Raise Your Game

Welcome to chapter #1 on Self-Awareness.

Alan tells us that THIS is the #1 virtue we need to master if we want a shot at raising our game.

KNOW THYSELF!

He offers this little quiz right after that passage above.

1. What do you do really well?
2. What do you need to improve on?
3. What is your plan for addressing #2?

Well…

What do you do really well? What can use a little work? What’s one thing you can do to Optimize?

P.S. Alan shares this BRILLIANT quote from Tony Schwartz: “We can’t change what we don’t notice.”

P.P.S. When I read the Google map metaphor, I thought of Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy’s Living Forward. Their book/philosophy is based on approaching life like a GPS system. They offer their own three questions and tell us: “The same is true when it comes to your Life Plan. It is the result of answering three powerful questions. Let’s consider them one at a time.

Question 1: How do I want to be remembered? In planning anything, the best place to begin is at the end. What outcome do you want? How do you want the story to end? How do you want to be remembered when you are gone? …

Question 2: What matters most? Maybe you have never given yourself permission to ask this question…. what’s important to you? What matters most in your life? This is a question about priorities. No one else can decide what they are for you.

Question 3: How can I get from here to where I want to be? If you are going to improve your life and realize your potential, you will have to figure out where you are now; where you want to be; and how you get from one to the other.”

That’s from Chapter #3 on Discipline.

(Note: Our first virtue in Part I was Self-Awareness. The second was Passion. Third was Discipline. Then Coachability and Confidence.)

Alan makes his point about the importance of discipline by telling us a story about Steph Curry. If you follow basketball at all, you know who Steph Curry is—one of the all-time great shooters, two-time MVP, etc. etc.

But… Once upon a time, very few people knew who Steph Curry was.

When Steph was a rising sophomore at a tiny college, Alan worked at a skills camp with him. And, he was BLOWN AWAY by his work ethic.

Guess who showed up at the gym first every morning? And worked the hardest on every.single.play? Yep. Steph. Alan says he was captivated. In “awe at his standard of excellence.”

Was he doing all that to impress someone? Nope. There was no one there to impress!! As Alan says, “He was building a monster. Just nobody knew it yet.”

Fast-forward and that discipline has paid dividends.

The theme reminds me of another world-champion: Josh Waitzkin. In The Art of Learning, he gives us a tour of his world-champion training camp and echoes Alan’s wisdom when he tells us about making our prior BEST our new BASELINE.

Here’s how he puts it: “I want to use that experience as a new baseline for my everyday capabilities. In other words, now that I have seen what real focus is all about, I want to get there all the time… So a deep mastery of performance psychology involves the internal creation of inspiring conditions.”

P.S. Another way Alan describes the building of champions via astonishing discipline is via a friend of his who called that ferocious work ethic “unseen hours. It refers to all the time and effort the public doesn’t see that lays the foundation to the success they do see.”

Reminds me of Jim Afremow’s visions of a champion in The Champion’s Mind where he tells us: “My favorite description of what excellence in the sports world looks like comes from Anson Dorrance, the legendary University of North Carolina women’s soccer coach. He was driving to work early one morning, and as he passed a deserted field, he noticed one of his players off in the distance doing extra training by herself. He kept driving, but he later left a note in her locker: ‘The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion when no one else is watching.’ The young woman, Mia Hamm, would go on to become one of the greatest players in the history of the sport.

Having a big dream—and a clear vision of what you will look like while pursuing competitive excellence—always inspires greatness. What is your dream goal? What does excellence in your game look like when you are fully dialed in and passionately pursuing your dream—becoming the best you can be in your sport? Make the description vivid and powerful enough to give you that burst of adrenaline when you need it, a burst that can only come from connecting completely with your heart’s true desire.”

P.P.S. Any time I read about the importance of having high standards, I think of John Gottman’s wisdom. Recall: He’s the guy who can predict whether a couple will divorce after watching and listening to them for just fifteen minutes. <- Wow.

In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, he tells us: “Couples who are demanding in their marriage are more likely to have deeply satisfying unions than those who lower their expectations.”

How are YOUR standards? Let’s hit them.

And make them our new baseline as we spiral up to the next-best version of ourselves!

That wonderful story, as you may have guessed, is *also* from the chapter on discipline.

Here’s the best part of that whole story. Nike flew Alan out to LA to work the first-ever Kobe Bryant Skills Academy. At the time, Kobe was the best in the world. Alan asked Kobe if he could watch him work out.

As he says, “That’s how it is in my business. Everyone can see the game, but to really learn the secrets, you have to watch the practice. It’s the difference between buying Jay-Z’s album and sitting in the studio watching him write and record one.”

So… Alan asked Kobe if he can watch his workout. Kobe says: “Sure. I’m going at four.” “But don’t we have a camp session at three thirty tomorrow afternoon?” Alan asked. “I know,” he replied. “I’m working out at four a.m.” <- :)

Then what did Kobe do? He ruthlessly HAMMERED his fundamentals. Of course, this reminds me of a BUNCH of wisdom we talk about all the time. (Have I mentioned how important consistency on the fundamentals is? ;)

In The Creativity Habit, Twyla Tharp says: “The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.”

In Spiritual Economics, Eric Butterworth tells us: “Ask the great athlete or the concert pianist or the successful actor if they arrived at the place where they need no further practice. They will tell you that the higher you climb in proficiency and public acceptance, the greater the need for practice.”

Jim Rohn calls it “The Two Easies.” In Leading an Inspired Life he tells us: “It all comes down to a philosophical phrase: the things that are easy to do are also easy not to do. That’s the difference between success and failure, between daydreams and ambitions.”

James Clear has some great wisdom on the importance of process in Atomic Habits. Like this: “The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long- term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement to continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”

Back to you. How are YOUR fundamentals? How can you step it up a notch or three?

Self-Comparison. It’s toxic if we want to cultivate virtue #5: Confidence.

A key aspect of cultivating a strong sense of trust in ourselves?

QUIT COMPARING!!

Science, of course, agrees.

Let’s invite Sonja Lyubomirsky in (yet again!) to share her wisdom on the topic. In The How of Happiness she tells us: “We found that the happiest people take pleasure in other people’s successes and show concern in the face of others’ failures. A completely different portrait, however, has emerged of a typical unhappy person—namely, as someone who is deflated rather than delighted about his peers’ accomplishments and triumphs and who is relieved rather than sympathetic in the face of his peers’ failures and undoings.”

So…

The next time you feel tempted to negatively compare yourself, consider recalling this wisdom and, rather than focus on your (supposed) deficiencies, celebrate the other person’s awesome.

P.S. Faulkner’s advice seems relevant here as well: “Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

Welcome to the introduction to Part II: Coach.

Want to be a Coach? Embody these five virtues: Vision + Culture + Servant + Character + Empowerment. Each of those qualities has its own chapter.

For now, let’s go with the most important quality: LOVE.

Here’s how The Leadership Challenge guys put it: “Of all the things that sustain a leader over time, love is the most lasting. It’s hard to imagine leaders getting up day after day, putting in the long hours and hard work it takes to get extraordinary things done, without having their hearts in it. The best-kept secret of successful leaders is love: staying in love with leading, with the people who do the work, with what their organizations produce, and with those who honor the organization by using its products and services.

Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart.”

P.S. Alan shares this gem from Tony Hsieh (founder/CEO of Zappos) in this section: “Chase the vision, not the money.”

Those are the final words of the book.

Quick context: Alan and Wojo (Steve Wojciechowski: a former Duke basketball player and current head coach at Marquette) are participating in something called “Hell on the Hill.”

-> “Organized by Jesse Itzler, the event required that we run up and down an eighty-yard hill, on a slope that averaged a forty-degree angle, 100 times. In total, it came out to over eight miles.”

Yep. That sounds like Hell on a Hill. Alan hit a wall on the 70th or so time up. He nearly quit. Then he runs alongside Wojo who told him he had only one more rep. THIRTY MORE TIMES. <- Brilliant.

Are you currently running up any hills that might feel like an endless hell? Break it down. Focus on the next rep. Get to the next telephone pole.

Let’s do this. It’s time to raise our games and give the world all we’ve got. One rep at a time!