Volleyball Coaching Life-Choking

Generally, people talk about choking when a team or a player blows a big lead.  Worse than watching the act of choking in real time is to be doing the choking and experiencing that sinking feeling as the game get away. Perhaps even more excruciating is to be the coach as they watch their teams going through that process, because the coach knows that there is absolutely nothing immediate that he or she can do to affect the outcome, as the fundamental work should have been done in the weeks, months, and years before. They can only curse themselves for not having trained their players to better survive the situation.

As I sat watching my Illini lose to Nebraska in the national semi-finals, I had that sinking feeling. Nebraska showed great heart and unity of purpose as they processed the loss of the first two games and played as they were trained. Their highs were celebrated and their lows were processed and forgotten. As the tide turned, the Illinois players showed signs of wavering, not through their demeanor but through the series of unforced errors.

Two days later, the Nebraska team took on a Stanford team that had gone through their semi-final match with relative ease. Indeed, it was a championship match for the ages, this match went five as well even though the sequence followed was completely different than the Illinois-Nebraska semi-final. The first two games were so even that either team could have won, they ended up splitting. The next two games were alternating blowout with Stanford winning the third and Nebraska winning the fourth. The last game was tight all the way down to the wire, with Stanford winning the championship, but barely. The causal sequence of games won and lost was indicative that both teams were mentally ready to battle and they did indeed, giving us one of the best finals in years.

As I was watching the semi-finals, my coaching thoughts turned to how I can train my players to behave as these players are behaving, the Nebraska players losing first two games and then turn around and playing comfortably and confidently as the pressure mounted? On the other hand, I was also thinking about what could be done to help the Illinois stanch the bleeding and turn the momentum around back to their favor. There was nothing inevitable about any of the three games that Illinois lost. Each game was relatively even until it moved into the critical segment of the game. The officiating was even, except maybe for the last touch in the deciding game giving Nebraska the two-point turnaround.

For the finals, I wondered about how the coaching staff of both teams trained their teams to maintain their composure and executed with such consistency while so much pressure is on them. They went through the emotional roller coaster ride with aplomb and resilience without succumbing to the fatalistic spiral that is so attractive when challenged.

The real question to me is: how to train the cognition system of these players to survive and succeed under the circumstances?

I have never been in Nebraska, Illinois, nor Stanford’s practices or had the privilege of witnessing the coaches train and I won’t pretend to project any of my conjectures upon these three programs. I used this match as motivation to think about how I would do it and to research how people who are much more experienced than me are training.

One resource that I found is The Playmaker’s Advantage: How to Raise Your Mental Game to the Next Level by Leonard Zaichkowsky and Daniel Peterson. Zaichkowsky is a psychologist who has been working at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and sports performance for a long time, while Peterson is writer working in the same area. The book is fascinating and educational. They also give us a look at the latest in cognitive neuroscience results, rather than just conjectures, which helps me think about these questions. I consider the book a must read

In chapter ten of the book, titled: How to Compete: The Clutch and Choke of the Performance Engine, they delve into the states that they call flow, clutch and choke. Zaichkowsky and Peterson quote Dr. Christian Swann -  a researcher who had interviewed high performance athletes about their cognition during periods of clutch and choke - defines: “Flow as a state of effortless excellence, in which everything ‘clicks’ into place.”  Swann further states: “We perform on autopilot, are totally confident in our abilities and fully absorbed in what we are doing without actually thinking about it.”  

Swann further defines Clutch as:

“a state where athletes are much more aware of the importance of the situation, what’s at stake, the potential consequences, and what’s required to achieve a successful outcome. In clutch, athletes describe being conscious of the pressure, and feel the pressure, yet are still able to perform at their peak.”

He also differentiates flow and clutch by stating that: “Clutch states share a core similarity with flow, but are more effortful, deliberate, consciously controlled and intense.”

Choke then is defined as the opposite of clutch. Swann found that the key factor which decides whether the athlete is clutch, or choke is a matter of personal perspective. It isn’t the score or the objective measure of the performance that affects performance, it is the subjective perception of the performance which most affects their performance. In other words, how people perceive of their own performance is what decides whether they are in a clutch or choke state.

This is all very instructive, and Zaichkowsky and Peterson goes in depth in explain the difference, but what mattered to me is: how do I train my players to perform in a clutch state and avoid the choke state. How do I get from understanding the explanation of the states to executing effective training to promote clutch performance? How do I put all of this knowledge into practice?

Zaichkowsky and Peterson delve into two interesting theories. The first theory is that the pressure is taking the athlete’s attention away from our task at hand, causing the athlete to be distracted, therefore disrupting their flow state. The alternative theory is that the pressure is causing the athlete to focus too closely on the task when they are under pressure, they begin to overthink their task, the paralysis by analysis idea. The alternative theory is based on the idea that any motor skill become so ingrained in the motor control system over time that the athlete does not need to pay attention because they can do it in their sleep, but the breakdown in performance comes when they have to focus and pay attention to what they do.

Not happy to have just theories, Zaichkowsky and Peterson found various large studies testing those two ideas together. The testing was done by other researcher on high level athletes and the result is that the latter theory, the over focus on the task theory, is the main cause for the most erosion in performance. They asked the athletes to perform familiar and ingrained tasks under two conditions: one is to introduce disruptions like noise and visual disruptions, and the second is to ask them to an addition unpracticed but simple task as they do their familiar task. The former tests the unfocused attention idea and the second tests the idea that focusing on a task causes the athlete’s mind to not do as they are trained but think about what they have to do. The practiced and well-trained athlete would perform at less than optimal levels if they had to think too much about HOW they do what they do and they would interrupt their flow state to focus too hard on WHAT they did, which inevitably cause them to make errors and spiral downward into a choke state. In other words, when the athletes start to turn their attention inward and try to FOCUS on the mechanics of their skill, they accomplish the exact opposite of their intent. Interestingly enough, I had read this same idea in Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis.

How does this translate into training? According to the Zaichkowsky and Peterson, one key aspect of training is to teach skills in an integrated whole rather than in a step-by-step manner, keeping the skill performance automatic and keeping the skill acquisition process as continuous as possible and limit the mental processing during skill acquisition. The reason is that if the athlete learned their skills in an integrated whole, they wouldn’t try to break it down into progressive steps when they are under pressure. I had to think about that for a bit. While I agreed with this in general, I keep thinking about the process of teaching skills to the youngsters and knowing the confusion caused by their minds trying to absorb the entire skill in one shot, especially dynamic skills like jumping and hitting or transitioning to the pins from the middle and blocking. On the other hand, I think about how long it takes for the athletes I have trained to break away from the if-then thought process and how difficult it was for them eventually overcome the mental process of the progression steps. I have tried to minimize the progressions when I teach skills, but I can’t get away from that paradigm when introducing beginners to volleyball. I am still thinking about that.

A productive way to think about the clutch performance is to define clutch performance as being able to perform as expected while under pressure, that is, treating performing under pressure the same way as performing under no pressure. Which sounds difficult knowing human nature, but if you train the player deliberately de-emphasize the mental pressure within the scheme of the sport, become acclimated to playing under pressure, and expect the players to be performing in the flow, regardless of the situation, then it seems possible. The ideal is the train the athletes to treat every action on the court as a natural and expected part, there are no surprises. It also follows the idea of preparing your team to be anti-fragile, that is, prepared to handle anything rather than preparing to be ready for specific things.

Of course, the problem is that we don’t know how our athletes will react while under pressure while in training, we don’t know what we don’t know about them. We can only hope for the kind of performance that we want when they are under pressure because we can’t possibly put realistic kinds of mental pressures which could alters their reaction in a practice. One thing that Zaichkowsky and Peterson suggests is to train them while altering the space and tempo of the training regimen, working deliberately in small spaces and with overspeed to make the players problem solve while under artificially created pressure situations; to be completely un-gamelike but erring on the side of overloading their cognitive capacity. They will fail and then they will learn while under space and speed duress, they will expand their cognitive capacity and learn; that is, create new capabilities in the system 1 or hot cognition response. This allows the athletes to learn to perform automatically without overanalyzing their situation and attempt to slow down their reactions or the game.

So, having thought about this, I have a blueprint of how I am altering my training plans this year, even though I am already a big fan of going overspeed, I will try to up the tempo even more and working in the space restrictions this year. This should be fun.

Much thanks to Len Zaichkowsky and Dan Peterson for checking my interpretation of their work and making sure I did not misrepresent their work.

Life with Mom-Living a Fear Filled Life

My mom is 93 years old, and her entire world is driven by fear.

Some background, she was on one of the last boats that came to Taiwan in 1949 just before the relations between Taiwan and China was shut down, so she was one of the last people to leave China. She came to Taiwan, alone, not own anything outside of what was on her back and in a little suitcase. She came to be with relatives and managed to get work and survive. This was quite a change from her youth. My maternal grandfather was a local banker and she grew up with 14 brothers and sisters in a large house, with servants waiting on her. As with most women who lived in feudal China at that time, she never went to school beyond the secondary school, and yet she managed to make a living. Working as an assistant principal of a middle school in Taiwan, and then a bookkeeper for USAID.

She married my father and had me, after three miscarriages; we moved to Honduras for my dad’s career as an engineer and then to the US. Our finances were not great at that time and our family struggled. Mom sacrificed, scrimped and saved, and even managed to work as a book keeper when they lived in Salem Massachusetts. She did all of this without complaint, toughed it out in the US and outlived my father.

All the above is to say mom is a survivor.

Back to the present, every decision my mom makes in her every day life is driven by fear. Fear of the unknown mostly but fear all the same. It is the prime mover in her life.

She is afraid that anything that she does will result in more pain and suffering, she is afraid that every decision I make is a bad decision which would result in pain and suffering for the two of us. She is afraid of leaving the house whenever it rains or snows because she is afraid that we may get into a car accident while driving. She is afraid when I go on long trips and she is afraid when I go on short trips. She was afraid when I started coaching volleyball because she thought I was wasting my time on frivolous non-essential activities, i.e. something isn’t central to my identity as an engineer. She is afraid of being late to anything, so we spend a lot of quality time in waiting rooms because we are so early. She is super generous with gifts for people who helps her, it could be the receptionist at the doctor’s, the bank teller, the lady who helps her at the church she attends, because she is afraid that she would be looked upon as someone who is ungrateful.

At first dealing with this world view was agonizing for me, the insecurity grated on me; but as I stayed home and spent time with her, it came to me: she did not live a normal life. She lived in extraordinary times and her circumstances were extraordinary. Her fears came partly from the times she lived in: the Japanese invasion of China, the division of China and Taiwan. The periods of stability in her life came while she lived in Taiwan during uncertain times, for her and for Taiwa. It came during the cold war between the East and West. She’d moved to two different countries where she had to learn different languages and navigate the very different culture and society that surrounded us. It was completely foreign to her cultural and economic background. And yet she persisted. The key to her survival is because of her persistence, all driven by that fear fear. As I remember our home growing up, she has always been the one who fretted and worried, driven by fear of the unknown.

Her fear has multiplied as the years wore on, her ability to understand the English language diminished, her ability to navigate her way around our modern society is hampered by the erosion of her senses because of old age, and her confusion with the world around her deepens because she just can’t keep up with the changes. Add atop of all that the fact that all of her friends, as well as my father had preceded her in passing on, she lives in a lonely and very scary world. Things that I take to for granted is not so simple for her. Which further amplifies the fear that she feels.

Our clashes since I have been home had, thankfully, receded, partly because of her  and partly because of my slow realization of how difficult living in the modern world is for her. Alas, the biggest problem is that she can’t adjust to all the changes, not that she wouldn’t, but she just can’t. Of course, why would anyone ask a ninety-three-year-old to make changes to accommodate our needs, it seems to be too much to ask and too impossible to accomplish. It would be sheer folly to even try, as the explanations and the process of seeking to understand is counterproductive.

So I have come to learn that it is I who should adjust and conform to her need. It hasn’t been easy, while we still clash, we don’t do it as often nor as intensely as we did before. I still have a tendency to lose my temper, we have the same temperament so it is inevitable that we clashed.

Volleyball Coaching Life-Resulting

How often have we caught ourselves saying: “The ball knows!” After the opponent serves into the net or hit the ball out of bounds after a bad ref call? How about when we were on the verge of correcting a player’s mechanics but stop in mid correction because the hit was a kill or the pass went to target?  We were resulting.

Resulting can be defined as our propensity to mistake the quality of our decisions with the outcome of the decision, that is, we let the result determine how we judge our decision.

We assume that we win because we make good decision, even though it is might be because of good luck. Conversely, we assume we lose because of bad luck or bad decisions.

In any competitive sport, coaching decisions are made with imperfect information with very little forethought due to the time constraints, the difficulty is magnified during live game action, but even when we do have the time to make the decision, there are hidden underlying factors that are not measurable nor are unidentifiable which affects our decision. Under those circumstances, we will resort to resulting because of the lack of other information.

The resulting habit is comforting to inexperienced coaches, but even the most seasoned coaches can find themselves resulting, because it is such an easy choice. Why bother looking for faults with a decision that resulted in your favor. In fact, many coaches are more likely to result when the decisions become more complicated.

One way of resulting is to come to a false conclusion regarding a decision after a positive outcome: the good guys won the point or the game or the match and the coach takes credit for the win attributing it to their own good decision making, even if it was because of sheer luck. This is a false positive: the outcome is positive but the reason for the outcome is false. This erroneous belief in the reason for the win will perpetuate in the coach’s decision making toolbox, and the same decision will be repeated again under the same situation.

The other possible outcome of resulting is the conjugate situation: the result was negative, and the team lost the point, game or match. The coach, being under the self-serving bias will opt to blame bad luck or bad decisions for the failure and move on rather than critically examine the decisions which led to the losing result. The unintended consequence of this bias is that possibly good decisions are dismissed as bad ones once the result is known. More insidiously, the coach blames the bad result on bad luck and won’t consider analyzing the decision. This is a false negative, where the bad outcome obscured the real reason for the bad outcome.

In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke talks about decision making in high stakes poker, and the effect that resulting has on her ability to thrive in her profession as a poker player and how she dealt with honing her decision making skills. The book is about decision making and her examples dealt with decision-making processes for one person playing poker against the house and other players; their decisions are just one determining factor amongst many other decision-making processes. The game involves all the decision makers, the cards, and the randomness associated with the cards. As complicated as that is, the volleyball coach is dealing with even more interactions and decisions.

For the volleyball coach, the game outcome is due to the interaction between bench decisions from the coaching staff, how the six players interpret and execute those decisions, the reaction and decisions of the six opposing players, the reaction and decisions of the opposing coaching staff, the reaction and decisions of the four officials, as well as the ever-present uncertainty. Volleyball coaches are having to have their decisions interpreted by the players, an added filter to the process. This filtering effect from the players and the additional complexity from the number of moving parts in a volleyball match make it even more critical that volleyball coaches refrain from resulting and analyze their decision making honestly and critically.

Resulting gives us false readings on our decision making, either false positives or false negatives. A false positive fits nicely with a coach’s confirmation bias even though the reason may be due to luck rather than sound decision making, which may lead the coach to continuously repeat the bad decision. In the false negative case, the coach may avoid pursuing a good decision because of the bad outcome. Sadly, resulting ends up confusing the coach; both false positives and false negatives hinders coaching decision-making by hiding the real reason for the result.

Volleyball Coaching Life-Trichotomy of Control

I recently spoke to a fellow volleyball coach and friend, he was feeling distraught because of how his team jad performed at the end the season, falling short of his expectations. More importantly, he felt that he had let a great opportunity for winning slip away.

I knew that Stoic philosophy is the lens to help him look at his situation in a positive way. In fact, the Stoics offer many tools and practices that are useful even though they are difficult in practice. The trichotomy of control is the tool I am recommending for this case.

In mainstream Stoicism, this concept is the Dichotomy of control, i.e. there are two ways to look at control. I refer to the Trichotomy of control, three ways to look at control, because in real-life coaching situations, there are often more gray areas than not. The idea of the Trichotomy of control comes from William Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life.  An excellent guidebook through the world of Stoicism.

Simply put, the dichotomy of control idea is: worry about what you can control and don’t worry about what you cannot control. In what is seemingly a simple and oft quoted maxim, the complexity of the decisions of what is controllable and not controllable is daunting. We regularly worry over things happening in our daily lives, but we do it without thinking about just how much control we have over those things. Life comes at us fast and furious, so it is all we can do to survive the barrage of decisions. The Stoic tool of dichotomy of control tells us to analyze the decisions that we make, and we should decide on which events are directly controllable.

On the other hand, we should sort out those things over which we have absolutely no control and learn to avoid wasting time on worry over these things because we know we can’t control them no matter what we do. In addition to those things that are obviously out of our control, we must take into account serendipity and uncertainty being a major factor. We, being humans, will spend an inordinate amount of time worrying over everything, but by recognizing that we can’t affect the outcome, we can focus all our energies on those things that we can control and affect.  Coaches also have a tendency to fret over the What-Could-Have-Been’s and we bury ourselves in regret when we overanalyze those variations.

What does this mean in volleyball coaching? Each coach should do mental triage over the things that are a regular part of their work day mental process. The obvious things that we can control are the most direct things that we do daily, we focus on our training and how we can persuade and teach our players the necessary things. This means that we need to take control of the technique training to bolster our team’s toolbox, we condition them physically so that they can  execute the game plan and the skills, and we train their mental game to react rather than analyze in the moment. We control our practice environment to foster learning. We control the pace of the drills to stress their minds when they are in a training situation so that they can react the right way when they are in competition. We control the practice plans to optimize learning.  We control how we communicate with our team, the parents, and our staff to make sure that we have accurate understanding. We control our game planning for specific situations as well as to prepare the players to deal with the unexpected.

Even as we marvel at how extensive the controllable list is, the uncontrollable list is even more extensive.

We don’t control how the other team execute. We don’t control how our players execute. We don’t control how the official’s judgement will go. We don’t control the temperature and humidity of the gym. When we are outdoors we don’t control the sun or the wind. The most significant thing that we don’t control is how the players on both sides of the net process information and react to pressure and stress. We are much less the chess master than we are the powerless observer. We are the Wizard of Oz: just a normal person hiding behind the curtains, pretending to be in control.

Some things on this list seem only somewhat uncontrollable, which makes it more difficult to definitively put them in the uncontrollable bucket. Volleyball, as with most sports, has multiple interaction between players, the ball, the net etc. There are times that the game action seem so inter-related that we will project our biases and desires into how we frame and look at the situation and we convince ourselves that we can control them.

This is where we need the third leg, the trichotomy of control to deal with the ambiguity, this can be described as things that we have some control but not all control, and this is where most of the stress in coaching volleyball come from. It is the gray areas, the spaces in between the known decisions. This is the area where we think we should have complete control, but most of the time we do not.

What can we do to truly triage those situations? Do we resolutely split the list into two different buckets without thinking? Do we just assume that they are controllable and wreck our emotional health? Or do we assume that they are uncontrollable and ignore that thought in the back or our minds screaming at us and worry that we are not doing enough to prepare our team.

The key to this conundrum is our players - they are the interpreters of our thoughts, the mechanism that validates our decisions:  we can be the best coaches on paper until our players interprets our thoughts and executes both our technical and tactical decisions. If we did our jobs right, and if we are in a perfect world, we should win. The reality is that all our best laid plans and our best intentions, are filtered through our surrogates: our players. This is the crux of a dilemma: do we assume that we are in control because we train them? Or do we assume that we are not in control because of that gap in the control: the execution of the players. 

A proactive approach to resolving this dilemma, as specified in Irvine, is to examine those situations and interrogate our goals to further segregate them into external and internal goals. It is our stated goals that drives our belief in what we control. We want to achieve our goals, so we are looking to controlling everything in order to attain that goal. External goals are those that involve the ambiguity in our situations. We can say that our goal is to win the point, the set, the match, and the tournament. But no matter how hard we try; the outcome is beyond our control. By focusing our attention on those things that we don’t control, we are battling ourselves: we are trying to control what is beyond our control. But, if we selected internal goals as our focus, those things that we absolutely control, we can meet our expectations and let the uncontrollable part of coaching volleyball to take place without stressing ourselves.

What are internal goals, those are the goals we absolutely control? We don’t control how the other team executes, but we do train our players how to react to how the other team executes. We don’t control how our players executes, but we do control how we train those players to execute. We don’t control how the official’s judgements will go. We do control how we teach our players to react to those calls. We don’t control the temperature and humidity of the gym. When we are outdoors we don’t control the sun or the wind. We do control how we teach our players to react to our environment and externalities. The most important thing is that we don’t control how the players on both sides of the net process information and react to pressure and stress. We do control how we teach and mentor our players when they are under pressure and dealing with the unknown and the uncertain. We work with our players to react and execute our skills while under stress, or at least we should. This is an area that many coaches neglect because we are so focused on the technique, tactic, adjustments, matchups etc. that we forget that we are coaching players and not technique, tactic, adjustments, matchups etc. 

I will present this to my friend, I hope that he takes heed because there are too many things that we stress about which will eventually kill us. The trichotomy of control is a good way ease some of that stress by looking at the situation and performing our sanity saving mental triage. I hope it helps.

Book Review-In Praise of Wasting Time by Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman is a very well regarded writer. His Einstein’s Dream is a playful piece of writing which explores Einstein’s relativity idea by playing with time and demonstrating relativity through clever writing.

This book, although not as whimsical is a valuable warning, guidebook, and inspiration. Lightman delves into his daily existence and found that he was caught up in the accelerating pace of modern life. Much of the acceleration comes from the rapid pace of technological development and he found himself being caught up in this era of computers, smartphones, instant messengers etc. He does a bit of research into what these brand new and invasive habits are doing to our minds and our lives. Needless to say, he found the changes in our habits lacking and he also experiences what we all do: that the dictates of this life is forcing our cognitive ability changed, and not for the better.

Lightman does a bit of storytelling and a bit of information relating, all to illustrate to us the predicament that we find ourselves in. The book is well structured and Lightman makes his points carefully and concisely. The chapters are well written and hits several notes of recognition in me and drew me in. He stays away from being pedantic and did not prescribe solutions, leaving the solutions to us the readers to contemplate and discover for ourselves. He did give us some salient examples. It is a good monograph that I can refer to in my worst days of being lost to time and be able to recover my equilibrium and slow my time down. I can use this book to abandon my chronos temporarily and indulge in my Kairos. (Read the book, it is Chapter 7.)

One note. This is a publication of TED, and this is the second book from TED that I have read. So far the content has been good but not in depth, much lik the TED Talks, it serves to keep the reader’s mind engaged without delving into the subject in a deep manner. It is a good start, I hope they keep it up.

Book Review-The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge By Abraham Flexner

This little monograph gives us two related essays. The first essay is contemporary and written by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the present director of the Institute of Advanced Studies. In this essay he serves up a history lesson of sorts, giving us some autobiographical detail on Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute of Advanced Studies. He goes into the Flexner’s beliefs which was the founding principles of the Institute as well as its role in the history of American innovation as the place where creativity and research into basic and fundamental research takes place. He goes into how the founding belief in the meaning of the title forms the guiding principle of the institution. He very nicely frames Flexner’s basic belief. We are then given Flexner’s original essay on why seemingly useless knowledge is more important than just practical knowledge; indeed, should be the bedrock principles of scientific and humanities research in the United States.

You can read the passion and purpose in Flexner’s essay, he resolutely defends his idea against every plausible objection anyone can raise in opposition. It is inspirational to read this essay, written in 1939, it demonstrates just how prescient Flexner was in insisting that the Institute of Advanced Studies be the exception to the pragmatic tendencies of American science and resist the commercial bent of the American mindset.

Dijkgraaf skillfully demonstrates, with the examples from the Institute’s history, of just how the useless knowledge being pursued by the researchers at the Institute end up contributing to the applied knowledge of the world. In a way, the contemporary essay serves as vindication of Flexner’s conviction.

This book will be read many times, as a beacon for myself when my belief for basic research is faltering.

Blog Post-Trite

I transitioned from Isaac Newton Junior High to Arapahoe High School, going to the big school with all its attendant cliques and high school social drama.

I was also transitioning from special English to a regular English class. I started to learn English when I was nine years old in Central America, and by the time my family moved to Littleton Colorado, I was speaking and understanding the English language, but I was still quite self-conscious about my written English. As I was destined to be an engineer, at least in my mind, I paid very little attention to the English classes that was required. It was yet another obstacle to be feared and survived as I made my way into engineering; that transition from special English to regular English was also a point of pride with me, as I was moving into the mainstream. Additionally,  this particular transition is also disguised by the fact that everyone else is going to a new school, where we had no history, I was going to slip in unnoticed, I hoped.

My first English teacher at Arapahoe was Rahn Anderson, an extrovert and a beloved younger teacher who had the energy to out enthuse all of us. I was an introvert, made more so by being a someone that doesn’t stand out. I tried to fly under the radar as much as possible but I was not able to escape Mr. Anderson’s eagle eyes all the time.

Mr. Anderson delighted in the practice of the impromptu, an extemporaneous essay written in class. He loved the challenge that the impromptu presented to us, I considered it a death sentence. It was during one of these impromptus that I learned the definition of the word trite. I received one of my essays back after a dreaded impromptu assignments with the word trite written over a paragraph that was circled in red.

In class, Mr. Anderson explained to us what trite meant: overused and consequently of little import while lacking originality or freshness. He further expounded on the evil of using trite and clichéd phrases. Amazingly enough, that lesson stuck with me through the rest of my life. My writing may not have improved but I have always checked myself when I read or wrote, or thought. I further extended that idea of trite to thoughts and ideas, readings, music, even to jokes and stories.

Every time I saw unoriginal phrases and ideas I avoided them, I elevated my expectations and made it my daily mission to never tell the same joke twice to the same crowd; I became much more sensitive to the words and phrases that I read as well as the words that I wrote.  I became impatient with people who told the same stories the same way all the time.

I grew to be an expert at spotting things that are trite, at least by my exacting standards, and I also became a connoisseur of the most overt offenders of my own sensitive palate for originality.  

This heightened awareness also made me delve deeper into language and thought, it made me think about how the great writers express themselves. I never made parsing sentences as habit, but I did learn to appreciate the well-turned phrase and the clever sentence structure. I reveled in all the ingenious ways that sentiments can be expressed, with originality.

Digging even further, as I became a better writer, I learned to appreciate the different forms of the English language. I came to appreciate the long form essay, the personal essay, the writings of people that I never thought I would ever read, since I was still a stereotypical engineer.

In recent years, I started to gain an appreciation for poetry. The most precise and imaginative form of writing, even though I am terrible at writing original poetry, I know what good poetry is: simple, spare, and definitely not trite.

As I move through this life, I look back on the simple and unexpected things that had moved me and shaped my thinking along the way, and that simple and unexpected lesson in trite definitely molded me in more ways than I could have imagined. 

Thanks Mr. Anderson.

Book Review-Legacy by James Kerr

This book came highly recommended by a number of coaches whose opinion I respect, even though it is yet another business book which touts their own brand of motivation/leadership credentials.  This book is unique because it tries to document the keys to success of one of the most mythical teams in world sports: the All Blacks of New Zealand. Indeed, their story has a magnetic attraction for those coaches who are believers in the simplicity and honesty of the All Black approach to working playing, and conducting their work.

Since the book is already a best seller by the time I got to it, I fully expected a slick, by the book business tome, structured to present a lesson each chapter and the ubiquitous anecdotes which support the central point that the author wished to make. Most business books seem to come off as insincere as they tried to make their points. Mr. Kerr, however, has an unadorned style. He takes his own advice in regard to the power of telling a story and tells the story of the All Blacks sincerely and adroitly.

Some comments on the structure and style of the book. Mr. Kerr jumps in both feet right away, there are fifteen numbered chapters which are neatly summarized in the sixteenth, and the first unnumbered, chapter. Each chapter ends with a final summary page which succinctly encapsulates the lesson with an aboriginal saying and a short catch phrase. This structure allows the reader to easily reach back into the chapters and get the idea behind each chapter, as well as use the summary to create their own environment from these ideas.

The chapters though are the gold of the book. Each chapter contains a good number of anecdotes and descriptions of what the All Blacks coaches did to create their unique culture and belief system. It is refreshing to read this book because the anecdotes are relayed without overly dramatizing the stories. In other words, Mr. Kerr does not rely on being overly dramatic to sell books.

I recommend this book to anyone who are inspired by the mythology of the All Blacks, want to know the philosophy and a bit on the implementation of the ideas in real life but want to be spared the usual business/leadership book treatment.

Book Review-A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine

I came upon this book in a somewhat unusual manner. I had read How to Be A Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci and he not only referenced Irvine’s book profusely but he recommended that his readers read this book as well. The kudos worked its magic with me and I bought this book on line. I eagerly attacked this book as soon as I finished Pigliucci’s book, and I am very glad that I did.

Irvine’s tone is different than Pigliucci’s not better, not worse, but different. He is more laid back and truly lived up to the Stoic goal of tranquility. The descriptions and arguments has a very tranquil quality to them, even as he discusses difficult questions like dealing with anger, death, grief, et. al. His voice is that of a gentle guide through the various knotty arguments that is so typical of anything philosophical.

The book starts with a good historical background of Stoicism, we meet the philosophers who make up the bulk of what we are about to read, and we are introduced to both the Greek and Roman Stoics. The second part of the book is devoted to the psychological tools used by the Stoics in order to practice Stoicism. This can be considered as teaching the reader to use the tools and to becoming comfortable wielding the weapons of great import.

The third part of the book is devoted to specific topics which have proven to be difficult for people to navigate as they attempt to live a Stoic life.  The aforementioned topics of anger, death, grief, insults, social relations, etc. were covered in short compact chapters detailing the ways a philosopher could approach the discussion and ensuing argument.  This section was a touch pedantic but it was a necessary exercise because it allowed us into the mind of a practicing Stoic and gave us a glimpse of what practicing philosophers do: state problems, formulate arguments and most importantly guide us through his reasoning.

The most impressive and important section of this book to me is the last section: Stoicism for Modern Lives. Three excellent chapters proceed from the description of the fall of Stoicism in the public eye and throughout history, to reasons why we should reconsider Stoicism as a personal philosophy, the meaning of having a personal philosophy, and finally he describes his own journey through making Stoicism his own personal philosophy. The last two chapters made the most impact on me personally as Dr. Irvine drew us into his personal experience and allowed us to look behind the curtain into how he was able to explore Stoicism in his own way. His chapter on reconsidering Stoicism is particularly impactful as he made some very salient arguments for taking the personal journey into investigating the practice. 

Even though I had committed myself to practicing Stoicism on my own, this book made the act seem much less dramatic and much more matter of fact for someone to partake in this most personal of journeys. I am at a beginning stage obviously, but I feel reassured and comfortable in knowing that I can always reach back and gain wisdom from this remarkable book.

To Run or Not To Run

As hurricane Florence spirals her way towards the Carolina coast, all the weather prognosticators are predicting massive waves, winds, and disaster. The storm is expected to wreak havoc with North and South Carolina, as well as Virginia. This is supposed to be a super storm to end all super storms. The state and local governments have declared mandatory evacuations and the weird sight of all lanes of traffic heading in only one direction is filling up the screens.

But, there are also people who are defiantly staying, managing to hoard bottle water, batteries, food and fuel and hunkering down in their homesteads. The news outlets are of course focusing on some of these people. While not overtly lauding them for the independence and their expressions of rugged individualism that American society find so commendable, the tone of the reports all seem to observe the action of these folks as an act of defiance in the face of officialdom and the inevitable acts of nature.

In some ways they are putting the lives of potential rescuers in peril if they end up changing their minds, usually at the worst time, i.e. when the options for evacuating them are nonexistent, even though the rescuers are always willing to put themselves on the line to save another human from certain peril.

The thing that I find interesting is the decision making process that these folks undergo in order to make that decision. The primal consideration might be driven by the fear of forever losing what they had. This thought process elicits in me the Stoic tenet and nothing is forever, and that material things are transient and temporary. Losing material things seem to be an inconsequential consideration when compared to a life.

Another consideration is the idea of a personal probability. The idea is that people have an ability to calculate a personal probability of failure or success for different situations. In this case, and I am projecting my own prejudices on this conjecture, that they probably have a belief in that nothing can happen to them because they are who they are, or that they have such abilities that they are able to survive the natural forces of our world. In short, they have the hubris to believe that they are immune to the forces of nature, whether it is by their won ego or by their belief in their capabilities, so they put a thumb on the scales of survival and increase their personal probability of survival.

Another way to look at it is that they are risk averse in their own way. People behave differently when faced with the same option but presented differently, as Kahneman and Tversky had discovered through their work. Given the same circumstance, people will inevitably be more conservative in their decision making if the proposition is made in terms of potential losses, whereas they will tend to be more aggressive if the proposition is made in terms of potential gains. Although the options of either losing a house versus gaining a life seem to be clear cut to me, it may not be to them, and their defensive response is to be conservative in terms of clinging to what they have materially. Of course coupling the aforementioned biases in the calculation of the personal probability in combination with the human proclivity to respond to more drastically to losses may explain this.

Officiating and Subjectivity

In the continuing conversations with my friends regarding the US Open situation, a few points were brought up with made me think about the rule itself and our expectations of the officials.

First the rule. Almost all sports have behavioral rules which do not exist in response to the on field play but rather exists as a deterrent to undesired behavior from the coaches and players. The logic to these kinds of rules are along the line of hitting them where it hurts, i.e. in the score of the game itself. Even though this deterrent never stopped anyone from behaving themselves the first time, the threat of further sanctioning, it is thought, will deter them from reacting errantly the second time around. What is different this time is that tennis has an escalating scale of punishment: a sanction with no consequences in the actual score, the awarding of a point, and then the awarding of an actual game. It is the second sanction which set Serena Williams off and resulted in the third sanction. In volleyball, we do have a sanctioning of a point and then the officials can deprive the team of the coach by ejecting him or her. In the greater scheme of things, the volleyball sanctioning affects the team psychologically rather than in terms of actual points.

I am not sure if I know of any other sport where the officials have so much power as to being able to definitively throw the game in favor of one player. This is an awful lot of power to invest in one person, which brings us to the other topic, which is:  the expectations we have of the officials.

The ideal model for a good official is the stoic and objective interpreter of the arcane arts of the rule makers. The are expected to know and understand the rules and adjudicate with Solomon-like righteousness and fairness; in presupposing this model of the official, we are assuming that these humans can strip away their humanity and very human emotions to serve the integrity of the game. This is an impossible task, even as we are entering an era of AI and automation the rule makers leave quite bit of room for human interpretation and allow the official to use their best judgement to best serve the integrity of the game. Officials are human, not only human, but human because being human is characteristic to be celebrated.

In looking back at the situation, Serena Williams behaved as a human when she interpreted the coaching penalty as an accusation that she is a cheater. The chair umpire behaved as a human when Serena called him a thief for taking a point and then a set away from her. Both behaved as any humans would except one is being castigated for showing her emotion, even if it was over the top and expressive. Carlos Ramos reacted emotionally when he assessed the third penalty, even though he didn’t show the emotions externally, it was an emotional reaction to her accusation. The difference is that we are assuming the official does not and should not react with emotion, we therefore interpret his actions as a due part of his duties as an official arbiter of the rules. Was he at fault? I would say no because he was at the mercy of the ambiguous rule. What constitute verbal abuse? Different people have different thresholds in the face of socially unacceptable behavior. As evidenced by the videos of McEnroe, Kyrgios and others, some of the officials just let the torrent of abuse roll off their backs while others react in other ways. Which brings us to the point of Serena’s contention: do the officials in tennis have a different threshold for men versus women? I would say that they do, they have demonstrated it time and again. The question is: do we allow the normalization of attitudes to equalize those thresholds, allow the situation to persist as status quo until humans alter their attitudes towards the genders or should we enforce equality immediately? Either option make it difficult for the official as they are asked to rule as they have always done while pretending nothing is wrong and suffer the wrath of players and fans alike because the inequality has been exposed publicly or to think about their own inherent bias they most often are not aware of consciously and rule accordingly, which robs them of the spontaneous skilled responses that they have worked hard to hone and perfect?

How did we get here? I still point at the rule itself, it is an imperfect rule and in this case it is a judgement call. In volleyball you cannot argue a judgement call, but in this era of instant replay, judgement calls are argued all the time amongst the fans. The more egregious point regarding the coaching rule is that it is exclusively a judgement and that judgement suffers from large amounts of variability and randomness, this is where the inclusion of human interpretation comes to serve to the detriment of the game. Even if the definition of “coaching” is specific in the rule book, it is still subject to human emotions and immediate reaction. Couple that with the escalating scale of justice imposed by the tennis organizing bodies, the capriciousness and randomness of human judgement inevitably play a large part in a game that is supposedly objectively adjudicated.

Some question then: is it desirable to have behavioral deterrent rules that punish the player? Is completely objective officiating desirable? If not, if we want to have that human element rather than having robots officiating, what are the limits for the human officials? Is it desirable to have any rules that is so broad and have so much impact on the outcome of the game be dependent on  the variability of human emotions?

I don’t know the answers, but it is interesting to consider.

On Serena and the 2018 US Open

It has been three days since the debacle at the 2018 US Open. Many people have jumped in the fray and many opinions have been expressed, some defending Serena Williams; while some profess their admiration for her talent and athleticism, yet also taking her to task for reacting the way she did, calling her out for having a reaction.

Three things became of interest to me.

First there is the lukewarm defense of the umpire, Carlos Ramos. There is the touting of his credentials as a tennis official, and there are small but spirited few who admiringly commending him for being fair to players of both genders because he is strict in his interpretations of the rules. The most common defense narrows the field down to the fact that his interpretation of the rules is strictly by the book, that there can be no fault to be found in his rulings. People who resort to strict and narrow reading of the rules are usually the same people who have a moral dilemma on their hands, or they have been called out by someone for not doing enough in a particular situation: witness the by-the-book defense of Paterno and of Urban Meyer. He walked right up to the minimal limits of his responsibility without doing an extra ounce more. The sign of someone who hasn’t done enough to meet his responsibility as a citizen of their society.

In the case of Carlos Ramos, it isn’t quite as serious but the logic is the same: he applied the rules as if he was a role model for future AI based tennis droids, strictly by the book, no interpretation allowed. Yet, in the any world where rules and laws are necessary for smooth operations, the rules demand interpretation because we cannot reasonably anticipate all situations and contingencies. The strictness of the interpretations is left up to the adjudicators. Interpretations that are too strict and too loose ill serve the greater good of the endeavor, but interpretations must be allowed. In this case Ramos hewed closely to the limit and it ill served the tennis world.

Texualists are those in the legal world who hold that only the original intent of the laws as written are the only interpretations that should be allowed. Of course the orthodox original intent of the laws are only those that are interpreted by the texualists and no one else. How convenient.

The other issue that interested me is the coaching rule itself. I am not so interested in whether Serena’s coach admitted to coaching or not, she was on the other side of the court and probably did not see his hands, which is where the looser interpretation of the coaching rule should have applied but wasn’t, thereby averting the controversy. This is important because this is the fuse that lit the situation into an unrecoverable mess.

I am not a regular tennis fan but by what I gather this is a rule that is difficult to enforce. What constitutes coaching? It seemed that coaches are expected to sit stock and live in fear of lifting a pinky finger for fear of being called for coaching. The other part of this coaching rule morass is that the rule is an open secret that everyone does it and it is rarely invoked. People on the broadcast talk about this rule as if it is an open joke amongst the cognoscenti, that this is one of these rules that exists as some kind of anachronism and that people ignore it with a wink and a nod. If this is the case, why even have it in the books? Why have a rule that is so ridiculous that no one knows how to deal with it? Why have a rule that is so broad and so difficult to enforce that the possibility of abuse by a very broad interpretation is very real. I think that Ramos in his zeal to be seen as strict and fair official abused this rule by so strictly interpreting this innocuous and arcane rule.

Now, the second and third penalties called by Ramos seem to follow his strict interpretation to a t, and I don’t have much to argue about those rulings, but the penalties that accrued are based on his original and humorless interpretation of the rules and what he thinks he saw.

Finally, the debate continues regarding what caused Serena to have her outburst and whether she had a right to be so indignant by equating the coaching ruling to being called a cheater. The ugliness blew up from that point on. Many electrons were sacrificed to that debate, but that doesn’t interest me.

What interest me is in observing the reactions of some of the people who have thrown themselves into the discussion. Those who take Serena to task for reacting the way she did. Many have pointed out that the best of the athletes who compete in the arena of public sports get incredibly personal, insulting, abusing, potty-mouthed, and childish when the ruling goes against them. They pout when things don’t go their way. Some have brought up the fact that there is a double standard when it comes to the male athletes versus the female athletes. The argument in response that just because men get ugly and cuss and swear doesn’t mean that women should be given the carte blanche to do the same. Indeed, that would be a sad and erroneous interpretation. The irony that people miss is that their reaction to what Serena exactly mirror the gender inequality in the way we view male and female athletes.

Why is it that our first reaction to a woman being combative and fierce is to call her out for being combative and fierce? Why is it that we do not react the same way or to the same degree when it is a male athlete acting inappropriately? Why is it that we hold female athletes to a higher standard of conduct than men? Does this have to do with your own inherent bias? Some have advanced the slippery slope logical fallacy, that if we allowed women to behave in the same way then all of society would slip down the slippery slope towards aggressive incivility. My contention is: if we find the rude behavior so unattractive, why not hold the male athletes to the higher standard that you are holding the female athletes? Why has this NOT been the norm in all the evolution of our society? Why are we such hypocrites when it comes to civil behavior? Why do we put the onus on the female athlete to behave differently from men? Why do we hold female athletes to a much higher standard? Why do we excuse male reactions as being passionate and a good quality to have while we condemn the female athlete for the same behavior? Why are men considered a get getter and a woman a pushy broad? Why not apply the same standards to both genders?

In the end, the one good thing that comes out of this, I hope, is that we can use the  ugly incidence to open minds and change attitudes, because if we let the ire and disgust with the inequality to just fade away, as the powers that be are wishing for, the anger will simmer and then explode in a more emotional and uglier form later. This discussion isn’t going away.

Book Review-The Playmaker's Advantage

I was made aware of this book from a mention on one of Vern Gambetta’s Facebook postings. It piqued my interest as I am a coach for a youth sports team and I had been thinking about how to use the neuro scientific results that has been seemingly flying out academia. I bought the book at the beginning of August and decided to give it a crack, an unusual thing for me as I usually have a tall To Be Read stack balancing precariously on my end table. I had just finished reading Grit, the book by Angela Duckworth and I was excited but also puzzled by the unfulfilled promise of that book. I was disturbed by the lack of any discussion as to How to train Grit. I was definitely looking for something more all-encompassing of the neuropsychology area. As it turned out, this book explained many of my puzzles.

The book is split into three clear sections; the reason for the split is well explained in the introduction. The three sections are:  Playmaker’s Foundation, Playmaker’s Cognition, and finally Playmaker’s Commitment. The first section describes the research that has been done on defining what the authors mean by the Playmaker’s qualities and how they researched the playmaker qualities. Unlike most of the summaries of the literature on the subjects, the account of the research is fascinating and the synopsis of the results and conclusions were concise and explicit without shortchanging the nuances of this research.

Playmaker’s Cognition is the revelatory section of the book, in my opinion, as this is where the authors deconstructs the mythology around the decision making process that Playmakers go through as well as the cognitive processes that explains some of the why’s and how’s. This was particularly interesting because the authors were able to delineate the specific steps for decision making and the motivation for the steps, which implicitly gives us an idea as to how to train the athlete to work towards attaining the state of being of a playmaker. There are three chapters in this section: Search, Decide, and Execute, each chapter addressing the progressive steps of good decision making. This was a revelation to me, even though in hindsight the steps and sequence made perfect sense. It was one of those: why didn’t I think of that moment.

Finally, the last section on Playmaker Commitment section is the section where the authors address a number of topics appearing in the popular press that seemed dodgy. Topics like Grit, Growth Mindset, and the ten thousand hour rule; topics that had captured the imagination of many who are seeking a formula or a recipe for success in whatever endeavor they have an interest in. Since this book follows the others by a few years, the authors were able to address the ambiguities inadvertently left exposed in the other books, ambiguities that pulled the mass audience zealously into popular, yet misguided and false conclusions. I had read the tomes regarding all of these ideas, and they left me puzzled since the books did not address how to attain these qualities, but this book boldly states that no one really knows how to train grit, or inculcate a growth mindset, or truly believe that ten thousand hours is sufficient for mastery. In fact, ten thousand hours idea is not even applicable to the sporting world that this book is addressing. The authors did a real service for the other authors and debunked the populist myth that had taken over the popular press.

In fact, there will be many who will find dissatisfaction with the lack of a formula with this book, because in the end the authors are scientists and careful practitioners, it is their professional responsibility to be accurate and precise, even if doing so means not giving sound bitesques conclusions. They do however give us enough information for us to experiment ourselves and try to apply the concepts that they were able to uncover and summarize.

I am planning the season for a youth team that I coach, and I am now rethinking my usual coaching plans and integrating the ideas from this book as a part of the major revamp of my philosophy and the way the various parts of my coaching fit together. This will be an adventure of a grand scale. I am happy to have this guide which does not give me a recipe but will guide me through my thinking and philosophizing.

Book Review-The Lady Tasting Tea By David Salzburg

This was not a book I had envisioned as being something that I would read, let alone grow to love. My experience with statistics had been limited to some courses I took in graduate school and then exposed to when I was on my first job, we were all exposed to statistical process control (SPC) and six sigma. My background in statistics only went so far as knowing some of the SPC tools. As I grew more mature I began to appreciate the usefulness of statistics but I had a hard time connecting the SPC tools I was exposed to with the mathematic heavy statistics that are taught in the textbooks. As I tried to parse through the dense formal statistical curriculum I grew frustrated with my own inability to get through to the kernel of the topic. As I struggled I kept seeing this particular book being recommended by a number of people, so I bought it and prepared for the worst, yet another dense explanation of rudimentary statistics that had very little to do with what I wanted.

To my surprise and amazement, this book was so different, different from any other book that I had ever read. It was a love paean to the study of statistics, it was a gossipy and information laden history of the evolution of the art of probability and statistics, it was a summary of the important developments in statistics, it was an invaluable primer in the methods used in the practical application of statistic, and finally, it was a hefty philosophical discussion of the problems and issues that are still plaguing the researchers in statistics. I think you get the idea that I kind of liked reading this book.

David Salzburg is a practitioner of the art of statistics, he has the ability to explain the very dense concepts in statistics, both the applied tools and the mathematical conundrums with adept ease. Most importantly he did this without employing any mathematics. Which in some ways is very impressive and in other times it was frustrating because it would have been more enlightening to resort to the bare bones mathematics, but no matter.

Prof. Salzburg clearly has a great love for the story as well as for the subject, he has a great sense of history as well as a deft touch for the internecine nastiness that occurred with the giants of statistics. His descriptions of the relationship, or lack thereof between Pearson and Fisher kept me riveted to the narrative. His description of some of the great mathematicians who were caught in the destructive totalitarian regimes during and after World War II added the human dimension to these stories. I don’t know which aspect of the book I appreciated more, the historical perspective or the unraveling the mystery of the functional relationship between statistical tools and ideas.

There is a clear devotion in his writing that reflects his devotion to giving credit where credit is due, even though he apologized for his inability to give credit to all that had contributed, the breadth and depth of the book was astounding and gratifying to someone who appreciates a truly “Big Picture” look at the statistical landscape from the 10,000 feet view. I particularly enjoyed the discussions regarding the contributions of Deming and Shewart to the SPC branch of the vast tree of statistical evolution. I was able to make the connections from those chapters to untie the knot that was in my mind.

The piece de resistance was the final chapter where he discusses his own views on the unexplained philosophical contradictions still existing in statistics. It felt like I was in the midst of the discussion even though I am a dilettante in the art of statistics.

This is a book that comprised of some very dense concepts and it was difficult to focus at times but it was well worth the effort in my mind.

Book Review-Getting to Us, Seth Davis

I am not sure where to put this book. Seth Davis is a nationally known sports reporter and he is a very good sports writer. The prose that he commits to paper reflects his sports reporting background, and to be clear, he is a very good sportswriter. He tells his stories well and he has a fine sense of the internal stories of his subject. The stories are taut and always gives perspective on the person being featured.

But there is a problem with this book, many problems actually.

It is a collection of nine profiles of successful coaches; almost all of them have succeeded in their profession and are recognized as the leader of athletes. Some have well defined personalities and known reputations, others are relatively new to the limelight and benefits from not being ubiquitous in the media spotlight.  One problem is that the chapters are relatively short, which makes for easy reading but it also make the profiles seem rushed and incomplete. Davis is seemingly trying to make his points and then rushing to demonstrate the challenges and obstacles they have faced in their inner life through anecdotes and personal histories without really examining how those headwinds affected their coaching philosophies and execution of their philosophies. What we get is a laundry list of what they do and examples. Davis lays out the facts as a reporter and then he links the professional practices of these coaches with the facts, but he never drills in deeply into the why’s of the relationship between the fact and practices. It isn’t a fatal flaw but it left me wondering. To be fair, he states in the introduction that this was not the intent of the book, it still leaves a void, a road not taken which could potentially be productive.

Another problem is that Davis uses a unifying theme to tie the coaches’ profiles. The theme is the title of the book: Getting To Us. He explains the theme thus: “A team begins as a collection of me’s, him’s and you’s. It is the job of the coach to figure out a way to get to Us.” A noble yet unoriginal theme, as our sports culture has always revolved around teams and teamwork. Davis uses the acronym PEAK to describe the desired characteristics of a coach to enable this ability to see the big picture and get the team to Us. PEAK is: Perseverance, Empathy, Authenticity, and Knowledge. Davis tries to apply these four characteristics to the story of each of the nine men and tries mightily to squeeze details about their experience and make up into these four niches. The effort seems forced and at times are inspired and at times clichéd. Davis stated that he only intended to highlight PEAK and try to connect those characteristics to Getting To Us. The results are uneven at best, mostly disappointing.

The coaches that came through with their reputations enhanced are Geno Auriemma, Doc Rivers, Brad Stevens, and Dabo Swinney. Stevens and Swinney are relative new to the national spotlight so the portraits are excellent at revealing their stories to us, through the Davis filter. Auriemma and Rivers were revelations to me, their stories were fascinating even though a little short. Rizzo came through unscathed yet also unenhanced.

One thing that Davis did was to give a portrait of these men that are unadorned, he reaffirms the portrait of coaches like Meyer, Krzyzewzki, Harbaugh, and Boeheim as they have been portrayed previously in the press. He does however, go into explaining why they are the way they are, he was not very successful.  Urban Meyer came off as somewhat reasonable until the recent troubles at Ohio State with Zach Smith. Ironically, Davis also featured Meyer’s wife Shelley, in this profile. Davis never fully explained Krzyzewzki’s decision to deal with Grayson Allen’s transgressions the way he did, other than repeating his defense. Harbough came off like a petulant child at times, albeit a very successful one. Boeheim reaffirmed his public persona as prickly personality, even though he seems more sympathetic.

If you came to this book as a means to get any insight on Getting to Us, don’t waste your money. If you can to read some quickie portraits of nine successful coaches, I would say go ahead and read this book, although I would also advise you to temper your expectations.

Book Review: Grit by Angela Duckworth

I had bought this book when it first came out but I had put off reading it since I was learning what was in the book form the mass media since this topic and Ms. Duckworth’s book was a ubiquitous subject amongst the education and coaching wonks. Grit and resilience had become the Growth mindset for the last few years. After a while, I finally decided to sit down and read it.

All of that is to say that my impressions of the book are affected by the widespread popularity of the subject and my lack of enthusiasm is not so much that I disliked what Ms. Duckworth wrote, it is that my impressions of the book suffered from being exposed to the subject due to her success in getting her ideas through to the reading public.

As with most books which appeals to the business crowd, Ms. Duckworth follows the tried and true business book formula: define the problem, lay out the solution to the problem, and give a lot of anecdotal case studies backed with qualitative summaries of quantitative studies in order to get past the general public’s impatience with numbers and lack of aptitude with statistics. In this regard, Ms. Duckworth did a masterful job. Every chapter is backed up with numerous anecdotes; she patiently attacks our preconceived notion of intelligence being the determining factor for successful people with wave upon waves of examples that makes her point for her. In fact, when she does goes to the solution phase of her book: Growing Grit from the Inside out and Growing Grit from the Outside In, she still couldn’t quite let go of her initial pedantic mode.

Even as the reader has become more than convinced of her thesis, she persists in attempting to persuade the reader to accept her premise that Grit is important and desirable in our lives. It was all this reader could do to NOT scream: I get it, it is important, it is a great character trait to have and develop, get to explain the HOW and not the WHY.

While I am a firm believer in letting each person develop their own methodology in teaching, it was somewhat maddening to be reading more anecdotes which illustrate her key ideas in how to train grit. In the end however, I did glean lessons on a process, I will have to apply this process experimentally and apply the scientific method to ascertain whether my guessing was correct. In the end it will probably be better for me to go through this process rather than being spoon fed a process, it doesn’t lessen the frustration.

Indeed, this book was indeed a landmark achievement, I just wish that the author did not choose to follow the business book clichés and be more direct with her conjectures on the What-If’s and How’s of attaining Grit.

Book Review-The Antidote By Oliver Burkeman

I picked up this book at Carmichael Books in Louisville. It sat there, quite innocuous with a rather mundane title and a rather funny looking cover. I’d read about the book previously and the topic looked entertaining, so I bought it. Little did I know that this was going to change my world view completely.

The Antidote questions, in the first chapter, our obsession with being happy, and in so doing it also questions the underlying folk wisdom that we take for granted. Such things as our cult like adhesion to the western definition of happiness, our goal setting habit, our aversion to anything that smacks of negativity, our fear of failure, our discomfort with death, and our deep seated dread of uncertainty. In eight well researched and written chapters, Mr. Burkeman dives in and dives in deep. Unlike most books investigating a specific subject, Mr. Burkeman does not just cite and regurgitate academic research results, although he does a quite reasonable job of that. He dives into experiencing a number of topics that challenges the status quo and certainly places him into some uncomfortable situations, all in order to conduct research for the book. Some of the more satisfying portions of the book are his descriptions of his own feelings and mental states as he is conducting his research.

Another source of reading pleasure are his in depth interviews with people. Rather than just doing a cursory review and restatement of the salient points of the interviews, Mr. Burkeman goes into deeper descriptive elocution of the interviews, this part of the chapters were wonderful peeks into the conversation and gives the reader a snapshot of the discussion. His subjects were eclectic and representative of the fascinating world that he had jumped into with both feet.

The breadth of the book is broad, Mr. Burkeman discusses the Stoic philosophers and philosophy, the Buddhist philosophy and how the two correlate. He examines the impossible situation that we force ourselves into when we adapt the ubiquitous and pedantic habit of goal setting, and how our fear of uncertainty reinforces our grip onto that goal setting habit. He then delves into our fear of failure, and how some have embraced failure as a guide and utilize that examination of failure as the guiding principle towards achieving tranquility, in place of happiness. He invokes the Stoic practice of looking at the most negative possible outcome in order to gain perspective and alleviate fears, fear of uncertainty, and submitting to the Stoic practice of dichotomy of control. He also dives in on the Stoic practice of Memento Mori, which forces us to examine the role of death and dying in our culture and attempts to get our minds to accept the finality of death and to overcome our fear of death. I must admit that this part of the book was particularly difficult for me, yet this practice does allow me to understand this previously taboo subject. I am still working on this part of my own thoughts.

The Antidote is not an easy read, which s what makes it special. The integrity of Mr. Burkeman who made sure that he had skin in the game as he did research was a singular point of merit; it made me that much more interested because he made the effort. Mr. Burkeman’s epilogue in the Antidote was matter of fact and rational. It did not appeal to nostalgia nor emotional hysteria, instead he remained Stoic in his story telling, which is the very attractive quality that permeates the entire book.

Book Review-Thinking In Bets By Annie Duke

I came upon this book when I read Stuart Firestein’s interview with Annie Duke in Nautilus magazine. The interview got me curious about the ideas in this book and I was fascinated by Annie Duke’s unusual background: being both a psychology graduate student at one time and a successful poker player. Graduate studies I know about, professional poker playing I did not. So the unique combination piqued my interest.

It was a fortuitous digression from my usual list of topics. Ms. Duke has a clear and eloquent voice and she has a way of explaining the same points in various ways so that she conveys the essential points which translates to understanding without seeming pedantic. She obviously knows the poker world, but it is remarkable how comfortably she steps into the academic mode without any noticeable change of pace. The book is loaded with references, other sources, and it is very well notated, no doubt a remnant of Ms. Duke’s academic training.

The tone of the book is very practical, it is a business book on decision making without reading like a business book, and I mean that as a foremost compliment.

The theme of the book is obviously noted in the subtitle: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts. Ms Duke lays out her case in six succinct and information filled factors. The first two chapters are her problem statement and her light primer on the poker worls, she never gets bogged down in the intricacies of playing poker professionally, as she states in her introduction: This Is Not A Poker Book. She does yeoman work in trying to convince the reader that this poker player point of view is a valid one for all decision makers to adopt and apply regardless of our lot in life. In fact she does this throughout the book in unobtrusive but obvious ways. The next four chapters are a combination of how the betting mindset and probability frame of reference help the decision maker and how to go about adopting that frame of reference. In these four chapters she makes a cogent argument about the benefits of thinking in bets. Much of the reason for adopting this mental tool comes from the fact that we humans are disastrously biased in our decision making. We fool ourselves into believing our beliefs whether they are worthy of our trust of not. This, of course, is not anything new. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has laid the ground work for that work, Ms Duke makes use of their argument to support her case, but the uniqueness of her attack is that she is able to lay out a “how” component to the discussion on decision making.

Ms Duke uses her professional poker player circle of support network and what they do in order to check their own egos and false conclusions as an example and gives us a look at what they do to make sure their decision making is objective and accurate.  She delves into how our inability and unwillingness to deal with uncertainty sends our thinking into erroneous conclusions and our own egos forces us into drawing wrong conclusions about the real reason for our own successes and failures. We will always attribute our success to our skills and our failures to bad fortune. She lays out the tools necessary for a decision maker to call themselves out when they start thinking in this ways.

Remarkably, the process that Ms Duke lays out aligns nicely with the Stoic philosophy, particularly with regard to dealing with uncertainty and the dichotomy of control which Stoics espouses. That exact point is notable in Ms Duke’s narrative.

The final chapter: An Adventure in Time Travel was especially entertaining and educational as she lays out the framework for an open-minded process of examining our problems and decision making regarding those problems. I am quite eager to apply this process in my own life now, as Ms Duke is quite convincing in her argument.

One point I need to make is that as I looked over my notes from the book, I realize that Ms Duke had repeated quite a few of her points. Usually I would attribute that practice to an author who had run out of things to say, as that is something that is easily discernable. In this case however, the repetition is written in such a way to reinforce the previous accounting of the concept and it manifests itself naturally and unobtrusively in the narrative. In fact, I would not have noticed until I saw that I had the same point written down multiple times, which means that I had noted the importance of those points multiple times, which in hindsight meant that the repetition was not only necessary but critical.

I am hoping that Ms Duke would follow this book with a deeper dive into the dynamics of her process and the intimate social dynamics of her CUDOS group. She already did a very succinct description of her group but I think an examination of the CUDOS group method as applied to different groups focused on different types of problems and existing in different milieus would be very good.

I obviously liked the book.   

Book Review-How To Be A Stoic

I came upon this book when I read Stuart Firestein’s interview with Annie Duke in Nautilus magazine. The interview got me curious about the ideas in this book and I was fascinated by Annie Duke’s unusual background: being both a psychology graduate student at one time and a successful poker player. Graduate studies I know about, professional poker playing I did not. So the unique combination piqued my interest.

It was a fortuitous digression from my usual list of topics. Ms. Duke has a clear and eloquent voice and she has a way of explaining the same points in various ways so that she conveys the essential points which translates to understanding without seeming pedantic. She obviously knows the poker world, but it is remarkable how comfortably she steps into the academic mode without any noticeable change of pace. The book is loaded with references, other sources, and it is very well notated, no doubt a remnant of Ms. Duke’s academic training.

The tone of the book is very practical, it is a business book on decision making without reading like a business book, and I mean that as a foremost compliment.

The theme of the book is obviously noted in the subtitle: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts. Ms Duke lays out her case in six succinct and information filled factors. The first two chapters are her problem statement and her light primer on the poker worls, she never gets bogged down in the intricacies of playing poker professionally, as she states in her introduction: This Is Not A Poker Book. She does yeoman work in trying to convince the reader that this poker player point of view is a valid one for all decision makers to adopt and apply regardless of our lot in life. In fact she does this throughout the book in unobtrusive but obvious ways. The next four chapters are a combination of how the betting mindset and probability frame of reference help the decision maker and how to go about adopting that frame of reference. In these four chapters she makes a cogent argument about the benefits of thinking in bets. Much of the reason for adopting this mental tool comes from the fact that we humans are disastrously biased in our decision making. We fool ourselves into believing our beliefs whether they are worthy of our trust of not. This, of course, is not anything new. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has laid the ground work for that work, Ms Duke makes use of their argument to support her case, but the uniqueness of her attack is that she is able to lay out a “how” component to the discussion on decision making.

Ms Duke uses her professional poker player circle of support network and what they do in order to check their own egos and false conclusions as an example and gives us a look at what they do to make sure their decision making is objective and accurate.  She delves into how our inability and unwillingness to deal with uncertainty sends our thinking into erroneous conclusions and our own egos forces us into drawing wrong conclusions about the real reason for our own successes and failures. We will always attribute our success to our skills and our failures to bad fortune. She lays out the tools necessary for a decision maker to call themselves out when they start thinking in this ways.

Remarkably, the process that Ms Duke lays out aligns nicely with the Stoic philosophy, particularly with regard to dealing with uncertainty and the dichotomy of control which Stoics espouses. That exact point is notable in Ms Duke’s narrative.

The final chapter: An Adventure in Time Travel was especially entertaining and educational as she lays out the framework for an open-minded process of examining our problems and decision making regarding those problems. I am quite eager to apply this process in my own life now, as Ms Duke is quite convincing in her argument.

One point I need to make is that as I looked over my notes from the book, I realize that Ms Duke had repeated quite a few of her points. Usually I would attribute that practice to an author who had run out of things to say, as that is something that is easily discernable. In this case however, the repetition is written in such a way to reinforce the previous accounting of the concept and it manifests itself naturally and unobtrusively in the narrative. In fact, I would not have noticed until I saw that I had the same point written down multiple times, which means that I had noted the importance of those points multiple times, which in hindsight meant that the repetition was not only necessary but critical.

I am hoping that Ms Duke would follow this book with a deeper dive into the dynamics of her process and the intimate social dynamics of her CUDOS group. She already did a very succinct description of her group but I think an examination of the CUDOS group method as applied to different groups focused on different types of problems and existing in different milieus would be very good.

I obviously liked the book.