Be Quick -- But Don't Hurry

“Be quick—but don’t hurry!”

Coach’s mantra. Love it.

Wooden’s championship teams were all known for their quickness. As Andy tells us, they learned to walk that razor’s edge between being QUICK (!) but not hurrying—moving right at the edge of their abilities WITHOUT losing their centeredness.

Reminds me of a phrase Todd Henry used often in Die Empty (see Notes). He referred to working with “urgency and diligence” but *not* becoming frantic.

Even Coach couldn’t articulate the precise meaning of his phrase but you can feel it.

You’re engaged. You’re stretching yourself. You’re intensely focused and moving at a quick pace.

Yet, you’re not pushing or rushing or losing your balance and getting frantic and burned out.

Can you feel it?

Which way do you tend to fall off the razor’s edge?

Too slow or too fast?

What’s 1 thing you can do to optimize?

P.S. As a sidenote, the championship Bruins teams loved the full-court press. Wooden said he didn’t run it to try to steal the ball though. His intention was to SPEED up the other team—knowing that young players already tend to go a little too fast and that, while his team could go quickly while maintaining balance, his opponents hadn’t honed that ability and would fall into hurrying and make a ton of mistakes.

Coach Wooden is perhaps the best example of letting results (in his case, NCAA championships) be the by-products of effort.

Here’s how he describes it in Wooden (see Notes): “When I was teaching basketball, I urged my players to try their hardest to improve on that very day, to make that practice a masterpiece.

Too often we get distracted by what is outside our control. You can’t do anything about yesterday. The door to the past has been shut and the key thrown away. You can do nothing about tomorrow. It is yet to come. However, tomorrow is in large part determined by what you do today. So make today a masterpiece. You have control over that.

This rule is even more important in life than basketball. You have to apply yourself each day to become a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better. Only then will you will be able to approach being the best you can be. It begins by trying to make each day count and knowing you can never make up for a lost day.”

Masterpiece days.

Getting a little better day in and day out.

THAT’s what we want to focus on.

Then we get to experience Wooden’s version of success: “Success is peace of mind that is the direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.

Furthermore, only one person can ultimately judge the level of your success—you. Think about that for a moment.

I believe that is what true success is. Anything stemming from that success is simply a by- product, whether it be the score, the trophy, a national championship, fame, or fortune. They are all by-products of success rather than success itself, indicators that you perhaps succeeded in the more important contest.

The real contest, of course, is striving to reach your personal best, and that is totally under your control. When you achieve that, you have achieved success. Period! You are a winner and only you fully know if you won.”

Full effort = full success.

How’s YOUR effort?

That’s awesome.

One defense. One out-of-bounds play. Simple offense.

Practiced over and over and over again to near-perfection.

Reminds me of Georges St-Pierre in The Way of the Fight (see Notes). He tells us: “This is how I get better. I pick small things and I practice them until they’re perfect. I have no choice, because there are two kinds of people who do martial arts: those who practice a thousand different kicks one time each, and those who practice one kick a thousand times minimum. You can guess which group I belong to.”

Which echoes Bruce Lee’s wisdom (see Notes on Striking Thoughts): “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

And then there’s Leonardo da Vinci’s gem: “Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.”

So, back to you.

Simple question: How have you complicated your life?

And, how can you simplify it?

What ONE thing could you do to simplify your life TODAY?

P.S. Speaking of ONE Things… Gary Keller’s great book The ONE Thing (see Notes) captures the essence of simplicity. Here’s how he puts it: “When you want the absolute best chance to succeed at anything you want, your approach should always be the same. Go small.

‘Going small’ is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. It’s a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It’s realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.

The way to get the most out of your work and your life is to go as small as possible…

When you go as small as possible, you’ll be staring at one thing. And that’s the point.”

Lots of goodness in there.

First, peaks and valleys are inherently part of the human experience.

We will never (!) get to a place where we’re *always* happy. Period.

Our highs may (and hopefully will) get higher and our lows may (and hopefully will!) get higher, but there will still be highs and lows.

The trick is to not let those moods swing to extremes.

The trick to that? (Well, at least ONE of the tricks?)

Fundamentals. Which is why THIS Micro Class may be the most important one I ever do.

When I read this Idea I had a flashback to 15 years ago when I was running my first business, eteamz. We had recently won the Anderson School at UCLA (go Bruins!!) business plan competition and hired a recent JD/MBA former Westpoint grad + Army Ranger/Military Intelligence Officer named Kelly Perdew who became our head of business development and my right-hand guy.

We shared an office in our Westwood HQ (yes, we had a ping-pong table and dart board in there—hah!). As with any start-up, some days things were going really well and other days they weren’t. In fact, some HOURS would seem to oscillate between the two. (Laughing.)

We got to the point where after a phone call discussing a potential deal or investment lead one of us would just walk up to the white board and write a happy face or a sad face. Then an up arrow or a down arrow. Too funny.

I vividly remember Kelly reminding me (and both us) that “Nothing is ever as good as it seems or bad as it seems.”

So true. And a key idea to have in mind if we want to enjoy the process of managing the peaks and valleys.

P.S. A few years later (after we’d raised $4m+ of venture capital together and sold the biz to a company that went public), it was fun to watch Kelly win Season 2 of The Apprentice. :)

Coach spent HOURS preparing for *practices.*

How’s your preparation?

Again, what’s one thing you could do to dial that in?

If you haven’t already, spend some time (hours?) mapping out your masterpiece days—with a special emphasis on how to make sure you integrate your fundamentals with a special emphasis on how you integrate your #1 non-negotiable self-care habit. :)

→ ‘No written word, no spoken plea, can teach our youth what they should be. Nor all the books on all the shelves: It’s what the teachers are themselves.’

Reminds me of Emerson (see Notes) who told us: “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

We talk about this a lot and it’s kinda obvious but let’s pause and actually think about it for a moment. We can tell our kids or our students/colleagues/team/spouse/etc. what we’d like to see from them but we must DEMONSTRATE the qualities. That’s, of course, where the power is.

This is especially obvious to me these days as our son is a couple weeks away from three years old. He does EVERYTHING we do. It’s almost surreal. And exciting as a reminder of this powerful truth.

What change do you want to see in the (+ your) world? Are you being that change?

→ “But being a teacher also meant breaking things down to their basic fundamental components, and then making them second nature by repetition.”

Back to the fundamentals. (AGAIN! :)

John Wooden is THE embodiment of the need to focus here. He tells us: “I believe in the basics: attention to, and perfection of, tiny details that might be commonly overlooked. They may seem trivial, perhaps even laughable to those who don’t understand, but they aren’t. They are fundamental to your progress in basketball, business, and life. They are the difference between champions and near champions.

For example, at the first squad meeting each season, held two weeks before our first actual practice, I personally demonstrated how I wanted players to put on their socks each and every time: Carefully roll the socks down over the toes, ball of the foot, arch and around the heel, then pull the sock up snug so there will be no wrinkles of any kind.”

So… How are YOUR fundamentals?! As philosopher Tom Morris recently described to me in an interview: Are you putting up a tent or a tower? If a tent, you don’t need a foundation. If a tower, you better have a strong one. Same with our lives.