Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Basketball: The GIFT, "Good Idea" Food Truck

Eat often at the GIFT, "Good Idea Food Truck." Never heard of it?

Food Trucks are accessible, inexpensive, widespread, and serve a variety of cuisines. Regrettably, the quality is uneven and patrons must research and test the merits of many to find high quality. 

Authors have written about GIFT before. You probably know or have read similar books. 

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (Robert Fulghum), Atomic Habits (James Clear), and Leadership in Turbulent Times (Doris Kearns Goodwin) are three examples from different domains. As the chef in your life kitchen, you need 'go to' entrees, side dishes, and beverages to wash everything down. 

Entrees

Excellence - Be good at what you do a lot. Basketball teams need to excel in the half court on offense and defense, manage transition, and be good at pick-and-roll among other skills. 

Generalization - Sometimes "generalists" can use analogies across disciplines to solve hard problems. David Epstein wrote about this in Range. 

Freeman Dyson wrote, "‘Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon,’ Dyson wrote in 2009. ‘They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.’"

Specialization Benefit from specialists. Teams have offensive and defensive coordinators and coaches with extra expertise in player development. It helps to know about many areas, but nobody knows everything. 

Even the best pizza chef acknowledges there are many kinds of dough, cheese, toppings, and unique creations (e.g. Korean barbecue on pizza). 

Side Dishes 

Habit creation and maintenance. Start small. As James Clear reminds us, "Establish a habit first and then improve it." You've probably heard of the 'Couch to 5K" program. Be a tracker - sleep, weight, fitness, savings, reading, whatever is important to you.

Persistence. "Don't cut corners." Coach Popovich teaches, "pound the rock." You have to hit it a hundred times until it yields. Show up and work hard day after day. 

Work-life balance. Burn out is a threat in many professions. It can drive people out of careers, destroy relationships and families, and in extreme forms lead to mental health disasters. 

Beverages 

Edit our life. "Recognize bad ideas when you see them." That means avoiding certifiably bad people and risk far out of proportion to reward. "Swimming with sharks" offers metaphorical excitement and measurable risk of 'permanent loss'. Hundreds of people have died taking 'extreme selfies'. More than one million people have died since 1999 from drug overdoses.

Maintain the equipment. There are no guarantees that seven to eight hours of sleep, better nutrition, exercise, and temperance assure health and prosperity. But the alternatives assuredly do not. 

Search for better ways. Re-search. Few ideas are novel. Ask 'what if'? What possibilities emerge along the spectrum of results? For every Bill Gates who drops out of college and emerges a titan of society, myriads fall by the wayside. Apply your growing knowledge of cognitive biases and mental models to reduce the chance of self-deception. 

Don't be too proud or stubborn to seek help. Life is a team sport. 

Lagniappe. Be authentic. 

Lagniappe 2. Someone wrote there are over 1,000 horns sets on FastDraw. Imagine!  

at