Climbing, Patience, Negative Thinking, Belichick, Diverse Teams
“Anyone can have a good day. But you have to be able to perform on a bad day.” - Jurgen Klopp
Good morning, coaches!
Today we have:
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Here we go!
✍️ ARTICLES
Climbing the wrong hill: Venture capitalist Chris Dixon with a great read on career/life advice and why a linear career path isn’t always ideal.
People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.
How patience and a plan shape Billy Napier’s approach at Louisiana and what it means for his football future (reply to this email if you can’t read this): I hadn’t heard of Napier before but the article goes into great detail on his approach to leading his team and being a coach.
He’s genuine and rational, a process-obsessed 42-year-old CEO who believes in “quality controlling” every choice he makes to ensure it’s the most efficient way to do it. He plans his years out to the day. He has his staff measure roster heights accurately to the quarter inch. He’s the rare combination of detail-oriented and chill.
🎙️ PODCASTS
The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos: Don’t Accentuate the Positive. This episode touches on the idea that being too positive can actually hold us back because we need to think about what can go wrong in life. Based on research, those of us who think about what can go wrong, and not just what we hope to happen, are more successful and more likely to achieve our goals. She uses the example of Michael Phelps swimming in the Olympics and having to swim with his goggles filled with water, yet still won a gold medal. [October 29, 2019–44 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Website Link
Despite what shelves of self-help books say, it turns out that negative thinking can be really, really helpful. In fact, new research is beginning to show that positive thinking, focusing only on good outcomes, can be a recipe for disaster.
💭 MISCELLANEOUS
Bill Belichick on the evolution of game planning (via November 11 Press Conf.)
It's evolved. I think if you want to go far enough, look at Sun Tzu. Look at the great generals, you exploit your strengths and attack weaknesses. That's about as fundamental as it gets. If there's something that you can do well, you want to try to do it. If there is something that your opponent is weak at, you want to try to attack it, and if you can match those up, then that's a good way of attack. Sometimes it's not as easy to get to the weaknesses as you would like because they do things to try to make it difficult for you to expose them in areas maybe that they're not as strong, whether that's schematically or personnel. Those both are, obviously, components there. The same thing with strengths. If you keep doing the same thing all the time, that makes it easier for them to stop it. If you can find a way to use your strengths without them really knowing exactly what you're doing, or you have some little bit of disguise or distraction to it, then, I think, fundamentally, that's really what you try to do. Be sound, play to your strengths and attack the opponent's weaknesses. Again, that's a much longer, detailed conversation, but at the heart of it, that's really where it starts for us every week. What do we need to stop, and what can we do, and then build it from there.
On Diversity of Thought (via Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts)
“Whether it is the forming of a group of friends or a pod at work—or hiring for diversity of viewpoint and tolerance for dissent when you are able to guide an enterprise’s culture toward accuracy—we should guard against gravitating toward clones of ourselves. We should also recognize that it’s really hard: the norm is toward homogeneity; we’re all guilty of it; and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it.”