Basketball and Business, How 100 Free Throws Can Illustrate Success.
I regularly incorporate mental and physical challenges into my day to day life because I believe like anything else, perseverance, personal accountability and resilience can be improved with practice. I also use this as a valuable tool for when I feel like I am letting myself slip with my own personal accountability and maybe not being as productive as I should be.
One particular night this week, I was working late, and thought I would go down the road to shoot the basketball and clear my head. It was a very cool, clear night and a little bit of exercise at 11pm was the ticket.
After a few shots, just mucking around on my own, I set myself the challenge of hitting 100 free throws before I left the park.
For any basketballer worth their salt, anything over 20mins is a frustrating day on the court, to hit 100. At around the 15 minute mark I had hit exactly 20 Free throws and missed countless others!
My hoodie was off. I was racing around chasing my missed shots, simultaneously trying to teach myself how to shoot better, trying to stifle my frustration, and trying to replicate good shots. More often than not, I was failing. Nonetheless, I thought I would be able to get the 100 done within an hour, so at the 20 shot mark, I set myself an additional goal, to get it done within an hour.
I had already set a stopwatch when I started shooting, so I had the timer going and I set about seeing what I could do.
I had made made my first two shots of the night one after the other, and then proceeded to miss about 20 in a row, and this pattern continued basically through the entire 100, which prompted me to think about how similar this small challenge was to running a business.
After 10 years of starting and running my own businesses and helping people run theirs, there is a lot to learn from setting a challenge of 100 free throws when you aren’t good at them.
So I guess comparing the late-night activities of a park-dwelling weirdo shooting a basketball, to the ups-and-downs of entrepreneurial life lead me to these wonderful revelations.
Lesson 1: Practice challenges. Things that are hard for you to do. (I am terrible at shooting a basketball) Get used to building resilience finishing tasks that don’t come easily to you. Often when you are required to be all the moving parts of a startup (or at least have a hand in it all), its tempting to do the easy/fun stuff and avoid the challenging aspects, which can quickly get too much for you and cost you opportunity down the track.
Lesson 2: One or two quick wins doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be followed up by more wins. Success in business, philanthropy and even sport is more about how you handle yourself when faced with adversity than how you handle yourself when faced with a clear run of wins. The first two shots of the whole night I made in succession. Then I missed, again and again, and again. A run of good shots doesn’t mean that you are home and hosed, it simply means you are having a good run. Likewise, a run of bad shots doesn’t mean you are doomed. I like to separate my attachment from feelings of winning or losing from the day to day operations of the business (each individual free throw) and concentrate on the end game (the 100 shots). By doing this I don’t get overly excited from a good run, and I don’t get overly discouraged from a bad run. The important thing is to get to 100 shots, and the only way to get there is to remain composed and keep going back to the free throw line to make them.
Lesson 3: Delayed gratification. The goal is to shoot 100 free throws, so before trick shots, resting and mucking around take place, we need to make sure that we finish the 100 shots. You earn your down time in life, business and on the field. You get a breather when you have achieved what you set out to achieve, not when you feel like the clock tells you to have a break. I am not immune to wanting to horse around and have fun, but when a goal is set, you have to keep going back to that free throw line and making the shots. In business it can be easy to get carried away and do the ‘fun’ stuff before you’ve really earned it. Sometimes you just have to be locked away in a room with spreadsheets and emails before you get to go to fancy dinners and flying around the country. Finish what you set out to do first. Trick shots second.
Lesson 4: Honesty and Accountability. I like to do these challenges on my own. When there is no one there to make sure I practice building accountability only to myself. It is so easy to call it a day early, to lie and tell everyone I did 100 when I didn’t or did it faster than I did it. I am very competitive and not being able to beat my own challenge is very frustrating. I would much rather be saying I shot the 100 in 59 minutes than the 1:03 that I actually shot it in. But integrity in all things starts with yourself, you cannot pick and choose when you will act with integrity. Owning your goals and holding yourself accountable when no-one else is around is a vital skill towards achieving success!!
The trick is to embark on challenges that are tough for you, both mentally and physically. Working on motivating yourself to stay true to a task and hold yourself accountable when no-one is watching is invaluable when it comes to work.
-As a little aside, after resetting the clock on my own productivity, I have since lifted my own performance at work at Odin Sports and the #JBNProject back up to where it needed to be after a lull of a day or two.
Try it yourself and let me know what you did and what you think! For video of my shocking abilities, you can check the VLOG out here and let me know what you think.
Thanks for Reading!
