Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks' owner notes, "entrepreneurs face the challenge of being self-aware." Kevin Eastman admonishes coaches to recognize, "shoot, it ain't working." Coaches are entrepreneurs, as Chuck Daly wrote, "I'm a salesman." We need both a solid product but an effective pitch to get our customers (players) to buy into our program. Belief in a flawed product doesn't rescue it. RealClearSports discusses the top 10 turnarounds in NCAA Men's basketball history.
Real estate tycoon Barbara Corcoran has always feared failure. Insecurity can drive individuals to outwork and outthink their competition. Adversity will accompany every competitor. How we transform challenges productively determines whether we reach our destination.
You can have too many assets. Abundant talent doesn't guarantee success. How you develop and deploy (process) means as much or more than having assets. In 1898, Samuel Langley received a total of $70,000 in government grants to develop manned flight. But money and previous success with catapulted flight didn't translate into victory over the Wright Brothers. A high payroll doesn't guarantee championships in the NBA. SBNation chronicles the hot mess of the Brooklyn Nets.
You can look but not see. With the obvious success of companies like Uber, who stood to lose? Of course, the Taxi industry.
Some young players are not highly regarded or recruited but both talented and driven. Steph Curry was not a highly regarded recruit but became an NBA MVP. Nassim Taleb wrote "The Black Swan" to promote the concept of the reality of the highly improbable.
Here's an excerpt from the New York Times review, "First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."
Whether in life, business, or coaching we need to see what others don't, recognize strength, weakness, and opportunity. That means overcoming intrinsic biases such as overconfidence, confirmation bias (reading and opinions that reinforce our beliefs), and framing (limiting choice). If we want to change the world, we often must change ourself first.
