wooden

"Wooden" is a book of John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach who won 10 NCAA national championships in 12 years between 1964 and 1975. Coach John Wooden is loved and respected by many, not only for his unprecedented (and probably unsurpassable) winning record, but his way of coaching and the life principles he teaches and practices with his players and himself on and off the basketball court. This book is a collection of Wooden's lifetime observations and reflections on families, values, success, achievement, coaching, leading, etc. It is easy to read, but powerful, inspiring, and even-keeled at the same time.

Some examples:

Overachievers

No one is an overachiever. How can you rise above your level of competency? We're all underachievers to different degrees. You may hear someone say that a certain individual "gave 110 percent." How can that be? You can only give what you have, and you have only 100 percent.

Underdogs

I have never gone into a game thinking we were going to lose. Never. Even though there have been games where the experts said there were no way we could win. Even if we were big underdogs I always felt anything could happen. Often enough, I was right.

That's also why I never assumed we were going to win.

Fame 

Fame is just something other people perceive you to be. You're not different. You're still you. It's their illusion. I didn't want it to become my illusion.

  

Hopes and Dreams 

Youngsters are told, "Think big. Anything is possible." I would never go that strong. I want them to think positively, but when you think big you often start thinking too big,  and I believe that can be very dangerous.

Wanting an unattainable goal will eventually produce a feeling of "What's the use?" That feeling can carry over into other areas. This is bad.

Some favorite maxims of his:

Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.

Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.  

You can't let praise or criticism get to you. It's a weakness to get caught up in either one.  

Being average means you are as close to the bottom as you are to the top.

Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.

In the final part of the book, Wooden lays out his defintion of success as such:

"Success is the peace of mind that is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming."

He draws a "pyramid of success" that shows how such success can be achieved: 

The pyramid has gained such fame there are actually courses and web sites after it:
http://www.woodencourse.com/woodens_wisdom.html

http://bit.ly/cjpH1k

A few words on Wooden's family and faith, lastly:

John Wooden was born on October 14, 1910 in a small town in Indiana to farmer parents Roxie Anna and Joshua Hugh Wooden. He had three brothers and two sisters, both died before reaching the age of three. Wooden met his wife Nellie when he was 16. They married in a small ceremony in Indianapolis 6 years later. John and Nellie had a son and a daughter. Nellie died on March 21, 1985 from cancer.

Wooden has remained devoted to Nellie, even decades after her death. Since her death, he has kept to a monthly ritual (health permitting)—on the 21st, he visits her grave, and then writes a love letter to her. After completing the letter, he places it in an envelope and adds it to a stack of similar letters that has accumulated over the years on the pillow she slept on during their life together.

In mourning Nellie's death, Wooden has been comforted by his faith. He has been a Christian for many years and his beliefs are more important to him than basketball, "I have always tried to make it clear that basketball is not the ultimate. It is of small importance in comparison to the total life we live. There is only one kind of life that truly wins, and that is the one that places faith in the hands of the Savior." Wooden's faith has strongly influenced his life. He reads the Bible daily and attends the First Christian Church. He has said that he hopes his faith is apparent to others, "If I were ever prosecuted for my religion, I truly hope there would be enough evidence to convict me."

flow

Two good books I read last year, recommended by two good friends, deal with happiness and success.

"Flow," a book written by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a renowned scholar/professor and former chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, is a serious work on the science of what constitues happiness and how it can be achieved for people. In its anatomy of human consciousness, it somewhat borrows the information theory model to define consciousness as "intentionally ordered information," attention as "psychic energy," and disorder in consciousness as "psychic entropy;" the goal then is to direct one's psychic energy away from psychic entropy to achieve order in consciousness, or the "flow" experience. It also examines what constitutes "I", and concludes it is both part and sum of the contents of consciousness that "I" directs its psychic energy to accumulate for--a circular process that constantly feeds and evolves on itself.

The book then goes on to analyze how "flow" state can be achieved in both physical and mental realms--resulting in sports, games and various scholastic disciplines we have in our civilization--as well as in our daily work, and how one can become an "autotelic" personality that self-motivates and enjoys the work he/she does.  

  

Evidence that this is not a quick-way-to-happiness book is in its discussion on the need of balance between self and group, or differentiation and integration: As one takes on and excels in more and more challenges with the "flow" experiences, he/she becomes more unique or different from others, but keeping union and harmonious relationships with others is still a very essential part of the overall happiness for the individual. (The old Confucius saying "君子和而不同" comes to mind, with emphasis tilting toward the other end, though). The same assertion is made again in its concluding chapter on the subject of the meaning of life:

"In the past few thousand years, humanity has achieved incredible advances in the differentiation of consciousness... We have invented abstraction and analysis--the ability to separate dimensions of objects and processes from each other, such as the velocity of a falling object from its weight and its mass. It is this differentiaion that has produced science, technology, and the unprecedented power of mankind to build up and to destroy its enviornment.

"But complexity consists of integration as well as differentiation. The task of the next decades and centuries is to realize this under-developed component of the mind. Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality. The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account. Recognizing the limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual's purpose merges with the universal flow."