Confidence Basketball Quotes

Basketball Rule #5 When you stop playing your game you've already lost.

IT WAS EASIER FOR PEOPLE to be good at something when more of us lived in small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone else could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains, these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled confidence of the victor. It may be for that reason that people who were born in small towns are statistically overrepresented among the eminent.68 If

Don’t worry about losing. Think about winning.” – Mike Krzyzewski, 5-Time National Champion Basketball Coach

Enjoying the taste of toasted raisin bread or the humor in a cartoon may not seem like much, but simple pleasures like these ease emotional upsets, lift your mood, and enrich your life. They also provide health benefits, by releasing endorphins and natural opioids that shift you out of stressful, draining reactive states and into happier responsive ones. As a bonus, some pleasures—such as dancing, sex, your team winning a game of pick-up basketball, or laughing with friends—come with energizing feelings of vitality or passion that enhance long-term health. Opportunities for pleasure are all around you, especially if you include things like the rainbow glitter of the tiny grains of sand in a sidewalk, the sound of water falling into a tub, the sense of connection in talking with a friend, or the reassurance that comes from the stove working when you need to make dinner.

Although I am sure he has seen human suffering and encountered personal loss, I never saw any evidence that it shaped him the way it did Patrice and me in losing our son Collin, or the millions of others who suffer loss and then channel their pain into empathy and care for others. I learned searing lessons from being a bully and from lying about my own basketball career and seeing how “easy lies” can become a habit. I see no evidence that a lie ever caused Trump pain, or that he ever recoiled from causing another person pain, which is sad and frightening. Without all those things—without kindness to leaven toughness, without a balance of confidence and humility, without empathy, and without respect for truth—there is little chance President Trump can attract and keep the kind of people around him that every president needs to make wise decisions. That makes me sad for him, but it makes me worry for our country.

What to do with a mistake: recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it.” – Dean Smith, 2-Time National Champion Basketball Coach

my old coach used to say that forty percent of success in basketball is desire and another forty percent is confidence.

Let’s take another example; a son whose relationship with his father is troubled. The son feels that no matter what he does it never seems to be good enough for his father. I am grateful that most of the relationships in my life are really good. I’m grateful to my father for working hard so that I could have the education that he didn’t get to have. I’m grateful to my father for supporting our family through my childhood, because I didn’t have a clue then how much hard work and money it took to keep our family going. I’m grateful to my father for taking me to basketball every Saturday when I was a child. I’m grateful that my father is not as tough on me these days as he used to be in the past. I’m grateful that my father cares so much about me, because he wouldn’t be tough if he didn’t care so much. I’m grateful that through my relationship with my father I have learned to have compassion and a greater understanding with my children. I’m grateful to my father for showing me how important encouragement is in raising happy, confident children. I’m really grateful when I get to laugh with my father. Some people never got to do that because they didn’t have a father. And for others, who have lost their father, they will never have the chance to laugh with their father again. I am so truly grateful that I have my father, because amid the tough times, there have been good times, and there will be more good times ahead with my father.

From kindergarten through senior year of high school, Evan attended Crossroads, an elite, coed private school in Santa Monica known for its progressive attitudes. Tuition at Crossroads runs north of $ 22,000 a year, and seemingly rises annually. Students address teachers by their first names, and classrooms are named after important historical figures, like Albert Einstein and George Mead, rather than numbered. The school devotes as significant a chunk of time to math and history as to Human Development, a curriculum meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence. Crossroads emphasizes creativity, personal communication, well-being, mental health, and the liberal arts. The school focuses on the arts much more than athletics; some of the school’s varsity games have fewer than a dozen spectators. 2 In 2005, when Evan was a high school freshman, Vanity Fair ran an exhaustive feature about the school titled “School for Cool.” 3 The school, named for Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” unsurprisingly attracts a large contingent of Hollywood types, counting among its alumni Emily and Zooey Deschanel, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Michael Bay, Maya Rudolph, and Spencer Pratt. And that’s just the alumni—the parents of students fill out another page or two of who’s who A-listers. Actor Denzel Washington once served as the assistant eighth grade basketball coach, screenwriter Robert Towne spoke in a film class, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma talked shop with the school’s chamber orchestra.

Although we had the same upbringing, David has always been more confident. Once, back in high school, we both had Saturday night dates who canceled on us in the late afternoon. I spent the rest of the weekend moping around the house, wondering what was wrong with me. David laughed off the rejection, announcing, “That girl missed out on a great thing,” and went off to play basketball with his friends. Luckily, I had my younger sister, wise and empathetic way beyond her years, to console me.

How did I bridge the gap from depression to elation? Well, I worked hard at improving all aspects of my game. I got stronger mentally and physically. I had good coaching, I studied the other players, and I learned from the history of the NBA. I gained confidence, ability, and intelligence. In short:I learned the game within the game.

Ever since Aristotle described three different kinds of friends—friends of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue—we have known that a set of friends can be a diverse lot. We can have friends we only see at basketball games or book club, friends we see nearly every day at work, and friends who are our confidants. Specialization is fine—we do not expect to like all of our friends in the same way or for the same reasons. At

The students at Sudbury Valley are “doin’ what comes natur’ly.” But they are not necessarily choosing what comes easily. A close look discovers that everyone is challenging themselves; that every kid is acutely aware of their own weaknesses and strengths, and extremely likely to be working hardest on their weaknesses. If their weaknesses are social, they are very unlikely to be stuck away in a quiet room with a book. And if athletics are hard, they are likely to be outdoors playing basketball. Along with the ebullient good spirits, there is an underlying seriousness—even the 6 year olds know that they, and only they, are responsible for their education. They have been given the gift of tremendous trust, and they understand that this gift is as big a responsibility as it is a delight. They are acutely aware that very young people are not given this much freedom or this much responsibility almost anywhere in the world. But growing up shouldering this responsibility makes for a very early confidence in your own abilities—you get, as one graduate says, a “track record.” Self-motivation is never even a question. That’s all there is.

Repetition until Your Learning Becomes Unconscious (Outsourced to Environment) While I implemented what I learned, my teacher would watch me from a distance. He let me struggle as I tried to remember what he had just shown me. The first time, applying what he taught took a lot of time and effort. So we did it again, and again, and again. Over time, I became competent and thus confident. Learning something new is all about memory and how you use it. At first, your prefrontal cortex—which stores your working (or short-term) memory—is really busy figuring out how the task is done. But once you’re proficient, the prefrontal cortex gets a break. In fact, it’s freed up by as much as 90 percent. Once this happens, you can perform that skill automatically, leaving your conscious mind to focus on other things. This level of performance is called automaticity, and reaching it depends on what psychologists call overlearning or overtraining. The process of getting a skill to automaticity involves four steps, or stages: Repeated learning of a small set of information. If you’re playing basketball, for instance, that might mean shooting the same shot over and over. The key here is to go beyond the initial point of mastery. Make your training progressively more difficult. You want to make the task harder and harder until it’s too hard. Then you bring the difficulty back down slightly, in order to stay near the upper limit of your current ability. Add time constraints. For example, some math teachers ask students to work on difficult problems with increasingly shortened timelines. Adding the component of time challenges you in two ways. First, it forces you to work quickly, and second, it saps a portion of your working memory by forcing it to remain conscious of the ticking clock. Practice with increasing memory load—that is, trying to do a mental task with other things on your mind. Put simply, it’s purposefully adding distractions to your training regimen.

A person who refuses to give up will always succeed, eventually. Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he succeeded. NBA superstar Michael Jordan was once cut from his high school basketball team. After his first audition, screen legend Fred Astaire received the following assessment from an MGM executive: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.