Darren Hardy wrote The Compound Effect which addresses process improvement, tracking, and the potential for large gains through daily progress. For example, imagine you stop at your favorite coffee shop and drop three bucks a day, five days a week. That's 15 dollars, let's say 50 weeks, 750 dollars of your after tax money.
Former Clipper VP of Basketball Operations and Celtics' Assistant, Kevin Eastman reads two hours a day. In three months, he develops an extra 180 hours of expertise on basketball, leadership, or other domains.
But we need to make conscious decisions. Hardy writes, “You get in life what you create. Expectation drives the creative process. What do you expect? You expect whatever it is you’re thinking about. Your thought process, the conversation in your head, is at the base of the results you create in life.”
How can compounding impact our basketball lives?
1) Attention to detail - player improvement programs, notebooks
2) Practice planning and preparation
3) Higher tempo operations
4) Tracking improvement (e.g. shooting, turnovers, points per possession)
5) Innovation (competition, physical training, sports psychology)
A final Hardy quote prompts us to change, “The first step toward change is awareness. If you want to get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to start by becoming aware of the choices that lead you away from your desired destination.”
Players and coaches inform their narrative. Steven King wrote his classic, On Writing, about his craft. Good writing, he opined, included plot, fascinating characters, and dialogue. Quality basketball teams share similarities, their identity ("this is who we are"), players ("all the world's a stage"), and actions ("this is how we play"). Compounding habits improves each of those dimensions. "We can't control our feelings, but we can control what we do." Compose a great story.