Author Matt Haig wrote that every story is about "someone searching for something." Each basketball season informs a journey with a panoply of possibilities. Teams with mediocre talent, leadership, and coaching have different destinies than talented, well-coached clubs. The former believe the 'we're good' lie and the latter prove it.
Fire emerges at the intersection of fuel, heat, and oxygen. Analogically, players are the fuel, competition is heat, and coaching is oxygen.
And each day coaches consider "what's the right question?"
1. What's our fuel?
- "Every day is player development day." The magic comes from blended size, athleticism, and skill. Meatloaf sang it well, "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad."
- Development grows explosiveness, skill, and resilience.
- Development teaches players to become their own coaches. The players learn to ask, "how am I getting better today?"
- Great players hunger for coaching.
- Great players drag others upward with them.
2. Where's the heat?
- "Need to succeed." It's hard to admit our inner desires yet realize that 'big things come from little things."
- Turn up the heat with better habits, Atomic Habits. "When you focus on tiny increments instead, each small success motivates you to achieve other successes."
- Never allow the heat to dissipate. Clear advises about building habits, "don't miss twice." Don't miss two workouts in a row.
3. How do we give dreams oxygen?
- Positive thinking drives positive lives.
- Positivity makes us smarter (per Black Swan group CEO Chris Voss).
- Find mentors. "Mentoring is the only shortcut to excellence."
- Read. Study. Learn how to learn.
- Become a copycat. Study greatness. Find stories and lives to power your dreams, like Tolstoy's tale of meeting barbarians and their request. Told via historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
“‘But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.’"
Merry Christmas.
Lagniappe (something extra).
"Do the right thing. It's that simple. Do the right thing when the right thing is not popular. Do the right thing when no one else is around. Do the right thing when temptation tells you otherwise. Do the right thing all the time." - Nick Saban, in How Good Do You Want to Be
