Success Quote by Tom Landry

Landry is quietly demoting the sexy part of ambition: the goal. In sports culture, goals get the poster treatment - bold, declarative, easy to chant. Landry, the hard-nosed architect of the Dallas Cowboys, treats them as cheap currency. The real expenditure is behavioral: choosing a method and enduring the boredom, doubt, and weekly violence required to see it through.

The line works because it flips what people want to believe about progress. We prefer the drama of deciding. Landry insists that the decisive moment comes after the decision, when you commit to a process that will keep judging you. "Deciding how" is strategy: film study, conditioning, play design, division of labor, discipline under pressure. "Staying with that plan" is culture: resisting panic after a loss, not rewriting your identity after a bad quarter, not chasing novelty when repetition is what builds timing.

There is also a coach's subtext here: goals are private fantasies; plans are public agreements. A locker room can share a plan. A plan can be coached, measured, corrected. A goal is too often a wish with better branding. Landry is speaking from a world where outcomes are noisy - weather, injuries, referees, opponent talent - and the only controllable variable is preparation. He offers a pragmatic kind of hope: you don't need perfect motivation, just a workable system and the stubbornness to keep running it when it stops being inspiring.