A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
It’s vital to make things more complicated for the opponent. There are two ways you can do that to a defense: One is to have a whole bunch of plays. But the trouble there is that your offense has to deal with as much complexity as their defense does. The other way is to have less plays, and run them out of lots of formations. That way you don’t have to teach a player a new assignment every single time, just a new place to stand. Simply put: If you wanna screw with the defense, screw with formations, not plays. We also decided we were going to let our quarterback check to other plays at the line of scrimmage. Play calling is important, but the more control we could give our quarterback at the line of scrimmage, the more flexible we could be. After all, he was the one in the middle of it. We knew that he could see the defense better than we could from where we were standing. He had information from ground zero.
Swing Your Sword
Mike Leach, Bruce Feldman, Michael Lewis, and Peter Berg
One thing I have learned as a competitor is that there are clear distinctions between what it takes to be decent, what it takes to be good, what it takes to be great, and what it takes to be among the best. If your goal is to be mediocre, then you have a considerable margin for error. You can get depressed when fired and mope around waiting for someone to call with a new job offer. If you hurt your toe, you can take six weeks watching television and eating potato chips. In line with that mind-set, most people think of injuries as setbacks, something they have to recover from or deal with. From the outside, for fans or spectators, an injured athlete is in purgatory, hovering in an impotent state between competing and sitting on the bench. In my martial arts life, every time I tweak my body, well-intended people like my mother suggest I take a few weeks off training. What they don’t realize is that if I were to stop training whenever something hurt, I would spend my whole year on the couch. Almost without exception, I am back on the mats the next day, figuring out how to use my new situation to heighten elements of my game. If I want to be the best, I have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to my advantage.
The Art of Learning
Josh Waitzkin
On the most basic level, bad sentences make bad books. Poet Robert Hass taught me you can rewrite a poem by making every single line better. I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are.