Saturday, August 5, 2023

Basketball: Turn the Page to Cope with Failure

"Don't whine, don't complain, don't make excuses." - John Wooden

Everyone fails. Not everyone recovers from failure. Fill a library of failure and recovery stories.

Being a critic is easy. Achieving durable success is hard. 

Part of recovery from failure is staying present. Don't allow a prior bad play bleed into the next. Zak Boisvert says, "turnovers often bleed into defense." Coach Mike Krzyzewski exhorted, "next play."

Developing the light bulb didn't come easily for Thomas Edison. He said, "I learned 999 ways not to make a lightbulb."

Abraham Lincoln endured an almost mythologic string of personal and election losses before ultimately becoming President. Lincoln is almost as famous for melancholy as he is for leadership. 

In 1915, Winston Churchill devised sea and land attacks on Turkey at Gallipoli. Ultimately, they were disastrous and Churchill shouldered the blame. But his resolve, along with American entry into World War II, gets credited with saving western civilization against the Nazis. 

Henry Ford helped develop a major breakthrough with the assembly line. But the Edsel with its "toilet seat grille" became an industry laughingstock. Ultimately, Ford recovered to become a major automaker. 

John Wooden didn't coach an NCAA champion until his sixteenth season at UCLA. Dean Smith won an NCAA title in his twenty-first season at Carolina.  

Author Stephen King was a twenty-six year-old school teacher in rural Maine. He had sold one article for two hundred dollars. He mounted a nail on the wall for rejections. It grew into a spike. He asked the custodian what the girls' locker room was like at school and got an idea for a novel. Months later he got a check for two hundred thousand dollars. Carrie was a blockbuster. 

Master filmmaker Steven Spielberg was repeatedly rejected from the USC film school. He refused to give up on his dreams and became one of the celebrated storytellers of our age. 

“I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.” - J.K. Rowling author of the Harry Potter series

For a more comprehensive chronicle of failure and redemption, consider John Maxwell's Failing Forward. 

Failure quotes I carry around:

  • "Don't beat yourself up; there will always be someone else to do it for you."
  • "Friends stab you in the front." - Oscar Wilde
  • "Fall down seven times, get up eight." - Japanese Proverb
Lagniappe. Be uncomfortable. 


Lagniappe 2. "Basketball is a game of separation." Footwork creates separation. 
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