Basketball, unlike football with its prescribed routes, is an improvisational game, similar to jazz. If someone drops a note, someone else must step into the vacuum and drive the beat that sustains the team.
Fall down seven times. Stand up eight. JAPANESE PROVERB.
As a leader your job is to do everything in your power to create the perfect conditions for success by benching your ego and inspiring your team to play the game the right way. But at some point, you need to let go and turn yourself over to the basketball gods. The soul of success is surrendering to what is.
The way you do anything is the way you do everything. TOM WAITS.
There’s a Zen saying I often cite that goes, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” The point: Stay focused on the task at hand rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.
Edwin Markham’s “Outwitted”: He drew the circle that shut me out – Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in!
Suzuki had just finished giving a talk to a group of Zen students when someone in the audience said, “You’ve been talking about Buddhism for nearly an hour, and I haven’t been able to understand a thing you said. Could you say one thing about Buddhism I can understand?” After the laughter died down, Suzuki replied calmly, “Everything changes.
When we called time-out with twenty-five seconds to go,” he re-called, “we went into the huddle and Phil said, ‘Michael, I want you to take the last shot,’ and Michael said, ‘You know, Phil, I don’t feel comfortable in these situations. So maybe we ought to go in another direction.’ Then Scottie said, ‘You know, Phil, Michael said in his commercial that he’s been asked to do this twenty-six times and he’s failed. So why don’t we go to Steve.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. JOSEPH CAMPBELL.
It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy. STEVE JOBS.
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.
To inspire the players, I adapted a quote from Walt Whitman and taped it on their lockers before the first game of the playoffs, against the Miami Heat. “Henceforth we seek not good fortune, we are ourselves good fortune”.
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. THE BUDDHA.
Management guru Stephen Covey tells this old Japanese tale about a samurai warrior and his three sons: The samurai wanted to teach his sons about the power of teamwork. So he gave each of them an arrow and asked them to break it. No problem. Each son did it easily. Then the samurai gave them a bundle of three arrows bound together and asked them to repeat the process. But none of them could. “That’s your lesson,” the samurai said. “If you three stick together, you will never be defeated.
Albert Einstein once described his rules of work: “One: Out of clutter, find simplicity. Two: From discord, find harmony. Three: In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated,” he said. “All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects.
The master nodded. “To hear the unheard,” he said, “is a necessary discipline to be a good ruler. For only when a ruler has learned to listen closely to the people’s hearts, hearing their feelings uncommunicated, pains unexpressed, and complaints not spoken of, can he hope to inspire confidence in the people, understand when something is wrong, and meet the true needs of his citizens.
The book I selected for him was Corelli’s Mandolin, a novel set on a small Greek island occupied by the Italian army during World War II. During the course of the story, the islanders have to accept the fact that they no longer control their own destiny and must come together and adapt to the new reality. In the end, they win by losing.
The Lakotas’ concept of teamwork was deeply rooted in their view of the universe. A warrior didn’t try to stand out from his fellow band members; he strove to act bravely and honorably, to help the group in whatever way he could to accomplish its mission.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated,” he said. “All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.