Letters to a Young Athlete

Key Concepts

“You Have to Find Your Why (And It Can’t Be Fame or Money)”

“Victory gets old and unsatisfying really fast without a purpose you can be proud of. If you make anger your why, it will suck the joy out of everything you accomplish—even if you win as much as Jordan.” (p. 40)

“But here’s the thing about a good why: It can endure through the ups and downs of life, even when everything around you is falling apart. Your what can be taken away from you in an instant—your why can outlast that.” (p. 40)

“The key is to never invest your why in something external that can be taken away by a power beyond your control. It has to be deeper than winning and losing, or getting some free money to pay for college. It’s got to connect to your soul. It’s got to connect you to something bigger than yourself. It can’t be about the hardware. It’s got to be something hardwired, something infused in your DNA.” (p. 42)

“Communication Is Key”

“Because life and leadership are about communication. Communication is the most essential when the stakes are highest.” (p. 76)

“In whatever form, a leader sees the challenge ahead, knows what the members of the team need to do to meet the challenge, and knows the words or the symbols or the images that will get them where they need to be. Knowing that doesn’t just take charisma: It takes a huge amount of insight into the team members. What kinds of words motivate them, and what kinds of words turn them off? How far can they be pushed? Is this a time to pick up their spirits, or a time to get them to ratchet up the intensity? Leaders have to know all that before they find the right words.” (p. 78)

“You have to spend time with your teammates off the court—at dinner, at each other’s houses, wherever. It can’t be all business all the time, because you have to build up trust and comfort with one another so that when you do have to call them out, they know it’s coming from a place of respect. They know it’s coming from the heart. That way, problems don’t boil over. They realize, ‘This guy’s a person just like me. He struggles to get better, too, so I know where he’s coming from.’” (p. 85)

“The point is that really strong leaders know how to have hard conversations without upsetting the team dynamic. They know how to take criticism like an adult, and they know how to give criticism in a way that leads to results. They’ve learned that communicating with teammates and coaches isn’t about figuring out who to pin the blame on when things go wrong. It’s about identifying problems and getting to the root of them—about helping people understand what’s happening.” (p. 87)

“Listening is the other side of communication. It’s about actually taking time to think about what you’re being told, about taking enough time to be quiet that you can actually hear what others have to say. Listening is the underrated half of communication—there are tons of books about ‘Great Speeches of History’ and probably not any about ‘Great Listeners of History’—but it’s a skill you can develop like any other.” (p. 89)

“Sweep Away Your Ego”

“No good athlete becomes the best without wanting to be the best, in a way that’s almost unhealthy. It’s a key skill. It’s also a key danger. For as long as there has been sports, there have been young athletes discovering that the skills that made them the best at one level just won’t cut it at the next one.” (p. 94)

“You’d be surprised how long you can blame your failures on the bigger stage to bad luck, or the coach having it in for you, or your teammates not deferring to your brilliance. But if you’re humble enough to look reality in the face—to realize that you still have a huge amount of learning and growing to do—then you really do have a shot at greatness. That’s the paradox of ego: If you want to be great, you have to be honest with yourself about all the ways in which you’re not great yet.” (p. 95)

“But that’s the thing about fighting your ego: The most powerful step to defeating it is learning to see it in the mirror. Once you realize the role ego plays in holding you back, you’ve taken a huge step toward beating it.” (p. 100)

“What’s the difference between ego and confidence? Ego is a liar. It tells you you’re the greatest, regardless of what the results say—it always finds a way to spin those. Confidence is belief in your ability, in the work you’ve put in, that’s backed up by reality. Confidence is expecting good things to happen because you worked to make them happen. Ego tells you that you deserve success just because you’re you. Confidence tells you that you can reasonably expect to earn success based on how your efforts have paid off in the past. Ego tells you that you’ve already achieved all you need to achieve. Confidence is always ready for the next challenge.” (p. 106)

“Leaders Lead”

“Sure, you could say, “It’s a business. You’re supposed to be coworkers, not friends.” And that attitude can work for a while—when things are going well. But when they aren’t, when you need to level with one another about what’s going wrong and how to fix it, you’ll find that teams with that attitude don’t have what it takes. Maybe you’ve heard the expression “Nobody cares what you say until they know how much you care.” For the most part, you don’t want to listen to someone who treats you as a cog in a machine. Leaders treat their teammates like real people, not cogs—not because they’re exceptionally nice, but because they understand that that’s how you inspire people to step up.” (p. 118)

“But whichever leadership style fits you, be prepared to change. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to change as a leader over the course of my career. I tried to stay true to who I wanted to be as a player others looked up to—to possess qualities like consistency, dependability, competitiveness, positivity. But the specifics of how you’re putting those qualities into action are always changing. Even if you’re comfortable in the role you’re taking on for your team, the things that are expected of you may change as the situation around you changes. If you feel called to speak up in practice, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been pigeonholed as “the quiet guy.” In fact, if you are the quiet guy, the moment you do speak up will be powerful. Because the team will know you are serious.” (p. 119)

“Do the Work. Do. The. Work.”

“How do you become a champion? What does it take? The only answer I know, that I like, comes from Trevor Moawad, the mental skills coach who works with Russell Wilson. ‘It takes,’ he says, ‘what it takes.”’ (p. 194)

“You have to believe that if it’s possible for someone to do it, then it is possible for you to do it. That’s a really powerful idea.” (p. 194)

“That’s what hard work means. Pushing your body and mind past their limits, again and again—with no promise that you’re going to get where you want to go.” (p. 196)

“There’s no quicker way to see practice pay off than practicing the weakest part of your game. And you aren’t just practicing the skill—you’re practicing being honest with yourself about what needs work.” (p. 202)

Quotables

“One of the things the poet Rilke taught me is that part of being wise is accepting you don’t have all of the answers right now—and that’s OK. It’s OK to be full of questions. “Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language,” he wrote in Letters to a Young Poet. ‘Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.’” (p. 8)

“Pain is temporary; glory is forever. If you want to excel, you have to get used to the pain. You have to get used to exhaustion. I can’t promise you that it will ever be a comfortable feeling, but I can guarantee you that you can become familiar enough with it that you can visit that mental and physical space on your path to getting better and not have to worry that you’ll crumple under the pressure. You can’t make that pain or exhaustion stop feeling like pain or exhaustion. But you can learn to welcome them in—to say, ‘Oh, I remember you. I know what this is going to be like.’” (p. 25)

“To be great, you have to be hungry. You have to stay hungry.” (p. 45)

“Besides, the idea that you can cultivate just your body, or just your mind, is a really new and untested one in the scheme of things. For most of human history, we believed that your brain and your body were the same thing. You can’t fully develop one without developing the other.”(p. 64)

“When the stakes are low—when you’re trying to sound smart in a pointless office meeting, for instance—that’s when the BS comes out, stuff like, ‘We need to circle back and do a deep dive on optimizing our synergies.’ Everyone knows that doesn’t mean anything, but because the stakes are low, it doesn’t matter. When the stakes are high—when winning or losing comes down to knowing those other four guys on the floor have your back—communication needs to be sharp, direct, and to the point.” (p. 79)

“Leaders aren’t infallible. Part of what gives them the credibility to call their teammates out is their willingness to admit when they’re wrong.” (p. 121)

“The important thing to realize about taking care of yourself is that it’s something no one else can do for you, because no one else has the stake in it that you do.” (p. 134)

“But there’s a big difference between not liking criticism and imagining that with the right game, the right comeback, the right PR, you can make criticism go away. Once you realize that you can’t—that the more successful you get, the more the criticism will be amplified—you may be able to reach some kind of peace with it.” (p. 147)

“You want to be a great? Get ready to lose—painfully, undeniably, in front of an audience—more than pretty much anyone in any other calling.” (p. 183)

“If you want success at any level, that’s got to be your mindset. If you want the rewards and you’re not putting in the work, you’re kidding yourself. If you’re not going to do the work, then why were you even bothering with this book?” (p. 205)

“I love the way Jerry Seinfeld put it once: ‘Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with . . . it’s work, it’s exercise. Find the torture you’re comfortable with and you’ll do well.’” (p. 206)

“Being in the zone is about being completely present. But you don’t get to that state of mind without preparing for it, day in and day out. You can’t force it—but you can make room for it.” (p. 207)