When The Coach Quits

The coach doesn’t quit because suddenly there’s a distaste for teaching and mentoring and pursuing a common goal and the high’s of winning and the shared heartbreak of losing.

The coach quits when the things that distract from the things mentioned above get too loud…the complainy parents, the too nosy athletic director, school and coaching politics and bureaucracy.

Our own pursuits are probably similar…

It’s not that the good parts go bad…it’s that other things infiltrate the good parts and make the good parts harder to focus on, harder to keep at the top of the priority list, harder to derive positive energy from.

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Strategies For Not Feeling Like It

What are your strategies for overcoming not feeling like it? Strategies for getting into it?

The good thing is…if you know your strategies then you can get better and faster at them. And as you get better and faster you’ll become more efficient and effective with time and opportunities.

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Dolly and Moshing

Dolly doesn’t get off stage wondering why there wasn’t a mosh pit.

For the rest of us…

Too often we internalize an expectation when what we’re building isn’t made to fulfill it.

Too often we internalize expectations that don’t match up with what we’re building and therefore won’t ever be fulfilled…unless we change what we’re building…or change our expectations.

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Tolkien Editing

There’s a copy of The Lord of The Rings trilogy in our living room. All three books in one. It’s a big book. Over five hundred thousand words…I looked it up.

I like to imagine that because there were so many words and so much writing (and so much less bureaucracy back then) that there are large passages of the book that are completely unedited…he thought of it, wrote it down and that’s exactly how we read it today. He’s alone at his desk scribbling away on a section and never touched it again until putting it into the now legendary final manuscript. I love that thought.

These days organizing and editing are so much easier and cheaper. Wonderful tools.

AND we’re taught that the first draft couldn’t possibly be the final draft. How could we be that good? We don’t believe we could be. And we use editing as a crutch when deep down we already know whether it’s good enough.

The biggest trick in the conversation of editing is to put in the work and raise the bar from the outset. That’s why Tolkien could write pages of a classic without ever going back and editing them…he’d already done the work and raised the bar. He knew his instincts were sharp. He knew how to identify quality and effectiveness at the moment of creation.

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The First Note

Your best chance is to win them over is on the first note.

If you don’t, it becomes harder (not impossible by any stretch, just harder). So the first note being a winning note has a lot more to do with what you do beforehand and who you are as you get on stage than the first note itself.

It’s a lot more fun to walk on stage WITH a magical first note than to merely hope you have one once you get up there.

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Saturday Deadline

It’s clear that people who have been on Saturday Night Live love talking about it…all th laughs and all the torment.

But the foundation of it all, the only thing that makes it worth anything is the deadline. If not for the Saturday night deadline there wouldn’t be SNL lore.

The deadline makes it sweaty and risky and magical and meaningful. The deadline is the shared enemy and the shared secret sauce.

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