#171 What I Learned from Steph Curry
What I learned from reading “Shot Ready” by Stephen Curry.
Today’s Chapter is based on the book “Shot Ready” by Stephen Curry.
Stephen Curry is an American professional basketball player for the Golden State Warriors in the NBA, widely regarded as the greatest shooter in history. He revolutionized the game by popularizing the three-point shot, leading the Warriors to four championships (2015, 2017, 2018, 2022) and earning two MVP awards while setting the all-time record for three-pointers made.
Here’s what I learned:
Embrace the Grind
“The hardest thing to do is work hard when no one is watching.”
— Ray Lewis
The most famous image of Stephen Curry is him jogging backward after releasing a three-pointer, the ball still in the air, his eyes already looking away before the ball goes through the net. However, what we don’t see are the thousands of repetitions that made that moment possible. The same shot, over and over, when there is no crowd, no defender, no applause.
As a matter of fact, Curry’s success began long before the bright lights of the NBA. It started in local gyms where he learned to love the unseen work that separates the good players from the great ones. He understood that greatness isn’t accidental but forged by hours of practice when no one is watching. He believed that the key to success is to work on the fundamentals. As he once said, “We practice not until I get the shot right, but until I can’t get it wrong.”
From the get go, Steph Curry understood that for him to succeed as a basketball player, he had to work harder than anyone else. As he explains, “I was never the most gifted athlete—not the highest jumper or the fastest runner or the tallest player on the court. In college, I looked like a middle-schooler trying to age himself up with a mustache so thin it seemed drawn on. Depending on my haircut, I’m still only 6’3” in a league where the average is 6’6”.”
As such, it is not surprising that Steph Curry believed in waking up earlier than others to work on his craft. He writes, “The key to these summer workouts, as in most things in life, is getting started before everyone else’s day begins.” Furthermore, he understood that he had to approach practice deliberately focusing on the details. As he mentions, “I give the ball a hard dribble, because even here in the practice gym, intensity and intention are important.”
“I fell in love with the grind. You have to. With the sacrifices that it takes to be great, you have to find joy in the work you do when no one else is around.”
— Stephen Curry
Curry defines the grind as the most important hours in any pursuit. For him as a basketball player, it is the work he does at the gym in isolation, where there is no defence and no live action. And yet, even when practicing alone, he practiced with a shot-ready mentality, as if the stakes were high and the clock is low. This allowed Curry to ensure that in-game performance felt easier than in practices.
Furthermore, Curry believes that focusing on the fundamentals are key to growth especially when you reach a plateau. He writes, “Grounding means returning to the fundamentals of the game, which is important whatever your game is. If you don’t master and remaster the basics, you’ll always be wasting time compensating for fundamental flaws.” As such, if you feel stuck, Curry advises you to “Slow down to examine what you’re doing, starting from the smallest variable—whatever your equivalent of the fifth metatarsal is—because being disciplined about small details, and taking joy in the work of getting them right until they’re second nature, is how you build consistent success.”
“Growth is the ultimate objective, but it emerges from grounding. Without mastering the fundamental principles of success, you can still struggle through, but at best you’ll be meeting your challenges instead of growing from them.”
— Stephen Curry
This reminds me of what we have learned previously from Kobe Bryant’s “Mamba Mentality”. Although Bryant first started it as a catchy hashtag, it became to symbolize his work ethic and his way of life. As Kobe once said, “The mindset isn’t about seeking a result—it’s more about the process of getting to that result. It’s about the journey and the approach. It’s a way of life. I do think that it’s important, in all endeavors, to have that [Mamba] mentality.”
As we have seen from others, obsession to one’s craft is primordial to reach success. In fact, Kobe believes that one must be willing to make sacrifices to obtain the level of success he had. He explains that “If you really want to be great at something, you have to truly care about it. If you want to be great in a particular area, you have to obsess over it. A lot of people say they want to be great, but they’re not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness.”
“What I’m saying is greatness isn’t easy to achieve. It requires a lot of time, a lot of sacrifices. It requires a lot of tough choices. It requires your loved ones to sacrifice, too, so you have to have an understanding circle of family and friends. People don’t always understand just how much effort from how many people goes into one person chasing a dream to be great.”
— Kobe Bryant
In Kobe’s case, he was obsessed in becoming the best and he “had a constant craving, a yearning, to improve and be the best.” As he once said, “If you want to be a better player, you have to prepare, prepare, and prepare some more.”
One way he did this was by watching game tapes of other players in order to figure out their weakness. His mentality was to dominate his opponents. He reiterates that “Whether it was AI, Tracy, Vince—or, if I were coming up today, LeBron, Russ, Steph—my goal was to figure you out. And to do that, to figure those puzzles out, I was willing to do way more than anyone else.”
Furthermore, Kobe understood that if he wanted to be the best, he had to take a contrarian approach compared to everyone else. As Albert Einstein once said, “The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone is likely to find themselves in places no one has ever been before.”
Therefore, Kobe had a particular workout routines compared to his peers. Here’s how he describes it:
“I always felt like if I started my day early, I could train more each day. If I started at 11, I’d get in a few hours, rest for four hours, and then get back to the gym around 5 to 7. But if I started at 5 AM and went until 7, I could go again from 11 until 2 and 6 until 8. By starting earlier, I set myself up for an extra workout each day. Over the course of a summer, that’s a lot of extra hours in the gym.”
— Kobe Bryant
Furthermore, Kobe believes that part of the reason to his success is due to the fact that he was never satisfied even when he reached the top. He always had that desire to be better even when he was winning championships. As he once said, “I’m at the gym at the same time after losing 50 games as I am after winning a championship. It doesn’t change for me.”
In fact, this continuous obsession to improve and to become better cannot change if one is to reach the top. Kobe reiterates that “The only aspect that can’t change, though, is that obsession. You have to enter every activity, every single time, with a want and need to do it to the best of your ability.”
Embrace The Shot Ready Mentality
“Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.”
— Charlie Munger
Stephen Curry didn’t just practice shots, he was mainly training his mind to perform under pressure. He coins the term “Shot Ready” to defines this mentality of being able to execute things automatically even when nerves strike. He explains, “I spend so much time practicing in this feeling so that even under the bright lights and crushing pressure of a real game, I can easily fall into an unconscious flow and execute my training. Of course, I’ll still feel all the nerves, but I don’t let them linger. Instead, they pass right through me. What is left behind is a calm that allows my training to kick in. And then I deliver.”
As a matter of fact, Curry is well-known for being the best shooter of all-time and he shares that the secret to being a great shooter is to be consistent. He writes that “Consistency is sometimes more powerful than technical perfection. Whether it’s from two feet or twenty feet, your shot position should always look exactly the same. When you have mastered the right form—the technically correct way to shoot—then you can relax into your own specific way to do it. And then you need to stick with it.” As such, having a “Shot Ready” mentality allows Curry to be in perfect balance and to simply let his muscle memory and practiced mechanics to take over. He doesn’t even need to think during a game and just follows his instincts completely.
“Being shot ready requires practice, training, and repetition, but it rewards that work with an unmatchable feeling of transcendence.”
— Stephen Curry
A big part of being “Shot Ready” is trained through visualization. Curry believes that visualization can be practiced. He writes, “You can practice visualization. Do it with me now. Think of yourself taking a shot. At first, you might see yourself from behind, facing a basket. But you have to get closer. Home in. Don’t picture yourself on the court. No, get inside your imagined self, see through your eyes, and feel through your hands. Notice every detail of your mechanics as you go into a shot. Feel the ball spinning off the leave finger of your hand, feel your hand follow through in a gooseneck. Do it again. Make it perfect. Watch the arc of the ball as it goes exactly where you targeted it, as if the gooseneck of your shooting hand just dropped the ball right in.”
Another part of being “Shot Ready” is to have confidence in your abilities. He believes that to be a great shooter, you need to be right in between of confidence and cockiness. However, you need to have the work ethic that earns you this confidence as it won’t mean a thing if you haven’t done the work. As he reiterates, “What’s the one key ingredient that the greatest shooters have in common? They all think they’re the greatest shooter ever.“ Confidence isn’t about making every shots, but about not letting any missed shots affect you. It is about trusting that your preparation has given you everything you need and to not have any hesitation for your next shot.
“As a shooter, what I need is confidence that the next shot is going to go in. To maintain that confidence—and to stay in the calm flow state I work so hard to achieve—my job is to not overanalyze. That applies to so much of life. You let a little bit of doubt creep in while you’re performing, and soon it infects your whole process. Doubt and worry will sap you of the juice and energy you need to perform in the moment.”
— Stephen Curry
This reminds me of what we have learned from Joe Montana who once said, “it is impossible to strive for something until we know what it is we are pursuing. You have to know what you want.”
If we do not know what are specific goals are, it is very difficult to have the drive, discipline or imagination to achieve them. As such, the first thing to do is to identify what we want to accomplish. Not only that, I believe it is primordial to choose which goals we need to focus on in order to manage our time better. One way of doing this is by writing down the goals we want to achieve and to circle the top three we want to achieve. The rest should be eliminated.
“This first principle, knowing what we want, is the beginning of achieving performance excellence.”
— Joe Montana
Once we have a goal in mind, Montana explains that visualization is a great mental tool in obtaining the positive results that we desire. He elaborates that “By concentrating on the image or outcome we desire, we can step into an “as if” reality, experiencing something as if it is really happening.”
He explains that the most important aspect of the visualization process is imagination. The greater the imagination, the more effective the visualization process will be. This idea reminds me of the importance of having imagination to succeed in business.
Embrace Failures
“Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.”
— John Wooden
Stephen Curry views challenges not as obstacles but as stepping stones to success. He embraced what he calls the J-curve of progress, where a dip is often needed before seeing massive progress. This once again demonstrates why we should favour Curry’s process focused approach rather than taking a results-based focus. Curry writes, “I’ve learned over the years that challenges are the most efficient teachers, so I don’t run from them. You need to get used to doing difficult things, so you’re not living in fear of things going wrong.”
A perfect example of this in basketball comes from Michael Jordan who once said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty‑six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game‑winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Similarly, Curry writes, “While missing shots is a great way to learn, obsessing over failure is just a distraction from the work of improvement.”
“This is trouble if you’re motivated solely by the validation of quick results. You’ll give up if you are results-focused instead of process-focused, because working harder doesn’t make that curve go up faster.”
— Stephen Curry
Furthermore, Curry explains that it is often common for persistent practice to not showing results immediately. He draws a parallel to the J-curve in investing. He writes, “Imagine a big J on a page: The dip at the start of the letter is when you’re investing in something but haven’t gotten any returns yet, and then the line rises, and fast. Whatever the investment is, you’re going to get feedback on the loss quicker than you get any positive returns—it takes longer for the trajectory to start shooting up. When you’re in that down phase, you have no idea how far it’s going to go until it starts to go the other way.”
Similarly, Curry had a similar experience during a summer in High School, where he had to re-learn how to shoot in order to improve his mechanic that would allow him to succeed at the next level. He explains, “I would acknowledge to young me that this summer will be one of the hardest tasks I’d ever face in my basketball life: breaking down the one thing I thought I did well to try to do it better, while feeling so far away from what I hoped the end result would be. And this is the advice I would give myself: This may seem like it’s as hard as it gets, but you’re going to have to do variations of this same work a hundred more times in your life. Different scenarios and settings. Different challenges. But the same hard work with the same distant and uncertain outcome.”
What he learned from that summer wasn’t just an improved shot, but the fact that if something is handed to you easily, you won’t get the chance to develop the drive you need to sustain excellence. This also happened to him when he was about to play in College. He was only able to play at Davidson a smaller Division I team, but this helped him to “work harder, maximizing my skill set as a sharpshooter who could tire out any opponent by racing all over the court.”
“The times when you’re most uncomfortable are the inflection points in your life. The discomfort is how you know you are changing.”
— Stephen Curry
Similarly, Michael Jordan also faced various failure during his career in basketball. However, he was able to move on and succeed by understanding that some things are outside of his control. In fact, he learned to focus on things he could control which was to give it his best and to make all the work necessary to put himself in a position to succeed. Furthermore, Jordan mentions that if you give it your best, all the other things will come to you.
“I had put in all the work, not only in that particular game, but in practice every day. If I missed, then it wasn’t meant to be. That simple. It wasn’t because the effort wasn’t there. It wasn’t because I couldn’t make the shot, because I had taken the same shot many times in every situation. As soon as the ball went up, there weren’t any nerves because I had trained myself for that situation.
I was as prepared as I could possibly have been for that moment. I couldn’t go back and practice a little harder. I knew I had done the right things to prepare myself for that situation. One way or another, I knew I was prepared to be successful. Now, if you know you haven’t prepared correctly, or you know you haven’t worked hard enough, that’s when other thoughts and emotions creep into your mind. That’s stress. That’s fear.
It’s the same process for doing anything, anywhere in life no matter how big or small the stage. Whether it’s running a corporation, taking a test in second grade or taking a shot to win a game, at that moment you are the sum total of all the work you have put in, nothing more and nothing less. If you are confident you have done everything possible to prepare yourself, then there is nothing to fear.”
— Michael Jordan
Beyond the Book
Read "Turning Adversity Into Advantage" by Farnam Street
Read "Why You Should Practice Failure" by Farnam Street
Watch " Stephen Curry: Shot Ready" on YouTube
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