CHAPTER 2 Motivation moves us, but...
...Curiosity and Passion keep us moving.
Mircea Lucescu died on April 7, 2026. He was 80 years old, still coaching, still learning, on a training pitch with Romania’s national team until his heart gave out. Thirty-five trophies. Half a century of reinvention. And when the tributes came in from across Europe, the word that kept appearing was not winner. It was original.
For hours I could not stop reading. Interview after interview, clip after clip. I kept going back, compelled by something I could not immediately name. Then I understood it. Relief. The relief of discovering that people like Lucescu exist. Quietly, without theater, without the performance of greatness. Just a man who watched basketball to learn about football training. Who studied swimming coaches to understand how the body moves under pressure. Who called this, simply, curiosity, and science would call it interdisciplinary thinking. He never called it anything. He just did it.
The Unconventional Builder
At Shakhtar Donetsk, Lucescu built something that had no precedent: a squad of young Brazilian players, in industrial eastern Ukraine, competing at the highest level of European football. Not one experiment. Twelve years of it. A consistent, deepening commitment to the idea that difference, cultural, linguistic, temperamental, is not a problem to be managed but the actual raw material of collective intelligence.
When people do not share assumptions, they have to communicate. When habit is unavailable, everyone has to think. When no one in the room is the default authority on how things are done, something generative becomes possible. Lucescu did not build teams despite their heterogeneity. He built teams through it, deliberately, patiently, over years.
Then the war came. Shakhtar lost their home city of Donetsk to conflict, became a displaced club, played their European matches as people without a place to return to. And they held together. Not because the strategy was good. Because what Lucescu had built between those people was not dependent on stable conditions. Relationship adapts. Collective identity, when it has been genuinely constructed, travels.
This is what breaks conventional teams under pressure: they were never really teams. They were individuals organized around a plan. When the plan fails, and it always fails eventually, there is nothing underneath. What Lucescu built had something underneath.
My First True Lessons In Leadership. What Six-Year-Olds Taught Me
For two years I Football - trained a group of children. They were six, seven years old. Small humans with complete sincerity and absolutely no interest in performing for an adult’s agenda.
You cannot lead a six-year-old the way most leadership frameworks suggest leading anyone. You cannot appeal to long-term vision. You cannot manage their motivation. You have only what is happening right now: this child, this mood, this specific morning, whatever they carried in from home.
What worked, and I discovered this by failing at everything else first, was genuine attention, playfulness, and PRAISE specific enough to be real. Not good job, but I saw exactly what you just did. Not performance management but actual seeing.
One thing I learned to do: when a child needed to learn a new skill, I would not teach him directly. I would explain it to another child who already knew it, making sure the first child was close enough to hear. Within days, I would see him practicing alone, quietly, on his own time. He had absorbed it not as instruction but as something he had chosen. The learning was his!
Another thing: I would say to a child, with complete sincerity, by next week you will be one of the quickest on this team. And he would be. Not because of the words. Because genuine foresight, when a child feels it is real, becomes something he reaches toward. He does not wait to be pushed. He pulls himself.
I carried this later into my work with adults. Patrick, a young man on my team, impatient for a leadership role, pushing before he was ready. I said to him: wait one more year. Then you will not just be ready, you will be two, three steps ahead of where you would have been. He waited. He surpassed. When older colleagues would tell me: Patrick needs more “experience” in order to be good enough, I kept building his confidence: your are good enough!
The method does not change. The scale does. What changes is how much courage it requires to offer genuine foresight to someone who is not yet who they are becoming. And to mean it.
The Schüler-Principle
Lucescu said that every young man he trained inspired him. Not that he inspired them. That they inspired him.
This is either something coaches say, or it is the most important insight in the whole of leadership development.
With Lucescu, it was true. You can tell because fifty years of work showed it. A man who stopped learning does not keep reinventing at eighty. Does not watch other sports to find new methods. Does not walk onto a training pitch with a national team when his heart is failing, because there is still something he wants to understand.
He was a Schüler. A learner. Not as a brand. As an orientation. Lived, consistent, turned fully toward the people in front of him.
My children taught me the same thing from the other direction. The sessions where I arrived as the teacher, with a plan, with a structure, with clear goals, were the sessions that collapsed the moment reality did not match my design. One child having a hard morning. Energy in the room different from what I expected. Something interesting happening that was not on my agenda. If I insisted on the plan, I lost the group.
The sessions where I arrived as a learner, genuinely curious about what this particular group, on this particular day, needed, were the ones where something real happened. The children surprised me. They surprised each other. The session became something none of us had anticipated.
That in my eyes is not a metaphor for leadership. That is leadership.
Collective Thinking as a Feature You Build
Most organizations treat collective intelligence as an outcome, something you observe when the team performs well. What Lucescu practiced, and what two years with six-year-olds confirmed for me, is that collective intelligence is a feature you build. Through specific, repeated, intentional practices of encounter.
It does not happen because you gather talented people. It does not happen because you communicate a vision clearly. It happens when each person in the group has had the experience of being genuinely met, seen, taken seriously, believed in, by the person holding the space. Once that has happened, something becomes possible between the members of the group that was not possible before. They start to TRUST not just the leader but each other.
They start to think together rather than in parallel.
I watched this happen with six-year-olds. The shift was visible. Once each child felt genuinely seen, in their particular way of moving, thinking, engaging, they began to notice each other. Not just to play alongside each other but with each other. The collective emerged not from the structure I imposed but from the quality of individual attention I offered.
Lucescu built this at scale, across languages and cultures, over decades. Under political upheaval. Under war. The unconventional team compositions, the Brazilian players in Ukraine, the methods borrowed from other sports, these were not eccentricities. They were the consistent expression of a single belief: that the most important thing a leader can do is stay genuinely curious about the people in front of them, and trust that what emerges from that curiosity will exceed anything the leader could have designed in advance.
The Prophet Question
He was criticized most in the country he loved most. Romania, which he put on the European football map in 1984, which he returned to serve again at the end of his life, was often the harshest in its judgment of him.
This is its own chapter. But it points to something worth naming here: leaders who build genuine collectives, who practice radical curiosity, who refuse to perform authority, these leaders are often unsettling to the people around them. Not because they are difficult. Because they require something back. They require you to stop waiting to be led and start thinking TOGETHER.
Not everyone wants that.
The ones who do, they remember you for fifty years. They write about you the week you die, unable to stop reading, relieved to discover you existed.
Thank you Mircea Lucescu for the leadership lessons. Rest In Peace.