Fellows Book Online Version 2020

13 can honestly say that I’ve been quite successful at least professionally, and later on in life I became very curious and tried to investigate the secret of success. I came across something quite interesting, something I absolutely love and it’s something that goes like this: if you want to be successful in life, it is very important that you identify very clearly and very early in your life what you want to do. I was lucky, as I said, because when I was three years old there was a ball lying around and I kept it. I fell in love with that and I realized straight away what I want to do in my life, so, I had a head start and from the age of three I started playing and doing something that I absolutely loved. Others find out at 20-25 years old or even later, which is absolutely fine. I was 3 years old when I realized what I want to do. Obviously, there were a few things that I required in order to transform something you love into a profession, and talent for example is something very important. For me talent is not the most important thing. I believe talent is not a gift and that’s it! Talent is a process and it is something that actually sits not at the beginning, but at the end of the learning path. First of all, you need to learn, and then you need to add your talent to everything. You have to learn many important things that you must do in order to transform your passion into a job which requires zero talent. For example, your work ethic, your body language, your attitude, being prepared, doing something extra, doing something passionately, your energy, your effort, being on time and being coachable. All these things in my opinion require zero talent but they are very important in order to transform your passion into a job. For me the most important thing is to find out early and clearly how you want to do it. I believe in practice, the quantity of practice, the amount of practice you put in and that can also be fun to do with your friends. But it’s also very important to practice alone by yourself, to do it at night, to do it in the morning, when it is sunny, when it rains, when you are feeling down, when you are feeling discouraged, keep practicing. I think you have got to change to succeed, so the quantity of practice and quality of practice depends on the coaches and the teacher that you find when you are developing yourself. When you are forming yourself in your early years, the better the coach or teacher the better the quality of your practice. I was lucky because I had fantastic teachers and coaches when I was very young. They made me do the right things all the time but then I tried to never waste a second of the practice, that I was encouraged to do. I always did it with the maximum energy and effort and I can honestly say I never met anybody in my life that practiced more than I did and did not become a professional footballer. I really think that practice is very important. I have to say as well that physical predisposition is also important, but this is down to nature, mother nature. I can say that football is a very democratic sport, because you can be tall or short, you can be fast or slow. You can still make it to be a professional footballer. For example, because of my body type I probably could not have been a jockey and ride horses or be a swimmer because my body doesn’t flow very well, that is just nature. If you think about it, you can give too much importance to talent. I think a practical example is when you speak with your children when they come home from school and they said: “Five in History” and I said “Why?” and they reply “because I don’t have talent in History” and this is a very easy way out for them. We can’t teach talent, in my opinion practice is more important. I read somewhere that the genius is 10% talent and 90% hard work, so this is my view about talent. In regard to leadership, I will tell you another personal story that happened in February 1998. When I was in London and I was playing for Chelsea, I became player- manager of the club. I will explain what it means to be player-manager, because not everybody is familiar with this position. Imagine making a movie and being a director as well as one of the main actors at the same time. As you can imagine it’s a position that has a lot of advantages but also has some disadvantages. For example, it is very tiring mentally and physically so you can only do it for a short time in my opinion. However it does have its advantages such as you can test your own method on yourself, and you can tell the players what to do and by doing it with them you immediately understand if what you are suggesting is working. Anyway, I didn’t not ask for the job, I was asked to become a player manager out of the blue, unexpectedly and I remember when they asked me, I didn’t know whether to accept the offer or not. So, I called my mentor Marcello Lippi who I had worked with in Juventus for a few years and I asked him whether I was, in his opinion, good enough to accept the job. He said “Yes, take it”. So, I said yes, and I spent the following three days taking advantage of the international break where we had no training sessions. I spent two days at home writing down everything from my playing system, my training sessions, everything that I thought was important to do with the players on the field and off the field and then suddenly the phone rang. It was a call from Marcello Lippi. He said, “Hi Luca, I see you accepted the job, what are you doing right now?” I explained I was writing down everything to create my own personal coaching method and he said “Look, don’t do that, stop doing that. I have something I would like you to do” and I said, “What is it?” He said, “You