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The greats never stop learning. Instinct and talent without technique just makes you reckless, like a teenager driving a powerful, high-performance vehicle. Instinct is raw clay that can be shaped into a masterpiece, if you develop skills that match your talent. That can only come from learning everything there is to know about what you do. But real learning doesn’t mean clinging to the lessons. It means absorbing everything you can and then trusting yourself to use what you know instantaneously,
In Virginia and the Middle Colonies, and farther south, there was a tendency to take the easy way out and settle for a tidewater existence. A planter could raise his crop of tobacco, and load it from his own wharf, by his mansion or farmhouse, directly onto a ship that took it to England. The same ship would bring out goods, both luxury products and basic manufactures. A planter was provided with a catalog and made his order, which was delivered the next voyage out, the ship taking his bale of tobacco in return. This was a primitive but highly convenient system, akin to barter, with everything done on credit. It eliminated the need for large market towns and thus impeded urban development. For the planter it was, again, the easy or lazy way out. But of course it operated very much to the advantage of the capitalist merchant in London, to whom the planter quickly got into debt and remained thus all his life. His heir inherited the plantation, the system, and the debts. In his letter to his half-sister, Washington’s mother, Joseph Ball gave some sound advice about the system. Rejecting the sea, he told her that a planter, if industrious, could live much better than the master of a ship. But she, and her son George, if he became a planter-farmer, must beware. “Neither must he send his Tobacco to England to be sold [there] and goods sent him; if he does, he will soon get in the merchant’s debt, and never get out again.” He advised using the market, and being patient: he must “not aim” at “being a fine gentleman before his time.” There is evidence that Washington did not exactly follow this advice to the letter. But it made him think; and he was beginning to acquire the practical habit of thinking in the long term, which was the secret of his success in life.
George Washington
Paul Johnson
I’ve told the story of Nate and me to young coaches. It’s funny. It’s entertaining. Everybody gets a kick out of it. Two guys in a basement, pizza boxes strewn all over, imagining game scenarios while scribbling all over whiteboards. It’s the hoops version of that movie A Beautiful Mind. But instead of brilliant mathematical equations, we’re drawing up sideline out-of-bounds plays. But here’s the thing. When I talk about how we made a spreadsheet of all the stuff we put on the dry-erase boards, I get asked by young coaches: Can we have that? They want the work product without doing the work. And I say, no, you’re missing the whole damn point. You have to do it yourself.
Rapture
Nick Nurse and Phil Jackson
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