Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success By Phil Jackson 

 

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.-RUMI

1 THE CIRCLE OF LOVE 

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar. JIM BUTCHER

“What moves me is watching young men bond together and tap into the magic that arises when they focus—with their whole heart and soul—on something greater than themselves. Once you’ve experienced that, it’s something you never forget.”

• Circle of love. That’s not the way most basketball fans think of their sport. But after more than forty years involved in the game at the highest level, both as a player and as a coach, I can’t think of a truer phrase to describe the mysterious alchemy that joins players together and unites them in pursuit of the impossible.
• 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.
• Kobe, who had been named the NBA’s most valuable player that year, was particularly laser-focused. I’ve always been impressed by Kobe’s resilience and ironclad self-confidence. Unlike Shaq, who was often plagued by self-doubt, Kobe never let such thoughts cross his mind. If someone set the bar at ten feet, he’d jump eleven, even if no one had ever done it before. That’s the attitude he brought with him when he arrived at training camp that fall, and it had a powerful impact on his teammates.

Tribal Leadership

• Tribal Leadership, management consultants Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright lay out the five stages of tribal development, which they formulated after conducting extensive research on small to midsize organizations. Although basketball teams are not officially tribes, they share many of the same characteristics and develop along much the same lines:
  • STAGE 1—shared by most street gangs and characterized by despair, hostility, and the collective belief that “life sucks.” 
  • STAGE 2—filled primarily with apathetic people who perceive themselves as victims and who are passively antagonistic, with the mindset that “my life sucks.” Think The Office on TV or the Dilbert comic strip.
  • STAGE 3—focused primarily on individual achievement and driven by the motto “I’m great (and you’re not).” According to the authors, people in organizations at this stage “have to win, and for them winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of ‘lone warriors.’” 
  • STAGE 4—dedicated to tribal pride and the overriding conviction that “we’re great (and they’re not).” This kind of team requires a strong adversary, and the bigger the foe, the more powerful the tribe.
  • STAGE 5—a rare stage characterized by a sense of innocent wonder and the strong belief that “life is great.” (See Bulls, Chicago, 1995–98.)

Shifting Culture

• The rules change when you move from one culture to another. That’s why the so-called universal principles that appear in most leadership textbooks rarely hold up. In order to shift a culture from one stage to the next, you need to find the levers that are appropriate for that particular stage in the group’s development.
• I can’t pretend to be an expert in leadership theory. But what I do know is that the art of transforming a group of young, ambitious individuals into an integrated championship team is not a mechanistic process. It’s a mysterious juggling act that requires not only a thorough knowledge of the time-honored laws of the game but also an open heart, a clear mind, and a deep curiosity about the ways of the human spirit.

 

2 THE JACKSON ELEVEN 

You can’t break the rules until you know how to play the game. RICKI LEE JONES

Mindful Leadership Rules 

• The basic principles of mindful leadership that I’ve evolved over the years to help transform disorganized teams into champions. You won’t find any lofty management theories here. With leadership, as with most things in life, the best approach is always the simplest.

1. LEAD FROM THE INSIDE OUT

• As an adult, I’ve tried to break free from that early conditioning and develop a more open-minded, personally meaningful way of being in the world.
• In my quest to come to terms with my own spiritual yearning, I experimented with a wide range of ideas and practices, from Christian mysticism to Zen meditation and Native American rituals. Eventually, I arrived at a synthesis that felt authentic to me. And though at first, I worried that my players might find my unorthodox views a little wacky, as time went by I discovered that the more I spoke from the heart, the more the players could hear me and benefit from what I’d gleaned.
• All journeys in life are inner… 

2. BENCH THE EGO

• I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became (very Tao Te Ching). I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority. Paradoxically, this approach strengthened my effectiveness because it freed me to focus on my job as keeper of the team’s vision.
• Some coaches insist on having the last word, but I always tried to foster an environment in which everyone played a leadership role, from the most unschooled rookie to the veteran superstar. 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.

3. LET EACH PLAYER DISCOVER HIS OWN DESTINY 

• One thing I’ve learned as a coach is that you can’t force your will on people. If you want them to act differently, you need to inspire them to change themselves.
• I’ve always been interested in getting players to think for themselves so that they can make difficult decisions in the heat of battle. Michael Jordan used to call the team’s collective “think power.”
• My approach was always to relate to each player as a whole person, not just as a cog in the basketball machine. That meant pushing him to discover what distinct qualities he could bring to the game beyond taking shots and making passes. How much courage did he have? Or resilience? What about a character under fire?

4. THE ROAD TO FREEDOM IS A BEAUTIFUL SYSTEM

• When I joined the Bulls in 1987 as an assistant coach, my colleague Tex Winter taught me a system, known as the triangle offense, that aligned perfectly with the values of selflessness and mindful awareness I’d been studying in Zen Buddhism.
• What attracted me to the triangle was the way it empowers the players, offering each one a vital role to play as well as a high level of creativity within a clear, well-defined structure.
• With the triangle, you can’t stand around and wait for the Michael Jordans and Kobe Bryants of the world to work their magic. All five players must be fully engaged every second—or the whole system will fail. That stimulates an ongoing process of group problem-solving in real-time, not just on a coach’s clipboard during time-outs. When the triangle is working right, it’s virtually impossible to stop it because nobody knows what’s going to happen next, not even the players themselves.

5. TURN THE MUNDANE INTO THE SACRED

• As I see it, my job as a coach was to make something meaningful out of one of the most mundane activities on the planet: playing pro basketball. Despite all the glamour surrounding the sport, the process of playing day after day in one city after another can be a soul-numbing exercise. That’s why I started incorporating meditation into practices. I wanted to give players something besides X’s and O’s to focus on. What’s more, we often invented rituals of our own to infuse practices with a sense of the sacred.
• We used to perform a ritual that I borrowed from football great Vince Lombardi. As the players formed a row on the baseline, I’d ask them to commit to being coached that season, saying, “God has ordained me to coach you young men, and I embrace the role I’ve been given. If you wish to accept the game I embrace and follow my coaching, as a sign of your commitment, step across that line.” The wonder of wonders, they always did it. We did this in a fun way, but with serious intent. The essence of coaching is to get the players to wholeheartedly agree to be coached, then offer them a sense of their destiny as a team.

6. ONE BREATH=ONE MIND

• To get the players to settle down, I introduced them to one of the tools I’d used successfully with the Bulls: mindfulness meditation.
• Though mindfulness meditation has its roots in Buddhism, it’s an easily accessible technique for quieting the restless mind and focusing attention on whatever is happening in the present moment. This is extremely useful for basketball players, who often have to make split-second decisions under enormous pressure. I also discovered that 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 equals one mind.
• Another aspect of Buddhist teachings that has influenced me is the emphasis on openness and freedom. The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki likened the mind to a cow in a pasture. If you enclose the cow in a small yard, it will become nervous and frustrated and start eating the neighbor’s grass. But if you give it a large pasture to roam around in, it will be more content and less likely to break loose.
• I’ve also found that Suzuki’s metaphor can be applied to managing a team. If you place too many restrictions on players, they’ll spend an inordinate amount of time trying to buck the system. Like all of us, they need a certain degree of structure in their lives, but they also require enough latitude to express themselves creatively.- “Create structure so you can have freedom. Create your weather so you can blow in the wind. Map your direction so you can swerve in the lanes. Clean up so you can get dirty. Choreograph, then dance. Learn to read and write before you start making up words. Check if the pool has water in it before you dive in. Learn to sail before you fly.”

7. THE KEY TO SUCCESS IS COMPASSION 

• In his new adaptation of the Chinese sacred text Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell offers a provocative take on Lao-tzu’s approach to leadership: I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. 
• These three are the greatest treasures. 
  • Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being. 
  • Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. 
  • Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world. Compassion has been the most important. I think it’s essential for athletes to learn to open their hearts so that they can collaborate with one another in a meaningful way.

8. KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE SPIRIT, NOT ON THE SCOREBOARD

• Management guru Stephen Covey tells this old Japanese tale about a samurai warrior and his three sons: 
  • The samurai wanted to teach his sons about the power of teamwork. So he gave each of them an arrow and asked them to break it. No problem. Each son did it easily. Then the samurai gave them a bundle of three arrows bound together and asked them to repeat the process. But none of them could. “That’s your lesson,” the samurai said. “If you three stick together, you will never be defeated.”
• When a player isn’t forcing a shot or trying to impose his personality on the team, his gifts as an athlete most fully manifest. Paradoxically, by playing within his natural abilities, he activates a higher potential for the team that transcends his own limitations and helps his teammates transcend theirs. When this happens, the whole begins to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
• Most coaches get tied up in knots worrying about tactics, but I preferred to focus my attention on whether the players were moving together in a spirited way.
• My confidence grew out of knowing that when the spirit was right and the players were attuned to one another, the game was likely to unfold in our favor.

9. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO PULL OUT THE BIG STICK

• In the strictest form of Zen, monitors roam the meditation hall, striking sleeping or listless meditators with a flat wooden stick, called a keisaku, to get them to pay attention. This is not intended as punishment. In fact, the keisaku is sometimes referred to as a “compassionate stick.” The purpose of the blow is to reinvigorate the meditator and make him or her more awake at the moment.
• Once I had the Bulls practice in silence; on another occasion, I made them scrimmage with the lights out. I like to shake things up and keep the players guessing. Not because I want to make their lives miserable but because I want to prepare them for the inevitable chaos that occurs the minute they step onto a basketball court. Similar to Josh Waitzkin’s principle “being at peace in the chaos”, “Because we ultimately don’t want to be meditating in a flower garden. We want to be able to meditate and have a meditative state throughout our lives – in a hurricane, in a thunderstorm, when sharks are attacking you – any moment.”
• Jackson’s advice to Luke Walton about becoming a coach “I know you’re thinking about becoming a coach someday. I think that’s a good idea, but coaching isn’t all fun and games. Sometimes no matter how nice a guy you are, you’re going to have to be an asshole. You can’t be a coach if you need to be liked.”

10. WHEN IN DOUBT, DO NOTHING 

• Basketball is an action sport, and most people involved in it are high-energy individuals who love to do something—anything—to solve problems. However, there are occasions when the best solution is to do absolutely nothing.
• On a deeper level, I believe that focusing on something other than the business at hand can be the most effective way to solve complex problems. When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.
• “The unconscious mind is a terrific solver of complex problems when the conscious mind is busy elsewhere or, perhaps better yet, not overtaxed at all.” That’s why I subscribe to the philosophy of the late Satchel Paige, who said, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.”

11. FORGET THE RING

• And yet as a coach, I know that being fixated on winning (or more likely, not losing) is counterproductive, especially when it causes you to lose control of your emotions. What’s more, obsessing about winning is a loser’s game: The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.
• That’s why at the start of every season I always encouraged players to focus on the journey rather than the goal. What matters most is playing the game the right way and having the courage to grow, as human beings as well as basketball players. When you do that, the ring takes care of itself.

 

3 RED 

The greatest carver does the least cutting. LAO-TZU

• Red Holzman was a master of simplicity. He didn’t espouse any particular system, nor did he stay up all night inventing plays. He had two simple rules, which he shouted from the sidelines during every game: 
  • See the ball. Red focused much more attention on defense in practice because he believed that a strong defense was the key to everything. In Red’s view, awareness was the secret to good defense. He stressed keeping your eye on the ball at all times and being acutely attuned to what was happening on the floor.
  • Hit the open man. If Red were coaching today, he would be appalled at how self-absorbed the game has become. For him, selflessness was the holy grail of basketball. “This isn’t rocket science,” he would proclaim, adding that the best offensive strategy was to keep the ball moving among all five players to create shooting opportunities and make it hard for the other team to focus on one or two shooters.

• One thing that fascinated me about Red was how much of the offense he turned over to the players. He let us design many of the plays and actively sought out our thinking about what moves to make in critical games. Red listened intently to what the players had to say because he knew we had more intimate knowledge of what was happening on the floor than he did.
• He instituted what he called “silly fines” for tardiness and banished from practices everybody who wasn’t on the team, including the press. He ran tough, disciplined practices focused primarily on defense. “Practice doesn’t make perfect,” he used to say. “Perfect practice does.”
• Although he was more accessible than other coaches, he felt it was important to maintain a certain distance from the players because he knew that someday he might have to cut or trade one of us.

Pregame Rituals 

• Another lesson I learned was about the importance of pregame rituals. But there’s only so much a player can absorb when his body is pulsing with adrenaline. This is not a good time for deep left-brain discussions. It’s the moment to calm the players’ minds and strengthen their spiritual connection with one another before they head into battle.
• To make sure the subs were prepared mentally, he’d usually give them several minutes’ warning before putting them in the game. He also constantly goaded them to pay attention to the twenty-four-second clock, so they could jump in at any moment without missing a beat. Red made each player feel as if he had an important role on the team,

4 THE QUEST 

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. JOSEPH CAMPBELL

• My journey of self-discovery was filled with uncertainty but also alive with promise.
• When I was a child, I had a number of curious health issues. At age two or so, I developed a large growth on my throat that baffled doctors and caused my parents great concern. They treated it with penicillin and it eventually went away, but I grew up feeling that there was something about me that wasn’t quite right. Then, when I entered first grade, I was diagnosed with a heart murmur and was told to avoid physical activity for a whole year, which was pure torture for me because I was such an active kid.
• One night when I was about eleven or twelve, I was sick and battling a high fever. I was sleeping fitfully, when all of a sudden I heard a roar, like the sound of a railroad train, building and building until it grew so loud I thought the train was going to burst into my bedroom. The sensation was completely overpowering, but for some reason I wasn’t frightened. As the noise kept getting louder, I felt a powerful surge of energy radiating through my body that was much stronger and more all consuming than anything I’d ever experienced before. I don’t know where this power came from, but I awoke the next day feeling strong and confident and brimming with energy. The fever was gone, and after that my health improved dramatically and I rarely got colds or flus. However, the primary impact of this spontaneous experience was psychological, not physical. After that night I had a greater belief in myself and a quiet faith that everything was going to work out for the best. I also seemed to be able to tap into a new source of energy within myself that I hadn’t sensed before. From that point on, I felt confident enough to throw my whole mind, body, and soul into what I loved—and that, as much as anything, has been the secret of my success in sports.
• I’ve always wondered where that power came from and whether I could learn how to tap into it on my own, not just on the basketball court but in the rest of my life as well. That’s one of the things I was searching for as I set out on my journey of self-discovery. I didn’t know where I was going or what pitfalls I might stumble upon along the way. But I was encouraged by these lines from the Grateful Dead song “Ripple.” There is a road, no simple highway, Between the dawn and dark of night, And if you go no one may follow, That path is for your steps alone.
• What I liked about basketball was how interconnected everything was. The game was a complex dance of moves and countermoves that made it much more alive than other sports I played. In addition, basketball demanded a high level of synergy. To succeed, you needed to rely upon everybody else on the floor, not just yourself. That gave the sport a certain transcendent beauty that I found deeply satisfying.
• When I was in college, I had another rude spiritual awakening. I had been raised on the literal reading of the Bible. So when I was studying Darwin’s theory of evolution in biology class, it was disconcerting to learn that, according to the best estimates, humans had been walking upright on the planet for more than four million years. This revelation made me question a lot of what I’d been taught as a child and inspired me to try to resolve—in my own mind, at least—some of the inherent contradictions between religious dogma and scientific inquiry. I decided to shift my major from political science to a combination of psychology, religion, and philosophy. That gave me the opportunity to explore a wide range of spiritual approaches from both East and West.
• One of my early discoveries was Joel S. Goldsmith, an innovative author, mystic, and former Christian Science healer who had founded his own movement, known as the Infinite Way. What attracted me to his work was his wholesale rejection of organization, ritual, and dogma. In his view, spirituality was a personal journey, period, and he designed his talks so that they could be interpreted from a wide range of perspectives. I was especially intrigued by Goldsmith’s take on meditation, which he saw as a way to experience inner silence and plug into your intuitive wisdom. I’d always thought of meditation as a therapeutic technique for quieting the mind and feeling more balanced. But Goldsmith showed me that it could also be a substitute for prayer, a doorway to the divine.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

• I’d been interested in learning more about Zen ever since I’d read Shunryu Suzuki’s classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Suzuki, a Japanese teacher who played a key role in bringing Zen Buddhism to the West, talked about learning to approach each moment with a curious mind that is free of judgment. “If your mind is empty,” he writes, “it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
• What appealed to me about Zen practice was its inherent simplicity. It didn’t involve chanting mantras or visualizing complex images, as had other practices I’d tried. Zen is pragmatic, down-to-earth, and open to exploration. It doesn’t require you to subscribe to a certain set of principles or take anything on faith; in fact, Zen encourages practitioners to question everything. Zen teacher Steve Hagen writes, “Buddhism is about seeing. It’s about knowing rather than believing or hoping or wishing. It’s also about not being afraid to examine anything and everything, including your own personal agendas.”
• Shunryu Suzuki’s instructions on how to meditate are simple: Sit with your spine straight, your shoulders relaxed, and your chin pulled in, “as if you were supporting the sky with your head.” Follow your breath with your mind as it moves in and out like a swinging door. Don’t try to stop your thinking. If a thought arises, let it come, then let it go and return to watching your breath. The idea is not to try to control your mind but to let thoughts rise and fall naturally over and over again. After some practice, the thoughts will start to float by like passing clouds, and their power to dominate consciousness will diminish.
• It took me years of practice to still my busy mind, but in the process, I discovered that the more aware I became of what was going on inside me, the more connected I became to the world outside. I became more patient with others and calmer under pressure—qualities that helped me immensely when I became a coach.

3 Aspects of Zen to Help a Leader

• Three aspects of Zen have been critical to me as a leader: 
  • 1. GIVING UP CONTROL Suzuki writes, “If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. Let them come and let them go. Then they will be under control.” The best way to control people, he adds, is to give them a lot of room and encourage them to be mischievous, then watch them. “To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy,” he writes. “The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.”
  • 2. TRUSTING THE MOMENT– the only thing that really matters—this very moment. Practicing Zen not only helped me become more acutely aware of what was happening in the present moment but also slowed down my experience of time because it diminished my tendency to rush into the future or get lost in the past. Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about “dwelling happily in the present moment,” because that’s where everything you need is available. “Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, and the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.”
  • 3. LIVING WITH COMPASSION One aspect of Buddhism that I found to be especially compelling was the teachings on compassion. The Buddha was known as the “compassionate one,” and according to religion scholars, his moral teachings bear a close resemblance to those of Jesus, who told his followers at the Last Supper: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” In a similar vein, the Buddha said, “Just as a mother would protect her only child at the risk of her own life, even so, cultivate a boundless heart towards all beings. Let your thoughts of boundless love pervade the whole world.” In the Buddhist view, the best way to cultivate compassion is to be fully present in the moment. “To meditate,” said the Buddha, “is to listen with a receptive heart.” In her book Start Where You Are, Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron contends that meditation practice blurs the traditional boundaries between self and others. “What you do for yourself—any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself—will affect how you experience the world,” she writes. “What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.”

 

5 DANCES WITH BULLS

 Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you. CHARLIE PARKER

• I’ve always felt that there is a strong connection between music and basketball. The game is inherently rhythmic in nature and requires the same kind of selfless, nonverbal communication you find in the best jazz combos.
• Steve Lacy, who played with Thelonious Monk, set down a list of Monk’s advice for the members of his combo. Here’s a selection: 
  • Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time. 
  • Stop playing all those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody! 
  • Make the drummer sound good. 
  • Don’t play the piano part, I’m playing that. 
  • Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by . . . What you don’t play can be more important than what you do. 
  • When you’re swinging, swing some more. 
  • Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself. 
  • You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
• What I love about Monk’s list is his basic message about the importance of awareness, collaboration, and having clearly defined roles, which apply as much to basketball as they do to jazz. I discovered early that the best way to get players to coordinate their actions was to have them play the game in 4/4 time. The basic rule was that the player with the ball had to do something with it before the third beat: either pass, shoot, or start to dribble. When everyone is keeping time, it makes it easier to harmonize with one another, beat by beat.
• The triangle gets its name from one of its key features—a sideline triangle formed by three players on the “strong” side of the floor. But I prefer to think of the triangle as “five-man tai chi” because it involves all the players moving together in response to the way the defense positions itself.

When everyone is moving in harmony, it’s virtually impossible to stop them.

Developing a System

• Tex was a master at this. He had developed a whole series of drills to teach players how to execute fundamentals. He trained them to create the right amount of spacing between one another on the floor and to coordinate their movements according to a basic set of rules. As far as Tex was concerned, the genius was in the details, and it didn’t matter whether you were Michael Jordan or the lowest rookie on the team; Tex would badger you until you got it right.

• The genius was in the details. One thing I liked about Tex’s system, from a leadership perspective, was that it depersonalized criticism. It gave me the ability to critique the players’ performance without making them think I was attacking them personally.
• The beauty of the system—and this applies to all kinds of systems, not just the triangle—was that it turned the whole team into a learning organization. Based on this language it seems like Phil most likely read or worked with Peter Senge and his book The Fifth Discipline (maybe my favorite business book). 
• The road to freedom is a beautiful system.
• Another aspect of the system I liked was its reliability; it gave the players something to fall back on when they were under stress. They didn’t have to pretend to be like Mike and invent every move they made. All they had to do was play their part in the system, knowing that it would inevitably lead to good scoring opportunities. 
• The system also gave players a clear purpose as a group and established a high standard of performance for everyone. 
• Even more important, it helped turn players into leaders as they began teaching one another how to master the system. When that happened, the group would bond together in ways that moments of individual glory, no matter how thrilling, could never foster. When I took over as head coach, I made it a policy to give Michael a lot of space. I took care to create a protected environment for him where he could relate freely with his teammates and be himself without worrying about intrusions from the outside world.

6 WARRIOR SPIRIT 

Think lightly of yourself and think deeply of the world. MIYAMOTO MUSASHI

• One of the things that intrigued me about Lakota culture was its view of the self. Lakota warriors had far more autonomy than their white counterparts, but their freedom came with a high degree of responsibility. As Native American scholar George W. Linden points out, the Lakota warrior was “the member of a tribe, and being a member, he never acted against, apart from, or as the whole without good reason.” For the Sioux, freedom was not about being absent but about being present, adds Linden. It meant “freedom for, freedom for the realization of greater relationships.”
• The point I wanted to make by showing the players The Mystic Warrior video was that connecting to something beyond their individual goals could be a source of great power. The hero of the series, who was based loosely on Crazy Horse, goes into battle to save his tribe after experiencing a powerful vision. In our discussion after watching the video, the players seemed to resonate with the idea of bonding together as a tribe, and I thought I could build on that as we moved into the new season.

Creating a Culture of Selflessness & Mindful Awareness

• I wanted to create a culture of selflessness and mindful awareness at the Bulls. To do that, I couldn’t just rely on one or two innovative motivational techniques. I had to devise a multifaceted program that included the triangle offense but also incorporated the lessons I had learned over the years about bonding people together and awakening the spirit.
• Basketball is a great mystery. You can do everything right. You can have the perfect mix of talent and the best system of offense in the game. You can devise a foolproof defensive strategy and prepare your players for every possible eventuality. But if the players don’t have a sense of oneness as a group, your efforts won’t pay off. And the bond that unites a team can be so fragile, so elusive.
• Oneness is not something you can turn on with a switch. You need to create the right environment for it to grow, then nurture it carefully every day. What the Bulls needed, I decided, was a sanctuary where they could bond together as a team, protected from all the distractions of the outside world. I prohibited players from bringing family and friends to our training facility, except on special occasions. I also restricted the media from observing practices. I wanted the players to feel that they could act naturally during practice without having to worry about doing or saying something that might show up in the papers the next day. 
• Lakota warriors always gathered in circular formations because the circle was a symbol of the fundamental harmony of the universe. As Black Elk, the famed Lakota wise man, explained it: Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are the stars. . . . The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood-to-childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.
• For the Lakota, everything is sacred—including the enemy—because they believe in the fundamental interconnectedness of all life.

Coaching Staff 

• We didn’t agree on everything, but we did develop a high level of trust and a commitment to modeling the sort of teamwork that we wanted the players to embrace.
• But what I’ve learned over the years is that the most effective approach is to delegate authority as much as possible and to nurture everyone else’s leadership skills as well. When I’m able to do that, it not only builds team unity and allows others to grow but also—paradoxically—strengthens my role as a leader.
• When I’m hiring coaches, my strategy is to surround myself with the strongest, most knowledgeable people I can find and give them a lot of room to express themselves.
• That allowed us to share information with one another and make sure we were all on the same page in terms of day-to-day strategy. Each coach had a high level of autonomy, but when we talked to the players, we spoke as one.

Yes, it was a difficult loss, one of the worst games I’ve ever had to coach. But once the noise died down, I noticed that the pain of humiliating defeat had galvanized the team in a way I’d never seen before. The Bulls were beginning to morph into a tribe.

7 HEARING THE UNHEARD 

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it. ROALD DAHL

• The most important thing was to get the players to develop a strong group intelligence in order to work more harmoniously together. There’s a section in Rudyard Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book that sums up the kind of group dynamic I was looking for them to create. During the 1990–91 season that became our team motto: 
  • Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back— For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

• When I started playing for the Knicks, I spent a couple of summers as a grad student in psychology at the University of North Dakota. During that time, I studied the work of psychologist Carl Rogers, whose groundbreaking ideas on personal empowerment have had a strong influence on my approach to leadership. Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, was an innovative clinician who, after years of experimenting, developed several effective techniques for nurturing what he called the “real self” rather than the idealized self we think we’re supposed to become. The key, he believed, was for the therapist to create a relationship with the client focused not on solving a problem but on nurturing personal growth.
• The paradox, he writes in his seminal work, On Becoming a Person, “is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up.”
• I don’t pretend to be a therapist. But the process Rogers describes is not unlike what I’ve tried to do as a coach. Rather than squeeze everybody into preordained roles, my goal has always been to foster an environment where the players can grow as individuals and express themselves creatively within a team structure. I wasn’t interested in becoming best friends with the players; in fact, I think it’s important to maintain a certain distance. But I tried to develop genuine, caring relationships with each player, based on mutual respect, compassion, and trust.
• Transparency is the key. The one thing players won’t stand for is a coach who won’t be honest and straightforward with them.
• One of the hardest jobs of a coach is keeping the role players from undermining team chemistry. New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel used to say, “The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”
• I’m not a big hugger or someone who doles out praise easily. In fact, some people find me aloof and enigmatic. My style is to show appreciation with subtle gestures—a nod of recognition here, a touch on the arm there. I learned this from Dick McGuire, my first coach on the Knicks, who used to come by my locker after games and quietly reassure me that he was looking out for me and would try to give me more time during the next game. As a coach, I tried to convey to each player that I cared for him as a person, not just as a basketball factotem. The great gift my father gave me was showing me how to be genuinely compassionate while also commanding people’s respect.

Getting Inside the Mind of the Players 

• I was always looking for new ways to get inside the players’ heads. When I started coaching the Bulls, I had the players create what I called a personal shield, a simple profile based on questions such as 
  • “What’s your greatest aspiration?” 
  • “Who’s influenced you the most?” 
  • “What’s something people don’t know about you?” 
    • Later I asked them to fill out a more formal questionnaire and used their answers to probe more deeply during our one-on-one meetings midway through the season.

• My favorite psychological tool was one June called a “social bull’s-eye,” which creates a picture of how people see themselves in relation to the group. On one of our long road trips, I’d give each of the players a sheet of paper with a three-ring bull’s-eye, representing the team’s social structure, in the center. Then I’d ask them to position themselves somewhere on the bull’s-eye based on how connected they felt to the team. Not surprisingly, the starters usually placed themselves somewhere near the eye, and the backups scattered themselves in the second and third rings. One year backup forward Stacey King, a fast-talking, stylishly dressed player who made everyone laugh, drew himself hovering far outside the third ring. When I asked him why, he said, “I don’t get any playing time, Coach.” Which wasn’t true, but it was how he felt. On the surface, Stacey seemed confident and gregarious, but inside he felt like an outsider struggling for recognition. I don’t think I ever figured out how to heal that wound.
• My intention was to give the players the freedom to figure out how to fit themselves within the system, rather than dictating from on high what I wanted them to do. Some players felt uncomfortable because they’d never been given that kind of latitude before. Others felt completely liberated.
  • So in my second year as head coach, I created a new position for Scottie—“point forward”—and had him share the job of moving the ball up court with the guards—an experiment that worked out far better than I expected. That switch unleashed a side of Scottie that had never been tapped, and he blossomed into a gifted multi-dimensional player with the ability to break games wide open on the fly. As he puts it, the shift “made me the player I wanted to be in the NBA.”

Quiet The Mind

• But what I discovered playing for the Knicks is that when I got too excited mentally, it had a negative effect on my ability to stay focused under pressure. So I did the opposite. Instead of charging players up, I developed a number of strategies to help them quiet their minds and build awareness so they could go into battle poised and in control.
• The first thing I did with the Bulls was to teach the players an abbreviated version of mindfulness meditation based on the Zen practice I’d been doing for years.
• I wasn’t trying to turn the Bulls into Buddhist monks. I was interested in getting them to take a more mindful approach to the game and to their relationships with one another. 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. According to Suzuki-roshi, when we do something with “a quite simple, clear mind . . . our activity is strong and straightforward. But when we do something with a complicated mind, in relation to other things or people, or society, our activity becomes very complex.”
• To be successful at basketball, as author John McPhee once pointed out, you need to have a finely tuned sense of where you are and what’s happening around you at any given moment.
• What I discovered after years of meditation practice is that when you immerse yourself fully in the moment, you start developing a much deeper awareness of what’s going on, right here, right now. And that awareness ultimately leads to a greater sense of oneness—the essence of teamwork.
• “To hear the unheard,” he said, “is a 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.”
• To strengthen the players’ awareness, I liked to keep them guessing about what was coming next. During one practice, they looked so lackadaisical I decided to turn out the lights and have them play in the dark—not an easy task when you’re trying to catch a rocket pass from Michael Jordan. Another time, after an embarrassing defeat, I had them go through a whole practice without saying a word. Other coaches thought I was nuts. What mattered to me was getting the players to wake up, if only for a moment, and see the unseen, hear the unheard.
• But 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. Train “On the other side of pain” 
  • There’s a story I love to tell about how Napoléon Bonaparte picked his generals. After one of his great generals died, Napoléon reputedly sent one of his staff officers to search for a replacement. The officer returned several weeks later and described a man he thought would be the perfect candidate because of his knowledge of military tactics and brilliance as a manager. When the officer finished, Napoléon looked at him and said, “That’s all very good, but is he lucky?” I believe that if you’ve taken care of all the details, the laws of cause and effect—not luck—will usually determine the result. Of course, there are plenty of things you can’t control in a basketball game. That’s why we focused most of our time on what we could control: As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Invisible threads are the strongest ties.”

But I learned a key lesson: how important it was to relate to each player as an individual, with respect and compassion, no matter how much pressure I might be feeling.

 

8 A QUESTION OF CHARACTER 

The way you do anything is the way you do everything. TOM WAITS

John Wooden used to say that “winning takes talent, to repeat takes character.”

• After a while, I returned to my office to reflect on what had just transpired. Later, when I met with the players privately, I told them that winning back-to-back championships was the mark of a great team. But what pleased me even more was that we’d had to navigate so many unexpected twists and turns to get there. Paxson called the season “a long, strange trip,” The first championship run had been a honeymoon. This was an odyssey.

 

9 BITTERSWEET VICTORY 

Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but . . . life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

• In The Tao of Leadership (book recap), 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.” Heider, whose book is based on Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, suggests that leaders practice becoming more open. “The wise leader is of service: receptive, yielding, following. The group member’s vibration dominates and leads, while the leader follows. But soon it is the member’s consciousness which is transformed, the member’s vibration which is resolved.”
• This is what I was trying to do with the Bulls. My goal was to act as instinctively as possible to allow the players to lead the team from within. I wanted them to be able to flow with the action, the way a tree bends in the wind. That’s why I put so much emphasis on having tightly structured practices. I would assert myself forcefully in practice to imbue the players with a strong vision of where we needed to go and what we had to do to get there. But once the game began, I would slip into the background and let the players orchestrate the attack. Occasionally I would step in to make defensive adjustments or shift players around if we needed a burst of energy. For the most part, though, I let the players take the lead.
• To make this strategy work, I needed to develop a strong circle of team leaders who could transform that vision into reality. Structure is critical. On every successful team I’ve coached, most of the players had a clear idea of the role they were expected to play. When the pecking order is clear, it reduces the players’ anxiety and stress. But if it’s unclear and the top players are constantly vying for position, the center will not hold, no matter how talented the roster.

Self-actualization

• Much of my thinking on this subject was influenced by the work of Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology who is best known for his theory of the hierarchy of needs. Maslow believed that the highest human need is to achieve “self-actualization,” which he defined as “the full use and exploitation of one’s talents, capacities and potentialities.” The basic characteristics of self-actualizers, he discovered in his research, are spontaneity and naturalness, a greater acceptance of themselves and others, high levels of creativity, and a strong focus on problem solving rather than ego gratification.
• To achieve self-actualization, he concluded, you first need to satisfy a series of more basic needs, each building upon the other to form what is commonly referred to as Maslow’s pyramid. The bottom layer is made up of physiological urges (hunger, sleep, sex); followed by safety concerns (stability, order); love (belonging); self-esteem (self-respect, recognition); and finally self-actualization. Maslow concluded that most people fail to reach self-actualization because they get stuck somewhere lower on the pyramid. In his book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Maslow describes the key steps to attaining self-actualization: experiencing life “vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption”; making choices from moment to moment that foster growth rather than fear; becoming more attuned to your inner nature and acting in concert with who you are; being honest with yourself and taking responsibility for what you say and do instead of playing games or posing; identifying your ego defenses and finding the courage to give them up; developing the ability to determine your own destiny and daring to be different and non-conformist; creating an ongoing process for reaching your potential and doing the work needed to realize your vision. fostering the conditions for having peak experiences, or what Maslow calls “moments of ecstasy” in which we think, act, and feel more clearly and are more loving and accepting of others.
• Maslow’s work opened a door for me to think more expansively about life. I was particularly drawn to his insights about how to get out of your own way and let your true nature express itself. Later when I became a coach, I found that Maslow’s approach of balancing physical, psychological, and spiritual needs provided me with a foundation for developing a new way of motivating young men.

Helping the Players in their Self-discovery Process

• My goal was to get the players to break free from their confining basketball cocoon and explore the deeper, more spiritual aspects of life. By “spiritual” I don’t mean “religious.” I mean the act of self-discovery that happens when you step beyond your routine way of seeing the world. As Maslow puts it, “The great lesson from the true mystics . . . [is] that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard.”
• To tap into the sacred in work as well as in life, it’s essential to create order out of chaos. Teasdale quotes Native American songwriter James Yellowbank, who says, “The task of life is to keep your world in order.” And that takes discipline, a healthy balance between work and play, and nourishment of mind, body, and spirit within the context of community—values deeply rooted in my own being, as well as my objectives for the teams I’ve coached.

10 WORLD IN FLUX 

If you live in the river you should make friends with the crocodile. INDIAN PROVERB (PUNJABI)

• In the preseason I’d invited George Mumford (Mumfor’s The Mindful Athlete book recap, highly recommend), a sports psychologist and meditation teacher, to join us at training camp to give the players a mini-workshop on coping with the stress of success. But a few days before George arrived, Michael announced his retirement, and the team was going through an identity crisis. So George talked about the two aspects of every crisis: danger and opportunity. If you have the right mindset, he said, you can make the crisis work for you. You have the chance to create a new identity for the team that will be even stronger than before. Suddenly, the players perked up.
• The word “mindfulness” has become so diluted in recent years that it’s lost much of its original meaning. It comes from the Sanskrit word smriti, which means “remember.” “Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment,” writes Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. This is an ongoing process that is not limited to the act of meditation itself. “Sitting and watching our breath is a wonderful practice, but it is not enough,” he adds. “For transformation to take place, we have to practice mindfulness all day long, not just on our meditation cushion.” Why is this important? Because most of us—basketball players included—spend so much time bouncing back and forth between thoughts of the past and the future that we lose touch with what’s happening right here, right now. And that prevents us from appreciating the deep mystery of being alive.
• As Kabat-Zinn writes in Wherever You Go, There You Are, “The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded.”
• The key, he said, was not just to sit and calm your mind but to learn to read and react effectively in any situation based on what’s happening at that very moment. 

11 BASKETBALL POETRY 

It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy. STEVE JOBS

• Michael was impressed with the mindfulness training George had been doing with the team because it helped bring the players closer to his level of mental awareness. In George’s view, Michael needed to shift his perspective on leadership. “It’s all about being present and taking responsibility for how you relate to yourself and others,” says George. “And that means being willing to adjust so that you can meet people where they are. 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.” 
• The master smiled and asked them “What determines the strength of a chariot’s wheel?” “Is it not the sturdiness of the spokes?” they replied. “Then why is it that two wheels made of identical spokes differ in strength?” asked the master. “See beyond what is seen. Never forget that a wheel is made not only of spokes but also of the space between the spokes. Sturdy spokes poorly placed make a weak wheel. Whether their full potential is realized depends on the harmony between them. The essence of wheel-making lies in the craftsman’s ability to conceive and create the space that holds and balances the spokes within the wheel. Think now, who is the craftsman here?” After a long silence, one of the disciples asked, “But master, how does a craftsman secure the harmony among the spokes?” “Think of sunlight,” replied the master. “The sun nurtures and vitalizes the trees and flowers. It does so by giving away its light. But in the end, in which direction do they grow? So it is with a master craftsman like Liu Bang. After placing individuals in positions that fully realize their potential, he secures harmony among them by giving them all credit for their distinctive achievements. And in the end, as the trees and flowers grow toward the sun, individuals grow toward Liu Bang with devotion.”

12 AS THE WORM TURNS

To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself. SØREN KIERKEGAARD

• “Everything changes.” Those words, Suzuki said, contain the basic truth of existence: Everything is always in flux. Until you accept this, you won’t be able to find true equanimity. But to do that means accepting life as it is, not just what you consider the “good parts.” “That things change is the reason why you suffer in this world and become discouraged,” Suzuki-roshi writes in Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen. “[But] when you change your understanding and your way of living, then you can completely enjoy your new life in each moment. The evanescence of things is the reason you enjoy your life.”

13 THE LAST DANCE

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge. TULI KUPFERBERG

• There’s a Zen saying I often cite that goes, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” The point: Stay focused on the task at hand rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. This team was getting very good at doing that.
• Looking back, I think my struggle with Jerry taught me things about myself that I couldn’t have learned any other way. The Dalai Lama calls it “the enemy’s gift.” From a Buddhist perspective, battling with enemies can help you develop greater compassion for and tolerance of others. “In order to practice sincerely and to develop patience,” he says, “you need someone who willfully hurts you. Thus, these people give us real opportunities to practice these things. They are testing our inner strength in a way that even our guru cannot.”
• The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about letting go as an opportunity for true awakening. One of her favorite sayings is “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”
• “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing,” writes Chodron. “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

14 ONE BREATH, ONE MIND 

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor. THICH NHAT HANH

 

• When the time came to pack up and drive to L.A., I felt anxious about my new life. I worried about what would happen to my kids now that I was becoming a single dad and moving to a new, unfamiliar city. To ease the transition, my daughters Chelsea and Brooke put together a mixtape for me of songs about starting over. It had been more than twenty-five years since I’d driven through the back roads of California. As I crossed the Sierra Nevada range, Willie Nelson’s soulful version of “Amazing Grace” came on, and I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I pulled over, stopped the car, and cried. Looking out over the sunlit California peaks, I felt as if I were putting a dark chapter of my life behind me and heading toward something bright and new. And my kids understood. This was their way of saying, “Move forward, Dad. Live life. Don’t close yourself off.”
• One of the basic principles of Buddhist thought is that our conventional concept of the self as a separate entity is an illusion. On a superficial level, what we consider the self may appear to be separate and distinct from everything else. After all, we all look different and have distinct personalities. But on a deeper level, we are all part of an interconnected whole.
• Martin Luther King Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated,” he said. “All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
• “If the spirit of many in body but one in mind prevails among the people,” he added, “they will achieve all their goals, whereas if one in body but different in mind, they can achieve nothing remarkable.”

 

15 THE EIGHTFOLD OFFENSE 

Greatness is a spiritual condition. MATTHEW ARNOLD

• Kobe was also a stubborn, hardheaded learner. He was so confident in his ability that you couldn’t simply point out his mistakes and expect him to alter his behavior. He would have to experience failure directly before his resistance would start to break down. It was often an excruciating process for him and everyone else involved. Then suddenly he would have an aha moment and figure out a way to change. 
• One night that week I had a dream about spanking Kobe and giving Shaq a smack. “Shaq needs and Kobe wants—the mystery of the Lakers,” I wrote in my journal. I told Shaq he needed to find his own way to inspire the Lakers. He needed to express his confidence and natural joy for the game in such a way that his teammates—Kobe especially—felt that if they joined forces with him, nothing would be impossible. A team leader’s number one job, I explained, was to build up his teammates, not tear them down. Shaq had probably heard this kind of spiel before, but this time I think it clicked.
• I also talked to Kobe about what it takes to be a leader. At one point I told him, “I guess you’d like to be the captain of this team someday when you’re older—maybe like twenty-five.” He replied that he wanted to be captain tomorrow. To which I said, “You can’t be captain if nobody follows you.”

Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path

• In a nutshell, the Buddha taught that life is suffering and that the primary cause of our suffering is our desire for things to be different from the way they actually are. One moment, things may be going our way, and in the next moment they’re not. When we try to prolong pleasure or reject pain, we suffer. On the bright side, the Buddha also prescribed a practical way for eliminating craving and unhappiness by following what he called the Noble Eightfold Path. The steps were right view, right thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
  • RIGHT VIEW—involves looking at the game as a whole and working together as a team, like five fingers on a hand. 
  • RIGHT THINKING—This means seeing yourself as part of a system rather than as your own one-man band. It also implies going into each game with the intention of being intimately involved with what’s happening to the whole team because you’re integrally connected to everyone on it. 
  • RIGHT SPEECH—has two components. One is about talking positively to yourself throughout the game and not getting lost in aimless backtalk (“I hate that ref,” “I’m going to get back at that bastard”). The second is about controlling what you say when you’re talking with others, especially your teammates, and focusing on giving them positive feedback.
  • RIGHT ACTION—suggests making moves that are appropriate to what’s happening on the floor instead of repeatedly showboating or acting in ways that disrupt team harmony. 
  • RIGHT LIVELIHOOD—is about having respect for the work you do and using it to heal the community rather than simply to polish your ego. Be humble. You’re getting paid a ridiculous amount of money to do something that’s really simple. And fun. 
  • RIGHT EFFORT—means being unselfish and exerting the right amount of energy to get the job done. Tex Winter says that there’s no substitute for hustle, and my addendum is, if you don’t hustle, you’ll get benched.
  • RIGHT MINDFULNESS—involves coming to every game with a clear understanding of our plan of attack, including what to expect from our opponents. It also implies playing with precision, making the right moves at the right times, and maintaining constant awareness throughout the game, whether you’re on the floor or on the bench. 
  • RIGHT CONCENTRATION—is about staying focused on what you’re doing at any given moment and not obsessing about mistakes you’ve made in the past or bad things that might happen in the future.

• With the Lakers, I found that I had to be a model of calmness and patience, much more so than with the Bulls. I had to demonstrate that the key to inner peace is trusting in the essential interconnectedness of all things. One breath, one mind. That’s what gives you strength and energy in the midst of chaos. 
• I too had a personal breakthrough that season. I learned to overcome my fear of the unknown and create a new life in a new city without losing what I loved most. This was a time for me to establish new, deeper relationships with my children—not just Brooke, who lived in the house, but also my other children, who visited regularly. It was also a time for me to continue to open up spiritually. During difficult moments, meditation had helped me cope with all the uncertainty and self-doubt that arise when you break from the past and throw yourself into a new life. I felt more alive than I had in years.

 

16 THE JOY OF DOING NOTHING

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. ZEN PROVERB

• “Kobe’s an alpha male,” he says. “He looks at the world with the eye of someone who says, ‘I know more than you,’ and if you were in his way, he was going to push and push until you pushed back. And if you didn’t push back, he was going to eat you.”
• Rick Fox compares Kobe’s competitive drive to that of M.J., whom Fox worked with at Jordan’s basketball camps when he was a college student. Rick says: “There are no other individuals I’ve known who act like they do. To them, winning at all costs is all that matters. And they demand that everyone around them act the same way, regardless of whether they can or not. They say, ‘Find somewhere inside yourself to get better because that’s what I’m doing every day of the week, every minute of the day.’ They have no tolerance for anything less. None.” But Fox noticed a difference between Michael and Kobe. “Michael had to win at everything,” he recalls. “I mean he couldn’t drive from Chapel Hill to Wilmington without making it a race. Whether you wanted to compete or not, he was competing with you. But I think Kobe competes with himself more than anything else. He sets barriers and challenges for himself, and he just happens to need other people to come along with him. He’s playing an individual sport in a team uniform—and dominating it. Once he steps off the court, though, he’s not interested in competing with you in the way you dress or how you drive. He’s obsessed with chasing the goals he set for himself at age 15 or 16.”

Non-action

• I’m not averse to taking direct action if that’s what is called for, but like Reinsdorf, I’ve discovered that you can solve many difficulties with what Lao-tzu called non-action. This approach is often misinterpreted as passivity, but actually it’s just the reverse. Non-action involves being attuned to what’s happening with the group and acting—or non-acting—accordingly. In the foreword to his adaptation of Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell compares non-action to athletic performance. “A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will,” he writes. “This is the paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.” Or as Lao-tzu proclaims in Mitchell’s work: Less and less do you need to force things, until finally, you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
• Still, life has a way of teaching us the lessons we need to learn. The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle observes: “With enthusiasm you find you don’t have to do it all yourself. In fact, there is nothing of significance you can do by yourself. Sustained enthusiasm brings into existence a wave of creative energy and all you have to do then is ride the wave.”
• When I’d first started working with Kobe, I’d tried to persuade him not to push so hard and to let the game flow more naturally. He’d resisted then, but not now. “Personally, I just tried to feed off my teammates,” he said after that game. “That’s one way that I am improving: learning how to use my teammates to create opportunities, just playing solid and letting the game and the opportunities come to me.” He was sounding more and more like me.

Gandhi once said, “Suffering cheerfully endured ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy.”

17 ONE-TWO-THREE—LAKERS! 

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved. GEORGE MACDONALD

• I knew what he was talking about. I’d been there myself. The feeling Rick described is sometimes referred to as “spiritual addiction”—a sense of connectedness so powerful, so joyful, you never want it to stop. Trouble is, the more you try to hang on to the feeling, the more elusive it becomes.
• Our biggest problem was boredom. That’s true of many championship teams, but it was more pronounced with the Lakers. This team had been so successful so fast that the players had begun to believe that they could flip a switch whenever they wanted to and automatically rise to another level—the way we had done the year before.
• The key to sustained success is to keep growing as a team. Winning is about moving into the unknown and creating something new. Remember that scene in the first Indiana Jones movie when someone asks Indy what he’s going to do next, and he replies, “I don’t know, I’m making it up as we go along.” That’s how I view leadership. It’s an act of controlled improvisation, a Thelonious Monk finger exercise, from one moment to the next. 

 

18 THE WISDOM OF ANGER

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. THE BUDDHA

Zen story: One rainy evening two monks were walking back to their monastery when they saw a beautiful woman who was having difficulty navigating the puddles in the road. The elder monk offered to help and carried her over the puddles to the other side of the road. Later that evening the younger monk approached the elder monk and said, “Sir, as monks we’re not supposed to touch women.” “Yes, brother,” replied the elder monk. “So then, sir, why did you lift that woman by the roadside?” The elder monk smiled and said, “I left her on the side of the road, but you are still carrying her.”

• I consulted a psychotherapist, who suggested that the best way to deal with someone like Kobe was to (1) dial back the criticism and give him a lot of positive feedback, (2) not do anything that might embarrass him in front of his peers, and (3) allow him to think that what I wanted him to do was his idea. I tried some of these tactics and they helped somewhat. But Kobe was in heavy-duty survival mode, and when the pressure became unbearable, his instinctive reaction was to lash out. I realized there wasn’t much I could do to change his behavior. But what I could do was change the way I reacted to his angry outbursts. This was an important lesson for me.
• In some Native American tribes, the elders used to identify the angriest braves in the village and teach them to transform their wild, uncontrolled energy into a source of creative power and strength. Those braves often became the most effective tribal leaders. That’s what I’ve tried to do with the young players on my teams.
• A better approach is to become as intimate as possible with how anger works on your mind and body so that you can transform its underlying energy into something productive. As Buddhist scholar, Robert Thurman writes, “Our goal surely is to conquer anger, but not to destroy the fire it has misappropriated. We will wield that fire with wisdom and turn it to creative ends.” In fact, two recent studies published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology demonstrate a link between anger and creativity. In one study, researchers discovered that feelings of anger initially improved the participants’ ability to brainstorm creatively. In another study, the same researchers found that subjects who were prompted to feel angry generated more creative ideas than those who experienced sadness or a non-emotional state. The conclusion: Anger is an energizing emotion that enhances the sustained attention needed to solve problems and leads to more flexible “big picture” thinking. 
• My practice when anger arises is to sit with it in meditation. I simply observe it come and go, come and go. Slowly, incrementally, over time I’ve learned that if I can stay with the anger, which often manifests itself as anxiety, and resist my conditioned response to suppress it, the intensity of the feeling dissipates and I’m able to hear the wisdom it has to impart. Sitting with your anger doesn’t mean being passive. It means becoming more conscious and intimate with your inner experience so that you can act more mindfully and compassionately than is possible in the heat of the moment. 
• This is hardly easy, but acting mindfully is key to building strong, trusting relationships, especially when you’re in a leadership role. Says Buddhist meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein, “An unexpressed anger creates a breach in relationships that no amount of smiling can cross. It’s a secret. A lie. The compassionate response is one that keeps connections alive. It requires telling the truth. And telling the truth can be difficult, especially when the mind is stirred up by anger.”

19 CHOP WOOD, CARRY WATER

Forget mistakes, forget failures, forget everything, except what you’re going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day. WILL DURANT

• Prior to the 2004–05 season, Kobe had boasted that as long as he played for the Lakers, the team would never fall below .500. But that’s exactly what happened: The Lakers tied for last place in the Pacific Division with a 34-48 record. That turned out to be a real wake-up call for Kobe. He’d never known such failure before, and it forced him to acknowledge that he’d have to wholeheartedly join forces with others if he was going to win any more championships.
• The two men relate to their bodies differently as well. Trainer Chip Schaefer, who worked extensively with both players, says that Kobe treats his body like a finely tuned European sports car, while Michael was less regimented in his behavior and given to indulging his taste for good cigars and fine wine. Still, to this day Schaefer marvels at how graceful Michael was as he moved up the floor. “What I do for a living is all about athletic movement, and I’ve never seen anybody else move like that,” he says. “The only word for it is beautiful.”
• I learned to be forceful without being overbearing—further lessons in the school of less is more.

 

20 DESTINY’S CHILDREN 

Connection is why we’re here. It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. BRENÉ BROWN

• “It sounds more mystical than it really is,” he says of the process he went through. “The coaches’ goal was to set down some basic guidelines for us on how to play basketball together as a group. And then you were expected to create your own chart for everything else. It was an uncanny way of creating an organization without over-organizing. It wasn’t about what they thought you should be doing, the way many coaches do. They stepped back and let you find your own way.”
• There’s nothing like a humiliating loss to focus the mind.
• When they returned to L.A. in October for the 2008–09 training camp, there was a fire in their eyes that I hadn’t seen before. “There’s no experience that wrenches your gut like making the NBA finals and losing,” says Fish. “We went into the off-season questioning everything because we had come so close, but we were still so far away. I think that loss forced us all to ask ourselves, ‘Do we really want this?’” The answer was decided yes. From day one this was a team possessed. “There wasn’t anything that was going to hold us back,” Fish adds. “No matter what we faced, no matter how many ups and downs, we knew we were tough enough—mentally and physically—to figure this out. And we did.”
• I was impressed by the players’ cool determination. The previous year they had taken a quantum leap forward in terms of mastering the system. Now, inspired by their mutual loss, they were deepening their commitment to one another so that they could become more integrated—and invincible—as a team. This is what I often refer to as dancing with the spirit. By “spirit” I don’t mean anything religious. I mean that deep feeling of camaraderie that arises when a group of players makes a commitment to stand up for one another to achieve something greater than themselves, no matter what the risks.
• This kind of commitment often involves covering for teammates’ weaknesses or fouling when necessary or protecting another player from being harassed by the enemy. When a team is bonding like this, you can feel it in the way the players move their bodies and relate to one another on and off the court. They play the game with a joyful abandon, and even when they’re squabbling, they do so with dignity and respect.
• Before game 5 even started, the media was in the locker room asking the players to imagine what it was going to feel like to win a ring. And when I strolled into the trainers’ room, I noticed Kobe and Lamar quizzing each other about championship-finals trivia. So I closed the doors and tried to set a different mood. Instead of giving my usual pregame talk, I pulled up a chair and said, “Let’s get our minds right.” We sat in silence for five minutes and got our breath in sync. “I didn’t write anything down,” he said, “because you guys already know what you need to do to beat this team. Go out there and play with the idea of playing for and with each other and we’ll end these playoffs tonight.” It was a great way to set the tone for a final game.
• For me it was a moment of vindication. That night I surpassed Red Auerbach’s championship record, which was gratifying in its way. But more important to me was how we did it: together, as a fully integrated team. The most gratifying thing of all was watching Kobe transform from a selfish, demanding player into a leader that his teammates wanted to follow. To get there, Kobe had to learn to give in order to get back in return. Leadership is not about forcing your will on others. It’s about mastering the art of letting go.

 

21 DELIVERANCE 

Fall down seven times. Stand up eight. JAPANESE PROVERB

• Kobe likes to say that he learned 90 percent of what he knows about leadership from watching me in action. “It’s not just a basketball way of leadership,” he says, “but a philosophy of how to live. Being present and enjoying each moment as it comes. Letting my children develop at their own pace and not trying to force them into doing something they’re not really comfortable with, but just nurturing and guiding them along. I learned that all from Phil.”

 

22 THIS GAME’S IN THE REFRIGERATOR 

We are all failures—at least the best of us. J. M. BARRIE

• For me, the nerves usually kick into high gear in the middle of the night. I’ll sleep for a few hours, then—bang!—my brain is up and spinning. “Should I have done this, should I have done that? God, what a terrible call in the fourth quarter. Maybe I should have called a different play?” And so on. Sometimes I have to sit and meditate for a long time before the noise settles down and I can go back to sleep.
• Coaching takes you on an emotional roller-coaster ride that’s hard to stop, even when you’ve diligently practiced letting go of your desire for things to be different than they actually are. There always seems to be just a bit more to let go of. Zen teacher Jakusho Kwong suggests becoming “an active participant in the loss.” We’re conditioned to seek only gain, to be happy, and to try to satisfy all our desires, he explains. But even though we may understand on some level that loss is a catalyst for growth, most people still believe it to be the opposite of gain and to be avoided at all costs. If I’ve learned anything in my years of practicing Zen and coaching basketball, it’s that what we resist persists. Sometimes the letting go happens quickly; other times it may take several sleepless nights.
• Buddhist sages say that there’s only “a tenth of an inch of difference” between heaven and earth. And I think the same can be said about basketball. Winning a championship is a delicate balancing act, and there’s only so much you can accomplish by exerting your will. As a leader, your job is to do everything in your power to create the perfect conditions for success by benching your ego and inspiring your team to play the game the right way. But at some point, you need to let go and turn yourself over to the basketball gods. The soul of success is surrendering to what is.

 

AFTERWORD LIFE IS A HIGHWAY 

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. GEORGE MOORE

• I’ve been a rambling man at heart ever since my high school days when my teammates and I would drive for miles across the plains en route to our next game. I love the freedom of the open road. I love the fact that you can never be entirely sure what awaits you over the next rise. As Steinbeck put it, “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
• For me, a highway is a form of meditation. Throughout my life, I’ve turned to the open road when my life was in turmoil. Driving long distances makes me feel more engaged in the moment and transports me into a calmer, more contemplative state of mind. When I was experimenting with meditation in my twenties, I was inspired by the musings of another famous road warrior, Robert Pirsig. “You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense,” he wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.”
• There’s a part of me that has always longed to lead a simpler, more ascetic life. But I’ve had to balance that with the demands of constantly being in the public eye. When I retired from coaching, Jeanie urged me to stay up to date with what was happening in the basketball world—which I did—but my first inclination was to go inside and become more attuned to my “inner minister.” I fantasized about slowing down, living more mindfully, and dedicating myself primarily to service. I was happy being the chief cook and bottle washer at home and spending a good part of my time buying the groceries, making dinner, and taking care of the household.
• Tucked away in the rear of the room is a small meditation space enclosed by Japanese-style paper screens, where Phil sits zazen most mornings. On one wall hangs a beautiful calligraphic drawing of enso, the Zen symbol of oneness, with these lines from Tozan Ryokai, a ninth-century Buddhist monk: Do not try to see the objective world. You who is given an object to see are quite different from you yourself. I am going my own way and I meet myself which includes everything I meet. I am not something I can see (as an object). When you understand self which includes everything, You have your true way.

 

This is the essence of what we’ve been trying to convey in this book: that the path of transformation is to see yourself as something beyond the narrow confines of your small ego—something that “includes everything.”