And then there’s also a line I took from Patti Smith’s Instagram, a comment she sent to somebody who had just lost someone to suicide: “Please think the best of him.” I found it incredibly moving. I was just obsessed with her kindness and her wisdom in the face of so many sad things.
Beautiful.
were right, and for the right reasons (think Bill Belichick’s famous 4thdown decision against Indianapolis in 2009 which summarizes to: gooddecision, didn’t wor
Are we right for the right reasons and are we the most right we possibly can be? Or are we right, but not right enough?
“I am not attuned to this environment, and I don’t want to spoil a decent record by trying to play a game I don’t understand just so I can go out a hero.”
Just an excellent story.
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From here on it will get more basketball focused, still good, but less stand-out insights for TLB that jump off the page.
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die
We should concentrate our efforts in a few key areas in ways others had proven unwilling. We should attempt to gain a competitive advantage that had a chance to be lasting, hopefully one unforeseen enough by our competition to leapfrog them from a seemingly disadvantaged position.A goal that lofty is anything but certain. And it sure doesn’t come from those that are content to color within the lines.
I think we're beginning to color outside the lines w/ EP.
Some tradition awaits us everyday at the office. I inherited Marlene Barnes as my executive assistant, a widowed lifelong Philadelphian that joined the Sixers in the fall of 1977. I was born in the winter of 1977. Marlene has worked for 11 different GMs and 5 head coachesat the Sixers. The names evoke many memories for you lifelong Sixers fans and students of history like me: Pat Williams, John Nash, Gene Shue, Jim Lynam, John Lucas, Brad Greenberg, Larry Brown, Billy King, Ed Stefanski, Rod Thorn. With us, she was immediately thrown into a new, more entrepreneurial work environment with a boss full ofquirks different than any she had ever encountered. She adapted wonderfully, and now is a regular Slack wizard along with much of our staff, has seamlessly plugged into one productivity hack after another, and has ordered more books from Amazon than she ever thought possible. Herpresence served as an everyday reminder to me of the impermanence of my leadership. I told her within a few weeks of working together that when I see her in the mornings I’m reminded that I am a steward—today’ssteward—of her Sixers.
Incredible reminder. For Sam, he was a steward of Marlene's sixers. For me, I'm trying to be the best steward possible of Beth's TLB. I see how much it matters to her and how much she believes in it and I find that incredibly moving and motivating.
“So if we want to think like a scientist more often in life, those are the three key objectives—to be humbler about what we know, more confident about what’s possible, and less afraidof things that don’t matter.”
Are we willing to identify what doesn't matter (I think we are) and pay less attention to them? Are we brave enough to say "this is what we really are about? (We are.)
s, it is annoyingly necessary to get comfortable with many grades of mayb
The greyness of maybe.
Phil Tetlock, from just down the street at Penn, addresses this well in his most recent remarkable book Superforecastingwhere he quotes the great Amos Tversky saying, “In dealing with probabilities...most people only have three settings: “gonna happen,” “not gonna happen,” and “maybe”.”Jeff Van Gundy sums it up succinctly on our telecasts, “it’s a make or miss league.”He’s right.
Are we comfortable with maybe? And can we weather the storm of maybe?
There has to be a willingness to tolerate counterarguments, hopefully in such a way that you can truly understand and summarize the other side’s arguments at least as well as they can. And then, after all that, still have the conviction to separate yourself from the herd.
Do we understand why other products do it the way they do?
What player do you think is most undervalued? Get him for your team. What basketball axiom is most likely to be untrue? Take it on and do the opposite. What is the biggest, least valuable time sink for the organization? Stop doing it. Otherwise, it’s a big game of pitty pat, and you’re stuck just hoping for good things to happen, rather than developing a strategy for how to make them happen
Finding inefficiencies and efficiencies and finding advantages that will be lasting.
To develop truly contrarian views will require a never-ending thirst for better, more diverse input
Importance of diversity. I think we get this.
Howard Marks describes this as a necessary condition of great performance: you have to be non-consensus and right. Both. That means you have to find some way to have a differentiated viewpoint from the masses. And it needs to be right. Anything less won’t work
On being non-consensus and right, nothing less.
to take the long view has an unintuitive advantage built in—fewer competitors. Here’s Warren Buffett in the late 80s on this topic: “In any sort of a contest—financial, mental, or physical—it’s an enormous advantage tohave opponents who have been taught that it's useless to even tr
The importance of the long view - fewer competitors.
4Jeff Bezos says that if Amazon has a good quarter it’s because of work they did 3, 4, 5 years ago—not because they did a good job that quarte
Right on the money here.
the first innovationoften isn’t even all that helpful, but may well provide a path to ones that ar
This is a crucial insight I think. What have we learned from our first innovation that we can use to inform future innovation?
You don’t have a wobbly understanding of just the things you got wrong, but the things you got right but not right enough. Listen to Charlie Munger talk about how he and Berkshire Hathaway should be measured not by their success, but by how much more successful they would have been ifthey bought more of something: “We should have bought moreCoke.”
"Right but not right enough."
3We talk a great deal about being curious, not critical. About asking the question until you understand something truly. About not being afraid to ask the obvious question that everyone else seems to know the answer to. And about the willingness to say three simple words, “I don’t know.”Tesla’s Elon Musk describes his everyday stance as, “You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wr
What are we wrong about in education? And what are we doing at TLB to help educators be less wrong? I think we've been on this track since the beginning.
To do this requires you to divorce process from outcome. You can be right for the wrong reasons. In our business, you’re often lionized for it. You can be wrong for the right reasons
We're right w/ EP. Are we right for the right reasons? And are we the most right we can be?
let’s stand on the shoulders of Charlie Munger, a giant to me. He is a man that’s been thinking about thinking longer than I’vebeen alive. Let’s start with him and his approach. His two-part technique is:1.First, what are the factors that really govern the interests involved, rationally considered?2.Second, what are the subconscious influences where the brain at a subconscious level is automatically doing these things—which by and large are useful, but which often malfunctions?
Removing cognitive glitches.
Whenever possible, I think cross-pollinating ideas from other contexts is far, far better than attempting to solve our problems in basketball as if no one has ever faced anything
Yup.
A league with 30 intense competitors requires a culture of finding new, better ways to solve repeating problems
This is something I think we're trying to solve for our clients. Each grade has repeating problems, and we are trying to find ways to them.
having the longest view in the room
The importance of having a long view is something he'll come back to later. Something I try to remind myself of often.
If you want to have real success you have to very oftenbe willing to do something different from the herd.
On being willing to stand alone and be different.
Excellent Howard Marks quote:
"The question is not, do you dare to be great? The question is, do you dare to be different? To diverge from the pack is required if you're going to be a superior in anything. Number two, do you dare to be wrong? Number three, do you dare to look wrong? Because even things which are going to be right in the long run, maybe look wrong in the short run. So you have to be willing to live with all those three different things, different, wrong, and looking wrong, in order to be able to take the risk required and engage in the idiosyncratic behavior required for success."