Basketball Zero Quotes

My parents are my backbone. Still are. They're the only group that will support you if you score zero or you score 40.”  – Kobe Bryant

Jack’s secret is not just to reward people for their profit contribution in the “great game of business.” It’s to put real numbers right in workers’ faces so they make better decisions every minute, every day, for every customer. I would go one step further, and maybe Jack already has. I would give employees a minor share in the overall company, but I would also then use software to measure each individual’s or team’s contributions after fair overhead allocations and direct costs. This would mean the back-line “servers” have fair revenue recognition of their efforts on behalf of the front-line “browsers” who actually serve the end customers. Is this not possible in a light-speed world of software and business metrics? We need more real business leaders and visionaries like Jack Stack, not BS Wall Street leverage artists or old-line corporate managers who merely streamline their top-down management systems while their workers wait for their unfunded retirement and death. And we need real educators, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who can make science understandable to everyday people. Most of all, we need people to love what they do so much that they won’t even think of retiring at age 63 or 65 or even 75. They’re so productive and happy that they don’t worry about a retirement that doesn’t make sense to them anymore, though it’s there if they have health challenges. They’re too busy satisfying their customers and creating new businesses to contemplate life without that fulfillment. They’re so focused on what they do that they’re like the champion basketball player who’s totally “in state” and one with his process. They’re certainly not bored or waiting to retire and do nothing!

off of the backboard rang throughout the gym like a bell as it flew back onto the court. “Zero, zero,” the coach said as he walked back to the top of the key. One of the other players in the gym got the ball from mid court and passed it back to the coach. “Check up,” the coach said as he passed the ball back to Matt. After that, you can imagine how it went. The basketball coach beat Matt pretty easily, scoring basket after basket with ease. It was almost like Matt wasn’t even there. Just like I had predicted, the coach beat Matt soundly, and he did it without having to say a word. Now, don’t get me wrong, a lot of players with grit talk trash, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but they usually only do it with people they perceive as real competition. There are a lot of things that go with trash talking and I can guarantee that you probably don’t know them. Don’t worry, you will after you finish this book. The coach in this story knew that Matt wasn’t real competition, so he just beat him. The other players on the sidelines did all the trash-talking for him. Most of the time, players with grit won’t talk trash to

He'd always played a lot of games: baseball, basketball, different card games, war and finance games, horseracing, football, and so on, all on paper of course. Once, he'd got involved in a tabletop war-games club, played by mail, with mutual defense pacts, munition sales, secret agents, and even assassinations, but the inability of the other players to detach themselves from their narrow-minded historical preconceptions depressed Henry. Anything more complex than a normalized two-person zero-sum game was beyond them. Henry had invented for the a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players, which opened up the possibility of wars run by industrial giants with investments on several boards at once, the buying off of whole governments, the emergence of international communications and utilities barons, strikes and rebellions by the slumdwellers between "Go" and "Jail," revolutionary subversion and sabotage with sympathetic ties across the boards, the creation of international regulatory bodies by the established power cliques, and yet without losing any of the basic features of their own battle games, but it never caught on. He even introduced health, sex, religious, and character variables, but that made even less of a hit, though he did manage, before leaving the club, to get a couple pieces on his "Intermonop" game published in some of the club literature.

squeaking ceased.  Cafferty heard a low, “Oh shit,” from the game, then a much louder, “Admiral on deck!” The six on the court snapped to attention facing the bleachers as the basketball bounced lazily away, coming to rest near the far door. Cafferty let the silence linger for a few moments, thankful for the rest it gave his ears, then waved