Nick Saban on the keys to high-level consistency: 'I think you've got to be a perfectionist of sorts'

If nothing else during his coaching career, Nick Saban has been consistent. A seven-time national champion, the Alabama head coach is widely considered the greatest to ever do it — and the secret to his success comes down to his “paranoid” mentality.

It’s almost like he relishes being chased. But that’s not the only thing Saban uses to stay at a high level.

One of his biggest emphases is everyone doing their jobs to make sure Alabama is in position to win games. That includes himself, and he strives for perfection as much as anyone else. It’s similar to going on a diet. In order for it to work, you have to stay with it.

Well, that’s not always the case. And Saban offered that comparison when talking about striving for perfection.

“I just think that you’ve got to be a perfectionist of sorts, and you have to have a very high standard of how you want to do things,” Saban said on Hey Coach and The Nick Saban Show. “Not really what somebody else wants you to do them, but you want to do them. And you’re willing to stay focused on the process of things that you have to do to be able to do that. And then, you also have to have the discipline to be able to stay with it every day and execute it. Because that’s probably the hardest thing any of us have to do.

“I mean, just think, probably everybody in this room’s been on a diet and at some point in time, right? You got the goal, you want to lose 10 pounds, you got SlimFast, they tell you everything you can eat every day. But where do you fail? The process is defined, the goal is defined. Three days in, you’re eating pie and ice cream again. So we don’t have the self-discipline to do the things you need to do on a consistent basis to sort of keep doing things at a high level.”

Nick Saban on the secret to success: ‘Everybody doesn’t want to do hard’

Dedication to your craft is also important. Saban said it’s critical to be on a consistent routine — and stick to it. If someone works a 9-to-5 job and only works from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., that’s how good that person’s going to be.

In order to meet expectations during the college football season, it requires players and coaches to put in the work. That’s why Saban said people have to avoid those “self-imposed limitations.”

“Everybody doesn’t want to do hard,” Saban said. “Just like — talk about our season. Talking about having a successful season. You know how hard it is to practice on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, play a game on Saturday, come back and watch the film on Monday and go practice again and get to work ready for another opponent and do it for 12 weeks in a row and do it at a level of consistency where you got to give great effort, you got to have great mental toughness and you got to have a tremendous amount of discipline to stay focused on being responsible to do your job, not only for yourself, but everybody else is dependent on you, too? How do you sustain that?

“You’ve got to be someone who’s got a really high standard for how they want to do things. Now, you’ve tried to establish that in the culture that you’re trying to build and you have expectations and you don’t accept things that aren’t done in a certain fashion. But it’s harder and harder to do that because people have more and more options. And the more and more options you have, the less committed you are.”

Saban also used an example from history to make his point. In 1519, when Hernan Cortes and 600 men arrived in the “New World,” he ordered to have the boats burned. That meant there was no turning back — showing how committed they were to their cause.

That type of dedication is essential to being successful. Saban said between that and staying “paranoid,” people will set themselves up well.

“When they tried and tried and tried and tried, and the captain says hey, we’re burning the ships today so there is no means to retreat. How many of us really make those kinds of commitments to the things that we do?” Saban said. “We’re going to only do it to a certain level and we’re going to have self-imposed limitations, I call it, on just how much are we willing to commit to?

“So you want to be successful? Get paranoid, aight? Think that somebody’s after you every day and somebody’s gonna get your job if you don’t do it better. Maybe that’ll get you going.”