Forty minutes late.

On a Friday night in November 1988, two of Notre Dame’s best players turned up 40 minutes late for the team dinner.

It wasn’t the first time. Tony Brooks led the team in rushing, and Ricky Watters led it in receiving. Both had been warned before.

Notre Dame is the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and its football team is about as close to Manchester United as American college sports get.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Notre Dame was ranked No. 1, and the next day it was playing USC, ranked No. 2, in Los Angeles. It was the first time the two old rivals met as the country’s top two teams, with the national title on the line.

Lou Holtz sent them both home to South Bend the next morning.

Holtz, who died in March at 89, built much of his coaching around three letters: W.I.N. What’s Important Now. He made the idea famous and asked his players to ask themselves the question dozens of times a day: in class, in the weight room, on the sideline, at a party.

Most people who borrow WIN use it as a filter for their to-do list: of the ten things in front of me, which one matters most right now? Useful. But it isn’t what Holtz did that Friday night.

If WIN had meant “what helps us win tomorrow”, Brooks and Watters would have played. Holtz answered a harder question. What’s important now, given who this team is trying to be?

A hundred players were watching to see whether the rules applied to the stars. That mattered most, and only then.

Notre Dame beat USC 27-10 without them. Five weeks later, they beat West Virginia in the Fiesta Bowl to finish 12-0 as national champions.

Now picture a medical device commercial leader in mid-November.

Q4 is short. The board wants the 2027 plan. Three sales roles are open, a product launches in February, and the field isn’t trained yet. And your region is 4% short for the year. Your best rep, already well past target and earning accelerators, has a capital deal that would close the gap before 31 December. All it needs is your approval for a discount well below your floor.

Run WIN as a to-do list and the answer’s obvious. Approve it. It’s the biggest number, it fixes your year, and it pays your best rep.

Run it the way Holtz did and the question changes, because every rep in the region will know what you decided by Friday. If the floor bends for the star in December, it isn’t a floor in January, and every negotiation next year starts from the new number.

The answer might still be yes. But the deal isn’t the only thing being decided. You’re also deciding, in front of all of them, what your team will believe is important next year.

That’s the part of WIN that rarely gets quoted. Holtz’s players asked themselves, over and over, every day, what was important now. The answer that stuck came from watching their coach on one Friday night in Newport Beach.

Your team is asking the same question all the time. Most of the time, they answer it by looking at what you did last.