Top 60 Bill Walsh Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If your why is strong enough you will figure out how!”

— Bill Walsh

2. “The culture precedes positive results. It doesn’t get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions: they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.”

— Bill Walsh

3. “Champions behave like champions before they are champions.”

— Bill Walsh

4. “Concentrate on what will produce results rather than on the results, the process rather than the prize.”

— Bill Walsh

5. “Find a great mentor who believes in you, your life will change forever!”

— Bill Walsh

6. “Consistent effort is a consistent challenge.”

— Bill Walsh

7. “Your path and purpose will become crystal clear when you begin to trust your vision.”

— Bill Walsh

8. “As the leader, part of the job is to be visible and willing to communicate with everyone.”

— Bill Walsh

9. “A good leader is always learning. The great leaders start learning young and continue until their last breath.”

— Bill Walsh

10. “To a winner, complacency and overconfidence can be destructive. To losers, desperation and despondency are just as harmful.”

— Bill Walsh

11. “Flying by the seat of your pants precedes crashing by the seat of your pants.”

— Bill Walsh

12. “Commit yourself to something you have a passion for.”

— Bill Walsh

13. “Invest in great relationships, they will pay a lifetime of dividends.”

— Bill Walsh

14. “Your enthusiasm becomes their enthusiasm; your lukewarm presentation becomes their lukewarm interest in what you’re offering.”

— Bill Walsh

15. “Nothing is more effective than sincere, accurate praise, and nothing is more lame than a cookie-cutter compliment.”

— Bill Walsh

16. “You can only succeed when people are communicating, not just from the top down, but in complete interchange. Communication comes from fighting off my ego and listening.”

— Bill Walsh

17. “Failure is part of success, an integral part. Everybody gets knocked down. Knowing it will happen and what you must do when it does is the first step back.”

— Bill Walsh

18. “Act like a VIP and become a VIP.”

— Bill Walsh

19. “Like water, many decent individuals will seek lower ground if left to their own inclinations. In most cases you are the one who inspires and demands they go upward rather than settle for the comfort of doing what comes easily.”

— Bill Walsh

20. “The minute you step away from the negative people in your life you will instantly see the beauty in your horizon.”

— Bill Walsh

21. “For me the starting point for everything – before strategy, tactics, theories, managing, organizing, philosophy, methodology, talent, or experience – is work ethic. Without one of significant magnitude, you’re dead in the water.”

— Bill Walsh

22. “If you see players who hate practice, their coach isn’t doing a very good job.”

— Bill Walsh

23. “Someone will declare, “I am the leader!” and expect everyone to get in line and follow him or her to the gates of heaven or hell. My experience is that it doesn’t happen that way. Unless you’re a guard on a chain gang, others follow you based on the quality of your actions rather than the magnitude of your declarations.”

— Bill Walsh

24. “Many people erroneously think they have only one chance to succeed, and if they miss that chance, they are doomed to failure. In fact, most people have several opportunities to succeed.”

— Bill Walsh

25. “Everybody isn’t everybody.”

— Bill Walsh

26. “The absolute bottom line in coaching is organization and preparing for practice.”

— Bill Walsh

27. “His leadership example of doing your job, treating others with respect, expecting people to do their jobs, and holding them accountable is a formula for success that will work in any good organization.”

— Bill Walsh

28. “Afford each person the same respect, support, and fair treatment you would expect if your roles were reversed. Deal with people individually, not as objects who are part of a herd-that’s the critical factor.”

— Bill Walsh

29. “A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist you are expected to know the difference.”

— Bill Walsh

30. “Everybody’s got an opinion. Leaders are paid to make a decision. The difference between offering an opinion and making a decision is the difference between working for the leader and being the leader.”

— Bill Walsh

31. “Before you can win the fight, You’ve got to be in the fight.”

— Bill Walsh

32. “The ability to help the people around me self-actualize their goals underlines the single aspect of my abilities and the label that I value most – teacher.”

— Bill Walsh

33. “Do expect defeat. It’s a given when the stakes are high.”

— Bill Walsh

34. “Your attitude will unlock the mystery of success you seek!”

— Bill Walsh

35. “Even when you have an organization brimming with talent, victory is not always under your control. There is no guarantee, no ultimate formula for success. It all comes down to intelligently and relentlessly seeking solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing. When you do that, the score will take care of itself.”

— Bill Walsh

36. “Consistent motivation usually comes from a consuming desire to be able to perform at your best under pressure, namely, the pressure produced by tough competition. If a player needed me to light a fire under him by turning the other team into a demon, he was lacking something I couldn’t give him.”

— Bill Walsh

37. “Here’s a good question to write on a Post-it Note and put on your desk: “What assets do we have right now that we’re not taking advantage of?” Virgil.”

— Bill Walsh

38. “Not to get too clever, but “consistent effort is a consistent challenge.”

— Bill Walsh

39. “The more you know about English, the less you’re likely to think there are unbreakable “rules” for a lot of things.”

— Bill Walsh

40. “By instinct we-leaders-want to run hard all the time; by intellect we know this is not possible. Reconciling those two positions in the context of leadership is an ongoing challenge.”

— Bill Walsh

41. “Victory is produced by and belongs to all.”

— Bill Walsh

42. “I’ve observed that if individuals who prevail in a highly competitive environment have any one thing in common besides success, it is failure – and their ability to overcome it.”

— Bill Walsh

43. “Innovation involves anticipation. It is having a broad base of knowledge on your subject and an ability to see where the end game is headed. Use all your knowledge to get their first. Set the trend and make the competition counter you.”

— Bill Walsh

44. “Used properly a hashtag can be really cool. Hashtags provide an opportunity for sly editorial comment, for parallel and perpendicular trains of thought, in the limited space that Twitter and, to some extent, Facebook provide.”

— Bill Walsh

45. “I’m not one of those “omg texting kids rite bad” alarmists. I just think there’s an interesting nexus where the Internet itself hastened language change when it comes to Internet terms.”

— Bill Walsh

46. “I caution against beginning or ending a quotation with ellipses.”

— Bill Walsh

47. “If I have any talent, it’s in the artistic end of football. The variation of movement of 11 players and the orchestration of that facet of football is beautiful to me.”

— Bill Walsh

48. “I often think about the class differences involved in “jobs” vs. “careers.””

— Bill Walsh

49. “There is a weird phenomenon where technology seems to be getting dumber in some ways as it gets smarter.”

— Bill Walsh

50. “If any sort of error is inexcusable, it’s an incorrect phone number. One of the cardinal rules of copy editing is that every phone number published must be checked.”

— Bill Walsh