US3 Homework: Ball Striking & Finishing

Below are videos I created in 2012 to help players improve their ball striking and finishing:

Ball Striking

Inside of the Foot Finishing

Shooting on the Dribble

Crossing & Finishing

US3 Homework: Passing

Below are videos I created in 2012 to help players improve their passing:

1 & 2 Touch Passing

Receiving Across Your Body

Turning

Driven Balls

US3 Homework: Dribbling

Below are videos I created in 2012 to help players improve their dribbling:

Cuts 

Attacking Moves

Vs

Shake & Bake

My Thoughts And Prayers Are With You

From Scott Steven's sermon at Northway Church this morning: "'My thoughts and prayers are with you' has become the spiritualized way of abandoning the responsibility of being involved in other people's lives and trying to meet their brokenness with the love of God."

Is The Patriots' Secret Weapon Their Character Coach? By Lorenzo Reyes

Here's a good article on the New England Patriot's 'character coach,' Jack Easterby. A few lines from the article:

“Character and the kind of people you hire is something that our country is in desperate need to get back to evaluating. Unfortunately, sometimes it matters most when we count it the least. And when we evaluate it the least, it matters most. It’s tough, but we have seen a lot of businesses and industries fall because of a lack of character."

“I just think that love wins. Communication with others wins. Servanthood wins. That’s why when we went through some of the stuff we went through earlier this year, it was a conversation, not a judgment."

“My role is to simply serve. To help them create healthier relationships, healthier viewpoints, so that they can become the kind of people they want. Doing that would make them more sustainable in just about everything.”

What Drives Winning: Brad Stevens

I've posted content from What Drives Winning in the past. Led by Brett Ledbetter, "What Drives Winning is an conversation on how to repurpose sport to build character." I'd especially recommend the videos; every one is gold. Below are all the videos featuring Brad Stevens, head coach of the Boston Celtics:

A Conversation with Brad Stevens & Geno Auriemma: Part I

A Conversation with Brad Stevens & Geno Auriemma: Part II

A Conversation with Brad Stevens & Geno Auriemma: Part III

A One-on-One Conversation with Brad Stevens: Part I

A One-on-One Conversation with Brad Stevens: Part II

A One-on-One Conversation with Brad Stevens: Part III

My Favorite Lines: Champions By Daniel Chambliss

Below are a few of my favorite lines from Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmer by Daniel Chambliss. You can find all my notes HERE.

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“They become champions by doing what needs to be done, by doing everything right, by concentrating on all the silly details that others overlook. What makes them champions is the knowledge -- and action following from that knowledge -- that champions are only real people, not gods, and that all it takes to be a champion is to do what champions do.” - p. 14

“The difference, what makes Schubert and a few others remarkable, is not their knowledge, not something that could be learned from a book, symposium, or clinic, but simply their willingness to do
what is necessary. All the ‘little’ things Schubert began in his first summer at Mission mattered.” - p. 32

“He attracted others who wanted to become great and were willing to pay the price.” - p. 37

“Going to the beach is fine, but if you want to be on this team, you have to come to practice. You see
these guys? They want to be national champions, and as a team we want to be national champions. If you want to be one, you can train with us. If you don’t, you can train somewhere else.” - p. 61

“I just came here to get more guts.” - p. 69

“This is an ‘heroic’ conceit -- a literary device, basically -- and it actually does a terrible injustice to the athletes, for the heroic conceit mystifies excellence, removing it from the routines of daily life where it must, each day, be lived; it looks back over years and years of small events and tries to explain them in a quick phrase: ‘a career of excellence,’ ‘incredible dedication,’ ‘the will to win.’ So it fails, finally to do justice to the drab routine of athletic training, and it presents dedication, too, as a gift -- as something that one day you just ‘have’ (like ‘talent’). In fact, world-class athletes get to the top level by making a thousand little decisions every morning and night. If you make the right choice on each of these -- decide to get up and go to practice, decide to work hard today, decide to volunteer to do an extra event to help you team -- then others will say you ‘have’ dedication. But it is only the doing of those little things, all taken together, that makes dedication. Great swimmers aren’t made in the long run; they are made every day.” - p. 94

“Hard training was the key to success; if the preparation was right, the performance would follow.” - p. 114

“There was no room for being ‘cool,’ for staying even a little bit detached.” - p. 172

“[Meagher] had become excellent, she believed, by doing fairly ordinary things consistently and with care. She was better than most swimmers, she thought, because she worked hard and enjoyed it … and because of a whole series of mundane habits she had developed over the years.” - p. 200

“Doing is the only thing that counts. The truth is simple: Most swimmers choose everyday not to do the little things. They choose, in effect, not to win. They say, ‘I could do this workout if I wanted to’ … In some sense, everyone ‘could’ win the Olympic Games, but ‘could’ doesn’t count. The gold medal is reserved for those who do.” - p. 215

Complainers By Rudy Francisco

"Complainers" by Rudy Francisco is a spoken-word poem performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: 

"Remember that every year two million people die of dehydration so it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or half empty, there’s water in the cup. Drink it and stop complaining."

High Standards By Jeff Bezos

Below is an excerpt from Jeff Bezos' annual letter to Amazon shareholders. It's very good.

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Intrinsic or Teachable?

First, there’s a foundational question: are high standards intrinsic or teachable? If you take me on your basketball team, you can teach me many things, but you can’t teach me to be taller. Do we first and foremost need to select for “high standards” people? If so, this letter would need to be mostly about hiring practices, but I don’t think so. I believe high standards are teachable. In fact, people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread. And though
exposure works well to teach high standards, I believe you can accelerate that rate of learning by articulating a few core principles of high standards, which I hope to share in this letter.

Universal or Domain Specific?
Another important question is whether high standards are universal or domain specific. In other words, if you have high standards in one area, do you automatically have high standards elsewhere? I believe high standards are domain specific, and that you have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest. When I started Amazon, I had high standards on inventing, on customer care, and (thankfully) on hiring. But I didn’t have high standards on operational process: how to keep fixed problems fixed, how to eliminate defects at the root, how to inspect processes, and much more. I had to learn and develop high standards on all of that (my colleagues were my tutors).

Understanding this point is important because it keeps you humble. You can consider yourself a person of high standards in general and still have debilitating blind spots. There can be whole arenas of endeavor where you may not even know that your standards are low or non-existent, and certainly not world class. It’s critical to be open to that likelihood.

Recognition and Scope
What do you need to achieve high standards in a particular domain area? First, you have to be able to recognize what good looks like in that domain. Second, you must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be (how much work it will take) to achieve that result – the scope.

Let me give you two examples. One is a sort of toy illustration but it makes the point clearly, and another is a real one that comes up at Amazon all the time.

Perfect Handstands
A close friend recently decided to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand. No leaning against a wall. Not for just a few seconds. Instagram good. She decided to start her journey by taking a handstand workshop at her yoga studio. She then practiced for a while but wasn’t getting the results she wanted. So, she hired a handstand coach. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but evidently this is an actual thing that exists. In the very first lesson, the coach gave her some wonderful advice. “Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.” Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards. To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be – something this coach understood well.

Six-Page Narratives
We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.

In the handstand example, it’s pretty straightforward to recognize high standards. It wouldn’t be difficult to lay out in detail the requirements of a well-executed handstand, and then you’re either doing it or you’re not. The writing example is very different. The difference between a great memo and an average one is much squishier. It would be extremely hard to write down the detailed requirements that make up a great memo. Nevertheless, I find that much of the time, readers react to great memos very similarly. They know it when they see it. The standard is there, and it is real, even if it’s not easily describable.

Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.

Skill
Beyond recognizing the standard and having realistic expectations on scope, how about skill? Surely to write a world class memo, you have to be an extremely skilled writer? Is it another required element? In my view, not so much, at least not for the individual in the context of teams. The football coach doesn’t need to be able to throw, and a film director doesn’t need to be able to act. But they both do need to recognize high standards for those things and teach realistic expectations on scope. Even in the example of writing a six-page memo, that’s teamwork. Someone on the team needs to have the skill, but it doesn’t have to be you. (As a side note, by tradition at Amazon, authors’ names never appear on the memos – the memo is from the whole team.)

Benefits of High Standards
Building a culture of high standards is well worth the effort, and there are many benefits. Naturally and most obviously, you’re going to build better products and services for customers – this would be reason enough! Perhaps a little less obvious: people are drawn to high standards – they help with recruiting and retention. More subtle: a culture of high standards is protective of all the “invisible” but crucial work that goes on in every company. I’m talking about the work that no one sees. The work that gets done when no one is watching. In a high standards culture, doing that work well is its own reward – it’s part of what it means to be a professional.

And finally, high standards are fun! Once you’ve tasted high standards, there’s no going back.

So, the four elements of high standards as we see it: they are teachable, they are domain specific, you must recognize them, and you must explicitly coach realistic scope. For us, these work at all levels of detail. Everything from writing memos to whole new, clean-sheet business initiatives. We hope they help you too.