Saturday, March 30, 2024

Basketball: "The Psychology of Money" and Basketball

Learn across domains and apply to sport and life. Morgan Housel wrote the bestselling The Psychology of Money. Some lessons apply to our lives and our game. Let's explore. 

1. "We all think we know how the world works. But we’ve all only experienced a tiny sliver of it." 

Basketball is an enormous discipline. We can't know or use everything. Avoiding bad choices (turnovers, fouls, bad shots, missed assignments) increases our chances of success. Success follows hard work to build skill, learn the game, develop physicality and resilience. 

2. "We prefer simple stories, which are easy but often devilishly misleading."

The stories get told different ways. Some say Wooden's character and teaching transformed UCLA. Some argue that players like Alcindor and Walton separated the Bruins. Other argue Sam Gilbert made UCLA. Everything matters. 

3. "There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need."

Identify what is 'wealth' in our lives and hang onto it. Our families and our reputation are wealth for many of us. Work-life balance is hard. 

4.  "The most powerful and important book should be called Shut Up And Wait."

Flanking the top of Wooden's Pyramid of Success are FAITH and PATIENCE. If we prefer, it's BELIEF and TIME. 

5. "Getting money is one thing. Keeping it is another." 

Success is elusive. Maintaining consistency and 'sustainable competitive advantage' is harder. "The wind blows hardest at the top of the mountain." 

6. “Your kids don’t want your money (or what your money buys) anywhere near as much as they want you. Specifically, they want you with them.“

What sacrifices are worth it? "In his book Go Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they learned from decades of life experience. He wrote: No one-not a single person out of a thousand-said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want."

7. "What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does-especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.”

Many of you have seen the movie Field of Dreams. There's a scene where Kevin Costner asks James Earl Jones, "what do you want?" Know what you want. 

8. "Savings without a spending goal gives you options and flexibility, the ability to wait, and the opportunity to pounce." 

Balance action and patience. No matter how much you practice, sacrifice, or study, you are going to need to have rest and recovery. 

9. "It’s hard to wake up in the morning telling yourself you have no clue what the future holds, even if it’s true."

With the advent of NIL and the Transfer Portal going full bore, nobody knows the future. Accept that and do our best with what we have. 

10. “The four most dangerous words in investing are, it’s different this time.”

The greatest coach alive won't have a perfect track record of development or winning. That's because we work with people who have different priorities and goals. It's why "overnight solutions" like weight-loss drugs are popular. Simple is not easy. Change is hard.

11. " It’s my margin of safety. The future may be worse than in the past, but no margin of safety offers a 100% guarantee."

Make our best judgments in planning, but know that certainty doesn't exist with life plans. 

12. "Market returns are never free and never will be. They demand you pay a price, like any other product."

To become a trained medical subspecialist, after high school I invested four years in college, four years in medical school, and six years of postgraduate medical training. That's fourteen years of education AFTER high school. That's not heroic or brilliant, it's reality. It's Isiah Thomas being upset with Larry Bird because some thought Bird worked and Thomas was born great. Everyone aspiring to success does the work, again and again. 

13. "The common answer here is that people are greedy, and greed is an indelible feature of human nature."

"Greed" is the triad of minutes, role, and recognition. It is who we are, who our players are, who their families are. There's a finite amount to go around. You have to fight and claw for what you want. 

14. "The bigger the gap between what you want to be true and what you need to be true to have an acceptable outcome, the more you are protecting yourself from falling victim to an appealing financial fiction."

Shrink the gap between expectations and reality. That can mean lowering expectations or building skill, knowledge, and resilience. Disappointments happen when expectations and reality diverge widely. "But I expected to start this season." That might be true, but others outworked you, outperformed you. 

"Money" is one representation of wealth. But wealth and money aren't the same. 

Lagniappe. 

Lagniappe 2. Slip and score.  

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