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Every year, the day after the NFL regular season ends, a number of coaches get fired. In a 32-team league, the number varies, but it’s often in the 5-8 range, which means there’s an annual turnover rate between 15% to 25%. This year, 5 coaches were fired. Black Monday, as it’s now called, represents a major miscalculation in professional sports. But it’s also representative of a larger failure in the business word.

A “fire first” mentality has taken hold in most industries. If sales are down this year, get a new VP of Sales. If your cost per lead doesn’t drop 25% like the Excel spreadsheet needed it to in order to please the new Marketing Director, then get a new agency. It’s cause and effect. Right?

There are many problems with this line of thinking. But before we delve into all of the flaws of the current firing zeitgeist, let’s see what we can learn from one of the greatest coaches in NFL history – Tom Landry – a man who never would have achieved legendary status in today’s climate of impatience and instant gratification.

Love is a word that gets thrown around a lot and sometimes loses its meaning. I love my job. I love my car. I love my phone. I love my new "insert material item here". It's so easy to get wrapped up in on our day-to-day lives and careers and our material possessions. Sometimes we need to be reminded about what's truly important.

When it comes to our jobs, we don't work so hard, or care so much, or obsess over deadlines and deliverables to simply be a labor output. To simply get the job done.

We do it because we have people in our lives that we'd do anything for. We want to make their lives better. We want to make our parents proud. We want to build a foundation for our kids' future. We want our dogs and cats to have amazing lives. We do it so the world is a better place - even if we can only see the impact with our immediate loved ones.

We were recently asked by a potential client to describe Nebo’s approach to innovation. Our answer should sound pretty familiar to anyone familiar with our brand:

We believe in putting the user first. Of course, part of our job is to stay on the cutting edge of trends and technology, but we’ll always be more interested in solving problems and making the world a better place. If pushing the envelope or breaking new ground helps us create a better user experience, we’re all for it, but innovation in and of itself shouldn’t be a goal.

With that said, we spend a lot of time examining some of the world’s biggest brands. We’ve talked about Coke and Tesla and New Belgium and extracted lessons from the decisions they’ve made, both good and bad. But when it comes to innovating in the name of better serving users, it’s important to understand that you don’t need a massive budget. Your brand may not have the R&D funding of Apple or Microsoft, but that doesn’t mean you can’t come up with simple, effective ways to better your business.

On a recent trip to my vet, I realized how the small, locally-owned practice was the perfect example of how user-first thinking can make a big difference.

In 1999, Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay saw a huge gap in the home entertainment market. People were growing frustrated trying to record their favorite TV shows and rewatch them. They either had to be home to man the VCR, which sort of defeats the purpose, or if they were really brave they could try to set the timer on the device and hope it didn’t cut off the first couple of minutes of their show. We all know the joke about how setting the clock on your VCR is about as intuitive as assembling a hydrogen bomb, so the results of this method were, unsurprisingly, mixed. Barton and Ramsay understood the problem, recognized the opportunity, and would go on to develop TiVo and forever change the home entertainment landscape.

That’s not the end of the TiVo story, but it might as well be. After enjoying a brief run of massive success, so much so that people still refer to recording shows as “TiVo-ing”, TiVo quickly found itself an afterthought in a crowded marketplace. The company that revolutionized television in the early 2000s today is nothing more than a tertiary player in the space. For reference, TiVo stock peaked at about $50 a share and today is worth about $13. Quite a fall for what was, not that long ago, one of the biggest brand names in the world.

So where did TiVo go wrong? It failed where so many companies before it have failed, and so many more since.

It didn’t have purpose.

Success is a difficult thing to quantify. It’s a lot like the present – it’s hard for us to really understand the moment that we’re in when the lines between what’s past and what’s future are so blurred.

So when people ask “How do you become successful? What are the steps I need to take to achieve success?” they’re asking the wrong questions. Their mindset is flawed. They’re trying to follow a roadmap to a singular destination, when success, like the present, is not a concrete moment in time but an ever-evolving process.