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Beat the Competition: Attack Every Challenge, with Shane Battier, ESPN commentator and former NBA player
My entire career, people counted me out because I didn’t fit the typical mold. First of all, I wasn’t a very high jumper. Not very fast, not very quick. Literally at every point in my career be it in sixth grade, in high school, in college, in the NBA, people said, “Oh Battier, he’s not going to make it. He’s not athletic enough. He can’t jump very high. Not very fast.” And people always looked at my physical limitations as the reason why I wasn’t going to make it. Well, they always underestimated two things. My heart, my heart and my head. And I knew that even though my physical skills may not be on paper what my competitions were, they couldn’t match me in between the ears right here. And so I knew that was my advantage if my body was my disadvantage. And so, my last few years in the NBA I was a power forward, you know. Every single night I had to go guard guys that were sometimes 50 to 60 pounds heavier than me. I’m 6’8″, 215, 16 pounds. And I got matched up with guys that were 6’8″ to 7’ from 240 pounds to 290 pounds. And they just beat the crap out of me every single night. It wasn’t the most fun, but it was an amazing challenge because I knew every time I stepped on the court the guys I was guarding who outweighed me by 40, 50 pounds looked at me just with such disdain and said, “there’s no way this guy’s going to guard me.” But I was armed with an incredible will and I knew my opponents games better than they knew their games. I knew their strengths. I knew their weaknesses and I knew how to position myself to take away their strengths. And so even though I was the smallest guy on the court for my position and I was slow and I was unathletic, I was the starting member of two NBA world championship teams. And that’s something I am proud of and I turned what was a perceived weakness on paper for our team into an incredible source of strength and that’s something I’m very proud of.
I’m a huge believer in Carol Dweck’s growth mindset theory. There are two types of people out there. People who believe what is is and people who believe that you basically can learn anything if you have enough stick-to-itiveness and open-mindedness. I like to think I’m a member of the growth mindset community– that there’s no problem too big, that you can’t solve, you know, without obviously hard work and dedication. But never rationalizing. Never rationalizing and thinking of reasons why something won’t work or can’t work. It sounds a little Pollyannaish, but I wouldn’t be here today if I accepted some of the circumstances that I was given in my life. You find a way. Find a way and you get it done and you move on.
I’m a strong believer – and I played for Coach Mike Krzyzewski. He taught us maybe the most important lesson that I learned in four years at Duke University. The importance of the next play. The importance of the next play. And he used a basketball analogy. If you have a great play and you go behind the back and you go up and you have a great dunk and you’re on national TV and the whole arena’s going crazy, what do you do? You start beating your chest, you know, pointing to your girlfriend in the stands, grandstanding. No. You get your tail back on defense and can you do it again? Can you do it again? Can you do to the play again, you know. On the other end of the spectrum, you have a terrible play. You make a boneheaded play. You throw the ball out of bounds. Everyone’s laughing at you. Your girlfriend’s laughing at you. National television is laughing at you. What do you do? Do you sit on the court and start crying and put your head down? No. You move onto the next play. You go back on the other end and you try to make up for it. It’s a simplistic metaphor that you use, but it’s applicable in every walk of life. How you respond to success and how you respond to failure is everything. It’s everything. And do you attack the next opportunity, the next problem, the next challenge with the same vigor, enthusiasm, passion, dedication that you previously gave to your failure or success, is what makes you successful. And people who can learn to go on to the next play, the next challenge with that same, you know, attacking, enthusiastic, passionate mindset, you’re going to be successful. Because anyone can hit a homerun every now and then. But can you hit 40 homeruns in a year? The people who do that are able to move on to the next challenge regardless of the outcome.