Finding Out What You Suck At

I was listening to a podcast interview this morning with someone that is a player development coach in the NBA. He works with professional and college players in the off-season to develop their skills and help them improve so they can become more valuable players and get more opportunities + make more money

A couple of interesting insights come to mind from listening to the conversation.

The first thing he covered was the value of embracing, acknowledging, and working on the things that you suck at.

Next was how, at the pro level, he believes that players get little benefit from playing five-on-five games during the offseason. That working against a chair with a coach or doing scenarios is much more valuable to them.

The reason for this is that if put in a game context, players will do what they know works because they want to win.

He wasn’t dismissive of the need for five-on-five time, but for pro players who are playing 82+ games a year, in the offseason, his belief was that it was better to work on something new or on improving something that was a weakness so that you can incorporate it once the new season comes around.

Both of these insights strike me as valuable for professionals in general, not just athletes.

How aware are you of the skills you need to improve to work and live better? What is your plan for improving them?

There is a lot of good advice about how focusing on your strengths and not your weaknesses will lead you to the best career results and I think that is true in a certain sense. But there are basic skills you need to work on and improve to be able to unleash your strengths.

Giannis Antetokounmpo is a perennial NBA MVP candidate, and while he is still not particularly good at shooting a basketball, he is way better at it today than he was years ago. His ability to handle the ball and pass and dozens of other smaller skills are many times better than 5 years ago.

When he got to the NBA his strength was speed, length, and crazy athleticism. Those are the things that make him special today still, but the reason he can use them is that he improved his ability to dribble, pass, and shoot.

Your strength on the job might be your ability to find creative solutions to problems and automate ways of solving them in the future, but if you can’t organize yourself to reliably get stuff done and communicate with the people you’re working with, then you’re never going to have an opportunity to solve big problems.

Another example that comes to mind, about working on new skills during the offseason, is Tiger Woods.

He was already a golf prodigy and winning all sorts of tournaments when he decided that his swing wasn’t as good as it could be, so he learned a new swing and worked on implementing it over the course of months. He got worse, but with a focus on being better in the long term.

This type of thinking almost never happens outside of professional sports. When is the last time you worked on implementing a skill that made you worse in the short term?

We treat every single day of the year as a game and never focus on skills that will help in the long term. Most of us are not even aware of what those skills are, let alone bringing conscious awareness and dedicated practice to improving them.

A handful of teams in NBA separate themselves with their player development programs, but many don’t and it is ultimately up to the player to find coaching and support that will help them improve their market value.

This is even more true in golf, where there are no teams and each player needs to approach his career like an entrepreneur.

To get what you want out of your career and improve your market value over time, you need to approach your professional development with the same mindset.

Identify what your strengths and weaknesses are, what skills are valued on the market, and what your core weaknesses harm your ability to harness your strengths. Then develop a plan to work on them. This will likely mean taking a step back in the short term as you expand your abilities in the long term, but if you don’t you will never reach your full potential.