Bruce Lee shows us the only "Right way" to point fingers. "There is no opponent."
We fail. Do we fail graciously and accountably or do we play the blame game?
In Above the Line, Urban Meyer writes, "It isn’t hard to find people who are caught up in Below the Line behavior. All you need to do is look for those whose first reaction is to blame (others), complain (about circumstances), and defend (yourself) or BCD." (We all do sometimes.)
Hans Rosling informs the Blame Instinct in Factfulness (Brilliant summary HERE). "The blame instinct is the instinct to find a clear, simple reason for why something bad has happened." We allow transition baskets; blame the players. What priority did I place on transition defense? Who is assigned to be back? How many do we send to the glass? How much did we practice transition defense? Are we tracking progress and adjusting to data?
He adds, "This instinct to find a guilty party derails our ability to develop a true, fact-based understanding of the world...blocks our learning because once we have decided whom to punch in the face we may stop looking for explanations elsewhere."
Let's shift gears to baseball and pace of play. Who should we blame? Oh, it's Tony LaRussa with a parade of pitching changes. Or Joe Maddon, who shifts players around the field. Or Bill James and Michael Lewis with Moneyball, glorifying the Greek god of Walks and rising pitch counts. Or catchers visits to the mound. Batters stepping out. Pitchers wandering around the mound. Or television advertising, with interminable breaks. We oversimplify to find a bad guy, a bad business, unfair reporting (all sides claim unfairness), or foreigners. Whatever happened to "you can't walk off the island?"
Or global CO2 emissions. How do China and India feel entitled to pollute the world?
The richest countries are the biggest polluters. "Canada's per capita CO2 emissions are still twice as high as China's and eight times as high as India's."
What about basketball? What's the problem?
- Greedy owners
- Greedy players
- Greedy agents
- Greedy NCAA
- Systemic corruption in recruiting
- Inexperienced coaches
- Unscrupulous coaches
- AAU and club teams
- Shoe companies
- Misplaced priorities in youth basketball (Winning uber alles)
- Parents (not our parents)
- Zone defense
- Selfishness
- Bad shot selection
- Analytics
- Tights and earrings (on boys)
- Charles Barkley (just kidding)
Rosling adds "Resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that:
when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking."
Stay open to finding better solutions.
Lagniappe: (excerpt from Factfulness)
“Do you know why I’m obsessed with the numbers for the child mortality rate? It’s not only that I care about children. This measure takes the temperature of a whole society. Like a huge thermometer. Because children are very fragile. There are so many things that can kill them. When only 14 children die out of 1,000 in Malaysia, this means that the other 986 survive. Their parents and their society manage to protect them from all the dangers that could have killed them: germs, starvation, violence, and so on. So this number 14 tells us that most families in Malaysia have enough food, their sewage systems don’t leak into their drinking water, they have good access to primary health care, and mothers can read and write. It doesn’t just tell us about the health of children. It measures the quality of the whole society." (The US infant mortality rate is 5.8 per 1000 live births. Compared with other OECD countries, the U.S. ranks No. 33 out of 36 countries (Figure 62). Iceland is ranked No. 1 and has the lowest rate with 0.7 deaths per 1,000 live births.)
Lagniappe 2: Justified praise for Trae Young
"A thing of beauty is a joy to behold."Trae Young Is A Ballscreen Genius | Film Room pic.twitter.com/4gfEGVWIos— Half Court Hoops (@HalfCourtHoops) October 26, 2019