Adam Grant's Think Again explores ideas on flawed and better thinking. I highly recommend it.
Humility drives progress.Don Meyer taught core values - PUSHT - passion, unity, servant leadership, humility, and thankfulness. I think of PUSHT as "push through" adversity. We've all heard the expressions, "stay hungry, stay humble" and "thinking less about yourself doesn't mean thinking less of yourself."
Aesop's fable 'The Tortoise and the The Hare' reminds us to value the grind, staying engaged. The tortoise stayed humble and ironically kept going and going and going.
Indiana Jones knew humility.
Dean Smith's quote informed humility, "a lion never roars after the kill."
The Grant graph from Think Again depicts how humility helps spawn curiosity and how that precedes discovery. Ask key questions.
- "What if?"
- "What does our team need now?"
- "What am I specifically doing today to improve?"
- "How can we score?"
- "How do we limit our opponent from scoring?"
Anyone professing to know all the answers can't be trusted. Learners know we are 'works in progress'.
Humility drives us to do more, to become more. Humility underlies our process, accepting that better habits make us better people. That echoes a James Kerr theme in Legacy, "better people make better All-Blacks."
Benjamin Franklin included humility as the last and thirteenth on his list of core values. He acknowledged that achieving humility was tough, "as if I did, I surely would be proud of it."
Adam Grant points out in Think Again that arrogance is the opposite of humility. He quotes blogger Tim Urban who wrote, "Arrogance equals ignorance plus conviction." Discipline is more important than conviction. Discipline binds productive habits.
Our core basketball values are teamwork, improvement, and accountability (commitment to high standards). Humility backstops all.
Teamwork - I need others to make the team better.
Improvement - Do more and become more.
Accountability - How I work and play impacts everyone.
Grant shares a belief/tools matrix in Think Again. Where are we?
Understand that belief varies by situation. Coaching situations are unalike. You might have "confident humility" to coach high school basketball but be unfit to coach another sport at any level. Clint Eastwood humbly said, "a man has to know his limitations."
Humility functions as a tool to keep us vigilant in search of truth.
Lagniappe. Work on our non-dominant hand.