The Value of Hard Work

UCONN guard Shabazz Napier on what made former teammate and NBA lottery pick Kemba Walker so good:

"I won't say I can replicate what he did. But one thing he taught me and the rest of our team is the value of hard work. You go out there and give it your all no matter what. Every practice we had, he practiced like he was a guy that was trying to make the team. He's the star of our team, but you looked over at him and he was always pressing himself, challenging himself. It was like he was a walk-on."

Rebounding and more from Bill Russell

*To succeed you can't play any other way than with passion. We enjoy the game more because of what we put into it.

*I didn't have to rely on extraordinary inner resources, flashes of inspiration, to tell me to get my body where it had to go. My objective was clear. I wanted to make sure of the rebound.

*The guy who insists on going up as high as he can every time is reacting -and losing- rather than taking a specific positive action necessary to accomplish what he wants. Most of my rebounds came from positioning, where I was able to get the ball while in heavy traffic.

*To me, knowing how to act is everything. You cannot just throw yourself at at problem and expect to succeed. You cannot win the NBA championship on the first day of the season. It has to be won at every practice, every meeting, each and every game on the schedule. During the season, you learn to master all the important skills needed to get you to the championship game.

Talent is not enough

"I think we have a shot with talent. Talent doesn’t mean anything. Talent never won any games. Hard work (does)."

-Tim Tebow

Going hard in everything you do

Good article in the USA Today about K-State head football coach Bill Snyder. He is a good quote from OT Nick Stringer, one of a handful of players left from the previous Snyder era:

A lot of guys came to us. They'd heard stories about practices and workouts and how hard he used to work and the things we used to. They asked us if it was true, and we were like, 'Yeah, but it pays off.'."

Take the simple 40-yard sprint. "You run 42 yards through the line, not running 39 and coasting the last one. Stuff like that," Stringer says. "That's when you get better, when you're going as hard as you can in every rep in everything you're doing."

Talent is Not Enough

Morris Peterson (former Spartan 2000 National Champion and current NBA player) speaking about this past years' Michigan State team:

"You can tell just from watching them that they care about each other," "Talent can get you so far -- it's your work ethic that makes a difference. Those guys work hard."

-

Kevin Eastman's 3 terms for today's players to understand

Hard Work
-It is the price of admission
-If you don't work hard you don't get on the floor
-Everyone works hard so hard work won't seperate you. It will get you in the door

Competitveness
-Most are competitive once they seperate from a group
-Inside Determination
-Desire to win anything you are involved in

Committed
-This is an elite group (Steve Nash, Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, etc.)
-People talk about it but don't understand it
-Think about what it takes to be great
-Everyday trying to get better, think long term, never have arrived

Going hard all the time

Big Ten defensive player of the year Travis Walton of Michigan State had the assignment of guarding North Carolina's Wayne Ellington. Walton had no answer for Ellington in UNC's victory. Here is what Walton said about the Carolina guard:

"He's a great player," Walton said. "He comes off screens hard. He gave you different looks. He stayed low to the ground. He's long. He exploded. He's got one speed, and it's going hard all the time -- even if he's missing shots. I watched film of him, and I was kind of surprised when he wasn't playing as well, he was still going hard, elevating on his jump shot. When he was in his hot streak, it's tough to guard a player like that. Today was his night."

Two Pains: By Kevin Eastman

From Celtics Coach Kevin Eastman:

The Pain of Discipline

Being disciplined is a great characteristic to have, but a difficult one to maintain over time. It’s not easy to work out day after day after day. It’s not easy to get in the weight room day after day after day. It’s not easy to do go to work and grind it out day after day. There is a pain factor involved — physical pain, mental fatigue (brought on by boredom of doing the same hard things over and over again), emotional pain from sometimes working your tail off every day and not being successful. The types and intensity of the pains will vary, but the constant is that they will be there!

In our careers it’s not easy to keep reading and studying the books, articles and reports or to continue to figure out how to become a better coach, salesperson, manager, CEO. Success is a disciplined process, not an overnight miracle.

Speaking from personal experience with our team last year, I think one of the reasons for our success was that we were willing to recognize and deal with that pain, to work through that pain, to invest in and commit to the grinding process that you have to go through to become successful in any meaningful challenge. For every NBA team, that challenge is to become the World Champions!

The Pain of Regret

Simply put, when all is said and done, if you haven’t invested in the discipline needed to be successful, you will look back and regret not having done everything within your control to make the outcome a successful one. This is the ultimate pain of regret. We know lots of people who do this — the ones who are constantly saying things like, ”I wish I had…” rather than ”I’m glad I did…”

So you, your team, your company all have a choice — do you choose the pain of discipline and continue to do everything possible (whether it hurts or not) to become successful? Or do you choose to shortcut things? Maybe you aren’t consistent in your energy and enthusiasm, or maybe you don’t maintain the focus needed to succeed. In any case, if you don’t choose the pain of discipline, you will regret it.

An excerpt from “Values of the Game” by Bill Bradley

The need for discipline applies first to conditioning. It’s painful and grueling, but there’s no alternative. You can’t lead the fast break or tear down 20 rebounds a game if you can’t run and jump without fatigue. Getting into shape and pushing the body to new levels every day is a mental activity. When you believe that you can’t do another lap or another push-up or another abdominal crunch, your mind forces you to go ahead. When your wind is short and you have a pain in your side from running, only your mind can get you to withstand the pain and go on. As UCLA’s legendary coach John Wooden says, “Nothing will work unless you do.”

I used to hate getting into shape no matter which routines I followed- laps, line drills, playing one on one full court, running the floor while passing the ball back and forth with two teammates. After six weeks of agony, during which every part of my body ached so badly that many mornings I crawled from bed to bathroom to soak in a hot tub, the pain began to diminish and the muscles started to come around. When you train seriously for basketball, you learn the difference between getting into condition and getting into condition. In the lesser of those two states, you can run up and down the floor and do what you have to do without the interference of fatigue. But you’re not really in peak condition until you can cruise when others push. When your body is honed, you can run your opponents around and around, with little immediate purpose beyond tiring them out, making them angry, or distracting them from any defensive concentration.

My toughest opponent, John Havlicek of the Boston Celtics, was a true genius when it came to using conditioning as a weapon. His goal was to get his opponent to give up, to stop overcoming fatigue, to stop pushing himself. Havlicek saw it as a matter of who gives up first. “You’ll pass out before you’re overworked, bust most people don’t know that,” he once told Orlando Magic senior executive vice president Pat Williams. “They think they’re overworked, so they stop. They could have kept going, but they didn’t. They weren’t beat physically; they were beat mentally.”