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Beat the Competition: Lessons in Personal Productivity with Shane Battier, ESPN commentator and former NBA player
Goal Setting
I’ve always been goal oriented and when I was in fourth grade I’ll never forget: I went to a basketball camp and I think it was Magic Johnson or Isiah Thomas extolled the virtues of writing your goals down. It’s really important to see your dreams. And it’s one thing to talk about them, but it’s really important to see your goals every single day. And so all I did is I went home and I wrote down on an index card I want to become an All-American basketball player and I want to make the NBA. And then I added, of course, I want to get straight A’s in school. And I taped that piece of paper on my mirror in my bathroom.
And every morning when I was brushing my teeth to go to school I looked at this piece of paper and I asked myself, “Hey Shane, are you ready on this single day – forget yesterday, forget tomorrow – on this day to get that much better, to get that much closer to these goals on this piece of paper?” And before I went to bed, brushed my teeth again I asked myself, “Hey Shane, did you get this much closer to these three goals?” And on most days the answer was yes. And the improvement that I saw just from trying to improve this much every single day was amazing. It was inspiring. There’s no question that’s a huge reason why I was able to play 13 years in the NBA and win multiple championships and really have a dream career.
Habits
Work’s a habit. Learning to work is a habit and I’m so lucky to grow up – my mother and father were both home and unbelievable examples for me. My dad worked and ran a small trucking company that hauled steel. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, sickness, bad moods he punched the clock and I saw firsthand what ethic really was. It’s showing up and doing the job, doing it to the best of your ability, going home, enjoying your family and then doing the same thing tomorrow.
I was lucky to sort of grow up in sort of the golden age of analytics as it pertains to basketball, in the age of really the emergence of big data and sports. My love for data and love for the numbers didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a process and you have to have a growth mindset and you have to go in with an open mind and say hey, this is going to be beneficial to me so it’s worth learning and making mistakes. But staying persistent on trying to learn how to use the data so it becomes instinctual. It has to become instinctual. I have to know that, you know, LeBron James is much better going to his right versus going to his left hand when he’s coming at me at 20 miles per hour on the court. And so after a while it became second nature. I was able to look at a piece of paper and instantly know what a player was, what his strength was, what his weakness was and be able to use that under stress, under duress. And was I perfect? No, I wasn’t perfect every time, but I know if I followed the data more often than not, it would mitigate my risk. That’s all I’m trying to do. That’s all I’m trying to do. Mitigate your risk and over the course of a game, a season it will pay dividends. And its work but it’s a habit worth developing.
Winning Mindsets
When I went to Duke, I went as a skinny knock kneed freshman and I left a man because of the lessons I learned from Coach K. Things like integrity. Things like commitment, responsibility, having a next play mindset. Always be able to attack the next play, whether you’re coming from failure or success with an enthusiasm and a vigor.
One of the most important things that Coach K taught us is, it’s not about wins and losses. And that’s where I think a lot of people go wrong. It’s about standard of play. It’s about representation. When you put the jersey on that has your name on the back, be proud of your name. And the only way to be proud of your name and to own whatever you’re a part of is to give more than yourself to the effort of the team. And give your spirit, give your soul and what that does in a team setting it creates amazing peer pressure that if I’m not giving my entire soul, my entire spirit, I’m letting the group down. And so look, there are probably other coaches who can draw better plays, X’s and O’s other than Coach K, but there’s no one who gets a team to play harder, smarter and more together than him, because it is about standards and living up to the standards. Wins and losses – they’ll follow. They’ll follow if your standards are high enough. It was really an amazing lesson.