As the host of the Hoop Heads Podcast I’ve talked to coaches all over the country about what makes them, their players, and ultimately their teams successful. One theme that I hear over and over again is “hard work”. Every coach we’ve interviewed has woven hard work into the stories they’ve shared. It might be a story about one of their players, “His work ethic set him apart,” or about their team , ”We brought energy and effort to practice every day,” or themselves, “I never thought I’d be where I am today, I just tried to be the best I could be wherever I was at the moment.”
There is a great lesson in the stories our coaches have shared. I think it is summed up very well in this quote by James Clear from his book “Atomic Habits.
“It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”
No one can control where they start the process of becoming…something, whatever that something might be. Some players are born with more genetic tools to work with than others. That may give them an advantage, but over time as Clear says, it is the trajectory that matters. No matter where you start in comparison to others, you should focus on making hard work a habit. When you work hard it is possible to make up a lot of ground over time. The more time you have, the more your trajectory matters and the more hard work you put in, the more likely you are to see improved performance. As a player, you can’t improve that much by working hard for a week, but you improve A LOT by working hard for a year. I previously wrote about the argument of the growing heap and how we as humans tend to overstate what we can get done in short time periods and vastly understate what we can get done over long time periods. A little bit of hard work or slacking off doesn’t seem to matter for one day, but when we put 365 days of working hard or slacking off together it matters a whole lot.
The lesson to take away is this, it doesn’t matter where you are today in your playing or coaching career. What matters is that you are committed to making hard work a habit. When working hard becomes a core value in your life, you’ve taken an important step to putting yourself on the path to success. Stop worrying about where you are right now, or worse yet, how you compare to others. Instead, focus on making your trajectory of improvement steeper by building great habits today that will carry you to a more successful tomorrow. Any great coach will tell you as I’ve written before, “Success without hard work is a myth.”