Talking about how success at one skill misleads people about another, the sportswriter explains why great assistant coaches often fail when promoted to head coach.
And no more so than in sports, I think, because you see it all the time where you have a good assistant coach who becomes a head coach.
Yeah.
And they had an expertise for calling plays or coaching pitchers or whatever it might be. But like to be a good head coach, you need to have a completely different skill set, a completely different ego and gall and, you know, fragile self-belief to stand in front of people and get them to follow you, not get them to run a certain play that you're calling. Like I think that it's so interesting. You look at the Bulls in the 90s and you had Phil Jackson and Tex Winner and those two were the perfect mix of that where you had one person who knew his expertise and that was designing offenses and communicating how to make this offense that ends up revolutionizing basketball and the career of Michael Jordan work. And then you have Phil Jackson who, I mean, man, if you had been writing your books in the 90s, I mean, you would have been with the Bulls every week. He would have had you in there all the time because all he was trying to do was find wisdom and find ways to get people into a common sensory experience that was separate…
Look, it's been a while since I've had to fill out an expense report. That's one of the perks of not having a job, but I don't remember enjoying the experience. And certainly, I don't want my employees to waste a bunch of their time doing it. You know, you got to find the receipt. You got to guess…
hours a week,
50 weeks a year for 40 years. That's a lot of time. Your career is the biggest opportunity you have to make if you want to make a positive impact on the world. Because look, if you're a talented person, if you have talents, how you direct those talents and what you direct those talents at, it…