To find our niche, expand our horizons. Catch more fish by casting a wider net. Learn from the wisest from other domains, like Vinad Khosla of Khosla Ventures. Khosla, a venture capitalist, informs skillsets, growth strategies, risk, and directness. Here are annotated quotes:
"The skillset is one of first optimism...with a healthy dose of paranoia." Optimism aids performing under pressure. Remember the "COTE of arms - confidence, optimism, tenacity, enthusiasm." Everyone around us may not want success for our team or us.
"So it's about these outliers and having the optimism to go after them." Average players mostly get average results. Extreme success needs talent found and grown.
"My willingness to fail is what allows me to succeed." Fear of failure holds people back. Sometime fear of success limits us.
"Returns come as a side effect of some change." Forces favor the status quo. Wooden said, "no progress occurs without change, but not all change is progress." Balancing change to achieve progress is a challenge. Expose ourselves to different mentors, voices, and approaches to raise our game.
"I pick the entrepreneur...if you have the wrong plan, the great entrepreneur will fix it." Coaching matters.
"You're relying on the team to keep iterating, keep improving." Company building and team building align to achieve excellence.
"Team building is one of the key characteristics of an entrepreneur." Team building is a challenge across domains in business or sports. Agendas exist at many levels.
"What is the underlying innovation?" Teams succeed because they have a plan and develop players who understand the plan, buy in, and have the skill and will to implement.
"40 or 50 percent of startups in Silicon Valley have immigrant cofounders." Coaches aren't stamped out with cookie cutters. Great coaches are young, old, women, men, and arise from different backgrounds and experiences.
"Learn how a startup works...don't join a venture firm." Coaching requires mentoring. Get experience as an assistant, learn your craft, and move up.
"I'm most proud of my relationship with my kids...and I've become a role model for young people." What makes you proud of your coaching experience?
"Most people lie very often...I learned that being direct helps people more than being polite...prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness." Khosla describes himself as being direct, unwilling to sugar coat problems or evaluations. He says he wouldn't work well in government because of that directness. Lying to ourselves self-sabotages. "I'll take care of that tomorrow."
"Go for higher risk, higher consequences...reduce risk make the consequences of success relatively inconsequential." Change the world through bold efforts. Developing a few exceptional players, possession enders, produces bigger results.
"More money is made by pioneering uncharted territory and thinking contrarian." Conventional approaches yield ordinary results. Extraordinary results require doing things differently than other people. How do we teach players to defeat pressure? What is our priority in player development? Teach players to separate and finish.
"We're in this other business of company building." Our youth program hasn't closely coordinated with the high school program. I believe in player development, especially when players on our middle school team don't always attend the local high school. Even if the high school plays a considerable amount of zone defense, I prioritize man defense at the developmental level.
Takeaways:
- Grow your skillset.
- Be willing to fail.
- Conventional thinking gets conventional results.
- Leaders excel at team building and individual development.
- Prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness.
Lagniappe (something extra). Questions and answers for players:
- What are your GO TO and COUNTER moves?
- What is your offseason improvement plan? Be specific.
- How are you implementing your plan TODAY?
- Write your plan.
- Track your results.