Transcript
Introduction
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 Ajax. First, by my second father, who was the club's groundsman, and later by my trainers. Thanks to Ajax, 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, and 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've learned from it or not. 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 Ajax 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. 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.
Those words were written by Johan Cruyff, the month he died of lung cancer at the age of 68, and that's an excerpt from the book I'm going talk to you about today, which is My Turn: A Life of Total Football and it's the autobiography of Johan Cruyff. And this is another example of a book that I would have never found on my own. One of the benefits of doing this podcast is that people send me -- I've probably received hundreds of fantastic biography and autobiography recommendations. And so this was sent to me by a listener named Nicolas. I want to read a part of the message he sent me because I think it's a great introduction of why this autobiography fits into everything else that we talk about.