Category: Other Books

I recently read “Playing For Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made” by David Halberstam. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Jordan was the most gifted athlete in the league, but unlike most other supremly gifted players, he had an additional quality rare among superb artists whose chosen work comes so easily: He was an overachiever as well.” (14)

“At Carolina, the ethic seemed to come from another time: The more you sacrificed for a goal – the higher the price you paid in personal terms – the more it would one day mean to you.” (80)

“What was interesting about the intensity of Jordan’s practice habits, thought Steve Hale, was that they were rare for a player so naturally gifted.” (99)

“It was part of David Stern’s innate wisdom that in the long run if you did the right thing and did not try to take credit for too much of what you did, then people would give you not only the right amount of credit, but perhaps even more.” (121)

“Rob Strasser was a man driven by impulse and faith in his own instincts, and his instinct when he had an idea was to go for it.” (143)

“Jordan turned to Falk and said, “Let’s make the deal.”
“But you never cracked a smile, or showed any enthusiasm,” Falk said to him.
“I had my business face on,” Jordan answered, and with that Falk had a quick sense that he was dealing with more than just another bright, talented athlete, that there were dimensions to this young man that he was still to learn.” (145)

“As Jordan smiled, race simply fell away. Michael was no longer a black man, he was just someone you wanted to be with, someone you wanted as your friend. The smile was truly charismatic, Moore reflected in later years. It belonged to a man completely comfortable with himself and therefore comfortable with others.” (146)

“Jordan was the first player at every practice and the last to leave, the hardest-working NBa practice player any of them had ever seen.” (152)

“The love could not be coached or faked, and it was something he always had. He was joyous about practices, joyous about games, as if he could not wait for either.” (153)

“Opposing teams got the killer, and the fans watching the Nike commercials got the charmer, a man of humor and intelligence, someone everyone seemed to like. “We broke i open, and we did it not by brilliance, but by sensing what felt right, and showing him as a human being,” Riswold said years later.” (182)

“Phil Jackson was also very smart, one step ahead of them at almost all times, and they knew they could not con him. The fact that he was not easily predictable was an asset, Rosen thought. It kept the players interested.” (194)

“Winning teams, Isiah Thomas decided, always saw themselves as being apart, taking on the rest of the world. If they did not have enemies who were trying to take away what was rightfully theirs, then they invented enemies in order to help push themselves toward their goals.” (237)

“Daly did not push it that evening, he simply told Isiah to think about it, and take a couple of days before he made up his mind, knowing that the very force that drove Thomas to this point of desperation, the passion to compete and win, would keep him in the game, that his disappointment and depression were the other side of the coin of love of the game and the need to excel.” (240)

“If there was one critical quality to coaching in the NBA, it was the ability to let go, to accept the occasional defeat on nights when you knew your team should have won.” (247)

“Whom the tabloids first inflate, they eventually attempt to destroy, or at least try to diminish.” (322)

“But when his pessimism was at its greatest, he would drive past a playground and watch a bunch of kids playing even as darkness fell, and he could envision the young B.J. Armstrong playing into the night and dreaming of playing in the NBA. Then he would remember tha the had been lucky enough to live out his dream.” (330)

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I recently read “The Education Of A Coach” by David Halberstam. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Belichick’s general defensive philosophy was simple: Find out what the other guys do best – which is what they always want to do, especially under pressure in a big game – take it away from them, and make them do things that they are uncomfortable with.” (3)

“But his ego was about the doing; it was fused into a larger purpose, that of his team winning. It was never about the narcissistic celebration of self that television loved to amplify.” (21)

“Some were completely seduced by fame, a sure sign that they would begin to slip in their chosen professions, and the rewards would quickly be pulled away. You could fall from celebrity in contemporary America almost as quickly as you had achieved it.” (23)

“Years later Bill Belichick would understand what made his father so good a scout: the absolute dedication to his craft, the belief that it was important, and the fact that so many people – the people who paid his salary, his colleagues, and the young men who played for him – were depending on him.” (72)

“What Bill Belichick remembered about his father in those years, perhaps the most important thing of all, something that lasted with him, was that he seemed to come home from work happy each night, a sign that he loved his work, and always seemed eager to go to work, and that the other mean, the men he worked with, obviously respected him greatly.” (80)

“He was saying that most scouts looked at other teams and thought that the most important thing was to find out what their weakness was, but the right way to do it was to search for their strengths and try to take that away from them, and make them do what they don’t want to do.” (82)

“He wanted the grunt work. He understood that the key to success, the secret to it, was the mastery of the grunt work, all the little details.” (110)

“Brady might not have Montana’s sheer natural ability in making reads, but he had driven himself so hard that superior preparation and superior instincts now were blended together.” (227)

“This is what the NFL was all about, that the better you were, the harder you worked.” (229)

“in the end the reward for what he and the staff and the players had done was the right to try and do it again under even more pressure.” (268)

“What sometimes bothered the media was that he was too straight, that he had so little in the way of artifice. “What’s interesting about him, and was judged a weakness in Cleveland,” Richmond said, “was that he did not play any games. There’s nothing fake, and there never was. He is what he is. There is no pretense, and he is utterly authentic in a world where because of television there is more and more which is inauthentic. What is troubling about all this is that a lot of people are more comfortable with the inauthentic, if it is reassuring, than they are with the truth, if it is not reassuring. He doesn’t play the role of the coach. Instead he is the coach.” (271)

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I recently read “Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success” by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“It takes a number of critical factors to win an NBA championship, including the right mix of talent, creativity, intelligence, toughness, and of course, luck. But if a team doesn’t have the most essential ingredient – love – none of those other factors matter.” (4)

“I discovered the more I spoke from the heart, the more the players could hear me and benefit from what I’d gleaned.” (12)

“I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became. I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority.” (12)

“If your primary objective is to bring the team into a state of harmony and oneness, it doesn’t make sense for you to rigidly impose your authority.” (13)

“You can’t force your will on people. If you want them to act differently, you need to inspire them to change themselves.” (13)

“When I had the players sit in silence, breathing together in sync, it helped align them on a nonverbal level far more effectively than words. One breath equal one mind.” (18)

“When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.” (22)

“Satchel Paige said, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.”” (23)

“The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome.” (23)

“I often reminded the players to focus on the journey rather than the endgame, because if you give the future all your attention, the present will pass you by.” (91)

“When I let him solve the problem himself, he was more likely to buy into the solution and not repeat the same counterproductive behavior in the future.” (96)

“At its heart, mindfulness is about being present in the moment as much as possible, not weighed down by thoughts of the past or the future.” (99)

“The mast nodded. “To hear the unheard,” he said “is necessary discipline to be a good ruler. For only when a ruler has learned to listen closely to the people’s hearts, hearing their feelings uncommunicated, pains unexpressed, and complaints not spoken of, can he hope to inspire confidence in the people, understand when something is wrong, and meet the true needs of his citizens.” (101)

“The most effective way to deal with anxiety, I’ve discovered, is to make sure that you’re as prepared as possible for whatever is coming your way.” (102)

“John Wood used to say that, “winning takes talent, to repeat takes character.” (110)

“John Heider stresses the importance of interfering as little as possible. “Rules reduce freedom and responsibility,” he writes. “Enforcement of rules is coercive and manipulative, which diminishes spontaneity and absorbs group energy. The more coercive you are, the more resistant the group will become.” (121)

“Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment.” (137)

“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.” – Steve Jobs (149)

“Instead of expecting them to be somewhere else and getting angry and trying to will them to that place, you try to meet them where they are and lead them where you want them to go.” (156)

“Everything is in flux. Until you accept this, you won’t be able to find true equanimity.” (168)

“There’s nothing like a humiliating loss to focus the mind.” (300)

“I tried to convey to him that the best way to get off the emotional roller coaster is to take the middle way and not get too high when you win or too low when your game fails you.” (303)

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I recently read “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human” by Jonathan Gottschall. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“In one study, they found that heavy fiction readers had better social skills – as measured by tests of social and empathic ability – than those who mainly read nonfiction.” (66)

“Fiction is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life.” (67)

“The left brain is a relentless explainer, and it would rather fabricate a story than leave something unexplained.” (99)

“In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.” (103)

“The world’s priests and shamans knew what psychology would later confirm: if you want a message to burrow into a human mind, work it into a story.” (118)

“Throughout most of our history, we’re taught myths. The myths tell us that not only are we the good guys, but we are the smartest, boldest, best guys that ever were.” (125)

“We won’t go along [with a story] if someone tries to tell us that bad is good, and good is bad.” (129)

“Storytellers never ask us to approve. Morally repellent acts are a great staple of fiction, but so is the storyteller’s condemnation.” (130)

“It’s worth remembering that until recently, storytellers who attacked group values faced real risks. For tens of thousands of years before the invention of the book, story was an exclusively oral medium.” (133)

“In Appel’s study, people who mainly watched drama and comedy on TV – as opposed to heavy viewers of news programs and documentaries – had substantially stronger “just-world” beliefs.” (136)

“Appel concludes that fiction, by constantly marinating our brains in the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the overly optimistic sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place. And yet the fact that we take this lesson to heart may be an important part of what makes human societies work.” (136)

“IF the movie is good, the people will respond to it like a single organism. They will flinch together, gasp together, roar with laughter together, choke up together. A film takes a motley association of strangers and syncs them up. It choreographs how they feel and what they think, how fast their hearts beat, how hard they breathe, and how much they perspire. A film melds minds. It imposes emotional and psychic unity. Until the light come up and the credits roll, a film makes people one.” (136)

“Until the past few centuries, story was always an intensely communal activity.” (136)

“Tolstoy believed that an artist’s job is to “infect” his audience with his own ideas and emotions – “the stronger the infection, the better is the art as art.” (149)

“In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence.” (150)

“We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard.” (152)

“Researchers found that memory was much less trustworthy than anyone had previously suspected.” (167)

“The past, like the future, does not really exist. They are both fantasies created in our minds. The future is a probabilistic simulation we run in our heads in order to help shape the world we want to live in. The past, unlike the future, has actually happened. But the past, as represented in our minds, is a mental simulation, too. Our memories are not precise records of what actually happened. They are reconstructions of what happened, and many of the details – small and large – are unreliable.” (169)

“We misremember the past in a way that allows us to maintain protagonist status in the stories of our own lives.” (170)

“William Hirstein writes, ‘The truth is depressing. We are going to die, most likely after illness; all our friends will likewise die; we are tiny insignificant dots on a tiny planet. Perhaps with the advent of broad intelligence and foresight comes the need for… self-deception to keep depression and its consequent lethargy at bay.” (175)

“Novelists who target highbrow readers shouldn’t complain when those are the only readers they get.” (179)

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