From Scrub to Hooper: Methods For Climbing Mastery Curves
I hated basketball as a kid.
In fact, most sports didn’t jive with my younger self — as a spastic kid with an excess of energy, I could hardly stop talking long enough to breathe. I remember playing basketball when I was ten years old in a low-level recreational league. I used to hide behind the defenders so our point guard, Richie Kurts, couldn’t beam a pass at me. I hardly ever scored (which might not surprise you now that you know I was actively hiding behind other players) and never really gained any traction in the sport. I was scared of the spotlight and I avoided it all costs.
My parents, unsure of how to drain me of my excess energy so I wasn’t always a Tasmanian tornado, decided to throw me in a pool and enroll me on a local swim team. And it worked like a charm. I finally chilled out. Swimming was my go-to sport up through college, but as most retired swimmers are well aware (also known as swammers), it’s incredibly difficult to jump back in a cold, foreboding pool after grinding out laps for countless years. For me, and many other swammers, the pool is synonymous with pain.
So, after watching a ton of basketball with friends towards the end of college, I revisited the sport with a renewed sense of interest and devotion. Instead of shying away from how terrible I was, I dove in and started to enjoy the process of methodically progressing across a multitude of microscopic skills that would hopefully form into a legitimate basketball player one day. The beauty of basketball slowly started to dawn on me — the rhythm, movements, coordination, repetition, explosiveness, and most importantly, the sound of the net swishing behind a flawless shot. I was hooked.
But improvement of any kind didn’t happen overnight.
In fact, it took years for me to notice even a modicum of a difference in my skillsets. My ball-handling skills were completely non-existent, my shot was painfully inconsistent, and the only thing I had going for me was my defensive persistence. I was awkward and clumsy on the court, to the point where I felt out of place. But my burgeoning obsession never wavered. I hung tight and continued to show up to the courts every single day.
I became obsessive about this one workout which consisted of doing five to six sets of twenty made-shots (makes). Each group of twenty makes were comprised of different ranges, a varied selection of moves, and fluctuated in their intensity (some involved explosive movements while others focused solely on shot repetition). The workout lasts as long as it takes for me to complete each subsequent set.
Small, incremental improvements became intoxicating. They kept calling me back time and time again. The comfort I felt on a basketball court now compared to a few years ago was astounding to me, mainly because I genuinely didn’t feel like I possessed the chops to improve to the degree that I did. The basketball court has become a second home.
The result nearly two full years after first creating this 100 Makes routine has been pleasantly surprising and has reconfigured my relationship to earned achievement — which brings me to why I’m writing this post at all:
My long-term obsession with basketball has become my model for how to approach progression of all shapes and sizes. More and more, I find myself overlaying my basketball methodology (which I’ll outline throughout the rest of this article) on top of other areas in my life where I could use some help systematizing my improvement.
It may seem like an oversimplified metaphor on the surface, but, after spending an inordinate amount of time pondering the core tenets that have led to my meteoric improvement, I’m convinced these tenets can cross-over with far-reaching implications for other areas of life.
Let’s start with one of the more obvious tenets, one that has to do with repetition:
This first tenet may not come as a surprise, but let me tell you, it’s one of those timeless pieces of wisdom that can’t be reiterated enough. Let me unpack this phrase a little bit more. When I’m talking about repeatable simple actions, I’m talking about finding the smallest and most simple action (derived from the skill you’re trying to improve at) that can most easily be revisited with the least amount of resistance. If the skill you’re trying to acquire is complex and multi-faceted, take the time to locate the diminutive actions (look closely, they can be microscopic) that form the foundation of that skill.
In the case of basketball, it’s most complex form would probably be a player with an excessive amount of fluidity, precision, and refined decision-making against other high-level players. That’s the destination on the horizon. That’s the dangling carrot. But that’s also quite the gap to bridge, because it’s difficult to say how one goes from having virtually no skills to being an undeniable badass. So, that’s where I started my quest and began to look at all of the separate microscopic skills I’d need to hone in on to improve.
Once I started chipping away at these fundamental building blocks over and over again (lay-up lines, shooting in rhythm, dribble drilling, left-hand development, crossovers, etc), they all started to gradually improve simultaneously. No matter how many times I bricked a shot or lost control of my handle, I simply retrieved the ball and started again. And again. And again. Until the improvement started to become more and more noticeable, which fed back into me making more trips to my local outdoor courts to continue sharpening all of these different skills.
But here’s my favorite discovery about pursuing the track of repeatable simple actions:
An improvisational and creative potential eventually emerges from sequencing simple skills acquired from dogged repetition. Because once you master enough repeatable simple actions, you start to combine these simple elements into more complex and unpredictable patterns, and you do so with more style and swagger.
Applying this tenet to other domains, if you want to learn how to code an application, the first action you might take is drilling yourself on simple html functions until you’ve memorized them. If you want to write a short story, start by repeatedly showing up to compose a short paragraph, or sentence, or just follow one word with another. The barriers to entry for these tiny actions are much lower than the notion of immediately ascending to the highest forms of the skill i.e. coding a best-selling application or making it onto the New York Times Bestseller’s List.
Find the smallest action and repeat it in order to climb up onto the higher shelves of skill development. The key is to dig until you reach the bedrock of repeatable simple actions, and follow them until new levels of combinatorial creativity follow.
Now you may be asking, “when will I find time to locate these repeatable simple actions so I can start to fire away at them?”
Which brings us to the next tenet:
Chew on this for a minute:
There comes a time in life when time will start to make choices for you, unless of course you beat it to the punch. As you grow older, doors will start to close despite your futile attempts to hold them open. The word kid is practically synonymous with the word potential. But that incredibly malleable time in life doesn’t last forever. Time will slowly but surely shrink your windows of opportunity, gradually turn you into stone, solidify characteristics about you that can no longer be left open to the winds of change.
And that’s not meant to sound hopeless or defeatist, it’s meant to be an airhorn in your ear. You should befriend the time you’re given at this very moment because that’s all the time you’ll ever have.
If you don’t willingly trade your time for repeatable simple actions that push you up skill ladders (which will ultimately enrich your life with purpose by way of proficiency), then time will advance without you in mind. Sure, it can be difficult to willingly trade time for skill, but isn’t it just as difficult to live a life without the incomparable joy of being good, even masterful, at something? Don’t be on the wrong end of the deal when dealing with the inescapable trade for time.
An interesting side of this idea is how it changes as you pursue repeatable simple actions. As you chip away at your skill’s foundational bedrock, you start to enter a mutually beneficial relationship with time in contrast to your previously dysfunctional one. Instead of fleeing from time’s inexorable advance, you willingly enter into its steady current with a goal to swim towards. And now I’ve unintentionally arrived at a metaphorical crossroads between finding your flow state as you agree to inescapably trade your time for repeatable simple actions, and let me tell you it feels great to come around full-circle.
Let’s keep going.
Just because you’re trading your time for repeatable simple actions and slowly climbing up the mastery curve of your choosing doesn’t mean you’re not going to trip over failure. Quite the contrary. Failure is going to be your close companion the whole way up the mountain. When I say failure here, I’m not necessarily talking about an epic fail or a massive setback. When I say failure, I’m referring to the tiny missteps and mistakes along the way that help to sharpen your skills — like all of the shots I inevitably miss as I’m trying to improve.
Even now, after years of not leaving the courts until hitting 100 makes, there are still days when I miss 5–6–7 shots in a row. Does it boil my blood and make me want to high-tail it home? You bet. But I stay, recenter my focus, and keep grinding until the ball goes through that net one-hundred times — no questions asked.
Because at its core, failure is the impetus that continues to drive you forward in your pursuit of mastery.
If I knew for a fact that I’d never miss another shot, then why would I even bother going to the courts? It’s like using cheat-codes in a video game — sure it’s fun for a few minutes, but the game will start to feel empty and pointless because progress wasn’t earned.
There’s always room to improve, always room for subtle refinements, and that’s what keeps us coming back for more. Sure, my shot is way more accurate than it used to be, but I’m still missing shots all of the time. Take Kobe Bryant as an example — you’d consider him to be a masterful player, right? Well he took over 26,000 field goal attempts throughout his illustrious career and made just south of 12,000 (a respectable 44% from the field). He missed more than twice the amount of shots he made, and yet he’s considered to be one of the most dominant players in the history of the sport.
Even the most supremely skillful people are failing all of the time. Nobody has summited a mastery curve, even if you have to peer straight up and hold a flat hand to your brow to block out the sun as you try to find them up in the clouds, they’re surely still climbing.
“You don’t rise to the level of your hopes, you fall to the level of your systems.” — James Clear (Atomic Habits)
This quote beautifully sums up the point I’m trying to make — hope may help you choose a direction, but it’s not going to foster marked improvement. Hope is fickle, temporary, and transient. Hope will vanish at the smallest signs of hardship. You can’t build mastery on top of the quicksands of hope. You’ll need something sturdier and substantive. That’s where systems come into play.
What good will hope do for my game? Other than delude me into thinking I’m better than I really am, hope is almost good for nothing. Hope should be feeding your systems, not your ego. And when I say “system” in this context, I’m basically talking about a routine that has been firmly baked into the casserole of your day. My system is the 100 makes routine that I never diverge from. It’s always the same. I don’t have to think, plan, or strategize on how to get better anymore because now all I have to do is show-up and run through the system over and over again. The results take care of themselves.
In the greater context of climbing the innumerable mastery curves available to us, I strongly encourage you to build your very own systems for methodical improvement by:
Now get out there and start climbing up some curves.
This story originally appeared on Sign & Wonders.
From Scrub to Hooper: Methods For Climbing Mastery Curves
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