have left our overall confidence shattered when it wasn’t working out.”

Belichick won the third-most regular games of any NFL head coach in his career, with 302, and the second-most games if we count the playoffs, with 333. But losses are also part of the game. Failure is “a part of every endeavor,” Belichick wrote, but it must be addressed. He said the team met regularly to reflect on points of improvement and tried to look at it impartially without ego.

“It's not your fault; it's not my fault; it's collectively as a team. What do we need to do better? And that really helped,” Belichick said. “Being objective, looking at our mistakes, figuring out what we could do better, correct them and try to make sure the next time that our performance was higher. And we did that even when we won.”

That mindset applied after Belichick won his first Super Bowl with the Patriots in 2001-02—when the coaching staff identified 28 players on a 53-player roster that could be benefit from improvement for the following season—as much as it did for the team’s last Super Bowl under Belichick in 2018-19. His philosophies, learned over 49 years in professional football before his current tenure at University of North Carolina, helped create a winning culture in New England that sustained over two decades. Now Belichick is sharing many of those lessons with the wider public to cultivate winning in their careers, businesses, and personal lives.

“I just kept trying to keep learning, learn every day, trying to keep improving,” Belichick said. “And that's really the theme of the book, in my mind, it’s a little different from the title, it's really about what I learned through my life, how I learned it, and who taught it to me, and hopefully, in some cases, those will be applicable to the reader. I tried to include some humor and some stories that were unique to my situation.”