Lighting In A Bottle – Round 1

lightning in a bottle – An incredibly difficult, unlikely, and/or elusive achievement or period of success.

So you want to discover your full potential and change the world for the better through your gifts, talents, and abilities? All you have to do is catch lightning in a bottle. Far easier said than done, however, if you know what to look for you’ll have a much better opportunity to hunt, catch it, then ride its electric wave for as long as it can be contained. Personally, I understand this extremely well as I’ve captured it twice in my lifespan to date. If catching lightning in a bottle is something you’d love to do but haven’t done yet, over the next two blogs I’ll share my experience of what it’s like for you to benefit from in discovering your full potential

Round 1-University of Wisconsin Stevens Point 1990-1993: It was early spring in 1990 and I was a fallen star living at my parents house bartending at the Mansfield, OH Holiday Inn. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the spring of 1989 with a Bachelor of Science degree and a successful wrestling career behind me, I was ready to conquer the world, kick ass, take names, and never look back. Wanting to own my own business since sixth grade in 1977, I went to job fairs halfheartedly and didn’t find one I thought would provide me a step up and into entrepreneurship successfully. That was until my fiancé at the time found a job ad in the newspaper that read, “$40K guaranteed with the opportunity to be your own boss”. There it was, my dream come true.

Responding to the ad immediately, I learned it was a straight commission sales job in which I sold a soft core collection system to businesses so they could recuperate lost revenue from bounced checks and unpaid credit balances. Not the sexiest job for sure, but one that I could see a path in learning how to be my own boss and control my income. Though I was a hard worker, hungry and knew what it took to be successful as a student-athlete; I had clue zero what it took to generate income outside of trading hours for dollars. Expecting to be successful immediately, I lived on my projected guaranteed $40K per year ‘if’come rather than my actual ‘in’come. It was only a matter of months until I couldn’t afford my lifestyle anymore and got evicted, separated from my fiancé, and moved back home with my tail between my legs to pick up the pieces of my shattered life and reset my erstwhile dreams.

While languishing at the bottom of the proverbial barrel, I received a phone call from a fellow Badger wrestler by the name of Marty Loy asking me if I’d be interested in coaching and going to grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP). For a more in depth version read my blog about Marty Loy. After initially saying no, I ended up choosing to take the opportunity and it became my first experience of capturing lightning in a bottle. Over the next three years as a team we accomplished the following:

• 2X WSUC Conference Champs
• 2X NCAA Division III Top 10 team place winners
• 13 WSUC Conference Champions
• 9 NCAA Division III All-Americans
• 7 UWSP Hall of Fame members

To put this into perspective, prior to 1989, the UWSP wrestling program hadn’t won a conference championship in over 30 years with their last win being in 1958. From its inception in 1952 as a collegiate sport for the University to 1989 it had only produced nine All-Americans in total (over a 37 year timespan) and finished seventh out of eight teams in the ’89 conference tourney. The team was so bad we were every opponents favorite date on their calendar because they knew it was a guaranteed win. That was until 1989 when Marty Loy took on the unenviable and seemingly impossible job of taking a program from worst to first

After I left begrudgingly in 1993 to work at USA Wrestling, the magic continued under Marty and Head Assistant Coach Eric Burke’s leadership through 1998 culminating in:

• 3 additional Conference Championships (5 Total)
• 5 additional NCAA DIII top 10 team place winners (7 Total)
• 22 additional WSUC Conference Champions (35 Total)
• 18 additional NCAA DIII All-Americans (27 Total)
• 2 additional UWSP Hall of Fame members (9 Total)

The question begs, “what happened to go from worst to first seemingly overnight?” This is the essence of catching lightning in a bottle. For those wanting to emulate this phenomenon and experience it yourself, here are the distinctions that I learned to recognize, create, and sustain it for as long as possible.

1. It always starts with the leader. In John Maxwell’s timeless classic, ‘The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership,’ the very first law he shares is “The Law of the Lid.” This means that the level of an organization, team, family, initiative, cause, or movement will never grow beyond the leadership ability of the leader. As the leader goes, so does everything following them. Additionally, the type of leader they are will determine how long you’ll capture lightning in a bottle. In Jim Collins’s seminal book, “Good to Great—Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t,” he shares that a critical characteristic of the companies that transitioned from good to great (only 11 out of 1,435 studied) is that they all had a level 5 leader. In his words, “Level 5 leaders display a powerful mixture of personal humility and indomitable will. They’re incredibly ambitious, but their ambition is first and foremost for the cause, for the organization and its purpose, not themselves. While Level 5 leaders can come in many personality types, they are often self-effacing, quiet, reserved, and even shy. Every good-to-great transition in our research began with a Level 5 leader who motivated the enterprise more through inspired standards than inspiring personality.” Marty Loy was a Level 5 leader. You cannot experience lightning in a bottle without this as your foundation.
2. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In every championship-caliber team and organization, the collective strength surpasses that of any individual. While strong personalities and high self-confidence are necessary for extraordinary achievement, true success is only possible when egos are set aside for the good of the team. This approach allows each person’s strengths to shine while reducing weaknesses, as others fill in the gaps. Instead of focusing on “me,” your energy, actions, and intentions are directed toward “we.” The synergy created when like-minded individuals work together is unstoppable—provided there’s a Level 5 leader who can manage egos, give others room to excel, and ensure everyone understands that their contributions are essential. When one person or small group takes center stage, it destroys the chemistry needed to contain and amplify the lightning-like power, causing it to dissipate. Once this balance is broken, the lightning escapes and the success it brought vanishes as quickly as it appeared.
3. Work becomes play – To excel at anything requires an extraordinary amount of effort to achieve something that only one person or team will accomplish at a specific time. To work smarter and harder than your competition involves a fanatic obsession with excellence, where you stop counting hours because you love what you’re doing and the results it yields—you don’t see it as work. Instead, it becomes something you look forward to, sometimes with childlike glee and enthusiasm, because you understand it is a necessary part of the recipe for success. You don’t need to be ‘motivated’ to do it because you are inspired simply by the act itself. As a result, what seems difficult to most becomes playful to you. This shift in mindset and approach to developing the skills of high achievement turns into a game within the game, setting you apart from everyone else. You aim to master the work itself rather than just win a competition, transforming the process into an insatiable pursuit where there’s nowhere you’d rather be and nothing else you’d rather do. This is the explosive power of catching lightning in a bottle.
4. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ – whatever your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), it’s not a question of ‘if’ your going to achieve it but rather when. This belief influences every part of your journey toward your goal. It shapes how you see setbacks that are inevitable along the way and redefines obstacles as ‘on the way’ rather than ‘in the way.’ It impacts the relationships between people, so you don’t have to agree all the time, but agreeing to disagree is not only better but also understood by everyone as the path to growth. It influences your ability to be fully yourself — vulnerable and powerful, happy and sad, ecstatic and depressed, right and wrong — experiencing the full range of emotions without judgment while enjoying the camaraderie of those who love you unconditionally. Most importantly, this understanding helps you see the perfection in God’s greatest creation: realizing how essential our need for connection and unity truly is, acknowledging that we both need each other and cannot accomplish greatness alone.
5. You’re connected eternally – to catch lightning in a bottle, you must risk everything to have it all. If you pursue it, miss it, but it touches you, it will burn everything in its path to ashes. Yet, if you catch it, it will bond you together like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. I’m not talking about a simple one-to-one union that couples might have or even a strong family bond that some share. This is an unbreakable attachment that remains even when life takes the participants down different paths. It requires going through the fiery depths together to forge the steel of resilience and withstand the immense pressure needed to create the brilliant diamond of achievement, standing as a testament to what’s possible. Only those who have caught lightning in a bottle understand this—both the beauty and the peril. Not everyone will become best friends, as conflict is often necessary to create greatness, but all will respect one another in a way that’s unmatched in any other endeavor.

In my journey to fulfill my purpose of helping humanity discover their full potential, I pray that everyone can experience the thrill of catching lightning in a bottle at least once in their life. I believe my insights will help you understand the importance of each trait so you won’t mistakenly think that ignoring one will still yield the same results. These principles are interconnected and non-negotiable. The opposite of these—fear, greed, ego, arrogance, apathy, righteousness, and selfishness—are obvious reasons why potential lightning won’t be captured in a bottle. If you want to experience the greatest thrill ride on earth that can elevate you to unimaginable heights, I pray you now know what to look for in your pursuit and capture lightning in a bottle!

I can’t wait to share with you round 2! Believe…