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Thursday, October 2, 2025

Basketball and Writing Are Both Art

"Be so good they can't ignore you." - Steve Martin

"The problem with the Lone Genius myth is twofold. For starters, it paints a warped picture in which most geniuses just so happen to be dead white men. Think Einstein, Picasso, or Mozart. It also excludes the partners, collaborators, mentors, benefactors and influences who made the work of these men possible. It depicts creativity as an antisocial activity, when in reality, it's almost always a result of an ecology of talent." - from the Show Your Work summary

Writing 'shows our work'. It doesn't show the life experiences and reading that underpinned it. Make our work reveal those and provide self-discovery more than self-promotion. Most coaches can't show their work. 

Dumpster diving is essential to being an artist, even with a figurative dumpster. Mine have been coaching clinics, used bookstores with dog-eared paperbacks, and lots of YouTube video. Somewhere after Popovich's "Figure it out," I realized that growth isn't adopting coaching methods - it's finding what contradictions you can live with. 

Warren Buffett tells the world how he invests, but I remember finishing The Snowball and knowing that I could memorize every page and still not be Buffett. Coach K can describe his drills, but that doesn’t make us him. At best, it makes us a little more ourselves.

That gap between knowledge and identity taunted me in my early coaching years. I’d pile up notes, try to do too much, and inevitably the team played confused. My daughters said I picked too many kids with ADD. I thought it was the coaching. I started to recognize when I coached badly - and that began a step toward coaching better. Simplicity comes with experience.

The more practices I ran, the more mistakes I could own and adjust. Rushdie calls it the shift from “creative imagination” to “critical imagination.” For me, it was the shift from scribbling plays to learning how to edit, prune, and teach them.

"Repetitions make reputations." Writers improve by writing. Coaches have to coach. Consider volunteering as an assistant. Ask experienced coaches if you can watch their practice. 

It would be fascinating to hear great coaches discuss their coaching arc. 

  • "Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment."
  • "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." 
  • "No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future." - GE executive Ian Wilson, via James Clear

We discuss player development far more than we discuss coaching development. People forget that John Wooden won his first title at UCLA in his sixteenth season. Overnight success is more myth than reality.
The best books inform useful information on every page. Yuval Noah Harari books like Sapiens or 21 Lessons for the 21st Century are slow reads because they're packed with information and speculation. The best coaches have a wealth of knowledge, the perspective to use it, and the connection with players to apply it. Look within the game to see what both coaches want to accomplish. 
Lagniappe. "Pound the rock."  
Lagniappe 2. Coach K on defense...


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