Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Overcoming Adversity Makes You Stronger

For some reason, a lot of people today expect everything to come easy. But life isn’t easy and the game of basketball isn’t easy.

“Military academies force you to deal with failure early on because they believe it is the only way to teach you how to succeed when failure seems inevitable. At Army, everyone had one talent above all others: Toughness. So, that was what we emphasized. We always believed that failure makes people stronger.”

- Coach Krzyzewski (Duke)

People have to go through the process to improve. The bad thing about some athletes is they don’t think there is a process to go through. They think they are good from the start so there is no process to go through. Coaches are all about the process.

One of the best examples I can give about persistence was a commercial Michael Jordan did for Nike about three years ago. He pulled up in a limo and was going into the back door of the gym. The announcer was giving a lot of statistics about Michael Jordan. He said he had missed 26 game-winning shorts and he had missed 2,963 shots as a NBA player, and he had lost 293 games in the NBA. Michael opened the door, looked at the camera, and said, “Because I fail is why I succeed.”

How can you overcome adversity if there is no adversity?

(Thanks Coach Starkey & Coach Brown)

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