Chapter 148 - Letters to a Young Athlete
What I learned from Chris Bosh
Today’s Chapter is based on the book “Letters to a Young Athlete” by Chris Bosh.
Chris Bosh is a retired American professional basketball player, born March 24, 1984, who starred in the NBA for the Toronto Raptors and Miami Heat over 13 seasons. He was an 11-time NBA All-Star, a two-time NBA champion with the Miami Heat, and an Olympic gold medalist with Team USA in 2008.
Here’s What I Learned:
Push Your Limits
“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”
— Bruce Lee
The first lesson we learn from Chris Bosh is the idea that true competitors shine the brightest when they push beyond their limits. He mentions that exhaustion isn’t a barrier but a test of character, urging us to push beyond your perceived physical limits. This mindset isn’t solely about athletic endurance, it can be used as a concept to face life’s adversities, where resilience determines success.
To explain his point, Bosh explains that, “How an athlete plays when they’re exhausted tells you everything about who they are as a competitor. The successful ones don’t even think about being exhausted. They’re so used to it that all they think about is performing. In fact, maybe that’s what being an athlete really is—enduring and transcending the limits you feel when, as The Boss once sang, you “ain’t nothing but tired.”
Bosh draws inspiration from David Goggins, an ex-Navy SEAL who runs ultra marathons (135 miles in 24 hours). Goggins once said that the reason to his success in running comes from learning how to distrust his limits. Bosh explains that “When you think you’ve hit your limit, you’re only at about 40 percent of your capacity. Your mind is telling you that your body needs to stop—but it’s lying. Your body can keep going well beyond that point. Realizing this should empower you.”
In the game of basketball, Bosh mentions that it is quite common for big men to quit on a rebound opportunities due to exhaustion. While this may be a norm in the sport, Bosh hated it.
“You think Kobe Bryant just said all of a sudden, “Man I’m just really, really in shape, and now I can score 30 points a night without getting tired”? No way. You get that way by never quitting, by pushing through precisely when you are tired. That’s the irony of this game: You become capable of the grind by surviving the grind.”
— Chris Bosh
Bosh extends this ability to push your limits when exhausted to the inevitability of pain in pursuit of glory. As a matter of fact, he believes that to succeed, one must be able to endure pain. He once said, “Pain is temporary; glory is forever. If you want to excel, you have to get used to the pain. You have to get used to exhaustion. I can’t promise you that it will ever be a comfortable feeling, but I can guarantee you that you can become familiar enough with it that you can visit that mental and physical space on your path to getting better and not have to worry that you’ll crumple under the pressure.”
Furthermore, Bosh believes that this concept of pushing oneself’s limits is also a primordial skill beyond the athletic life as it is the key in order to face life’s adversities. He explains that “And in life, it’s the same. Life doesn’t wait to see if you’re rested and ready before throwing the biggest tests at you. It throws those tests at you whenever it feels like it—you lose your job, or you fail at something that mattered deeply to you, or someone you love gets really sick.”
“The difference between people who crumple in the face of adversity and the people who come through it stronger and wiser is the ability to reach down for that extra endurance even when you’re exhausted, even when it’s not fair, even when you want to curl up in a hole somewhere. When times are hard, your mind may be telling you that you’ve hit your limit. Remember: It’s lying.”
— Chris Bosh
This lesson from Chris Bosh reminds me of what we have learned from Konosuke Matsushita who believed that there is an inextricable link between facing adversity and achieving success both in business and in life. As Matsushita once said, “the great figures of history are those who have been buffeted by adversity and whose dauntless spirit has helped them overcome countless difficulties.”
This belief stands in contrast to the common perception that success is a linear journey free from setbacks. In reality however, adversity is key to progress and innovation. Matsushita believes that challenges are great opportunities to gain wisdom and to improve. As he once said, “We should strive to be the kind of person who learns something with every fall.”
However, it takes resiliency and perseverance in order to face adversities as you may need to fall seven times before you can reach success. Matsushita compares this process to mountain climbing as he believes that life is a series of mountains that we must climb in other to prosper both in business and in life. As he once said, “Just as you have reached the summit of one mountain in your journey and caught your breath, there lies before you another mountain. You trudge upward, and when you gain the next peak, there lies yet another ridge, and then another, endlessly along the path. This is one of the truths of our lives as well.”
As such, Matsushita mentions that it is important to cultivate a strong mindset in order to have the will to continue fighting despite so many adversities. In his opinion, this can be achieved by approaching life as if one was constantly in a sword fight. It is only with this sort of approach that we may have the mental fortitude to survive and thrive when facing challenges that end up in our path toward success.
“Life itself is essentially a fight with a real sword: you take your life in your hands whatever you do. No matter how small the matter, you have to undertake it as if your life depended on it.”
— Konosuke Matsushita
Find Your Why?
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
In a world and culture obsessed with wealth, status, and external validation, Bosh warns us to not be motivated from the wrong reasons such as money or fame. Instead, he urges us to find purpose in what we do by finding a profound “why” that sustains long-term drive. He argues that true purpose fuels continuous improvement, even beyond initial successes, drawing from examples of elite athletes who persist despite having made it.
As a matter of fact, Bosh believes that money and fame and popularity, while they can be good short-term motivators, are not the reason why elite athletes keep performing at a high level. For example, he mentions that “Serena Williams will never have to work another minute in her life, and yet she is working every day; not just on her game, not just on her body, but on multiple companies she owns. Serena had more money than she could ever need, plus twenty-three Grand Slam titles, second most of all time. She then came back after her pregnancy to continue being one of the top players in tennis. Why? Because she has a much bigger why than living that life.”
How often do you hear about athletes that get satisfied by making varsity, with signing their first contract, or their first start, or their first shoe deal and just lose their hunger and stop performing at a high level? Probably too many to name. They get surpassed by others who are hungrier. Bosh explains that, “It’s fine to celebrate. There’s nothing like celebrating a win or a big moment. But some people just get stuck there. And meanwhile, life keeps going—other players are hitting the gym, new kids are coming up to the league from college, you’re getting older, and your body is just a fraction less capable than it was the day before. Without hunger, life leaves you behind.”
“What keeps a guy like Tom Brady coming back? The same thing that keeps James Harden working on new shots in the off-season. What keeps a team like the Heat pushing for a second title when they could just sit back and enjoy the first one? The same thing that keeps writers writing, even after they’ve got a classic to their name. What keeps Elon Musk at it, starting new companies? It’s not the financial rewards. It’s just the joy of getting better, of wanting to beat your own personal best every time you lace up your shoes or step into your office. And it’s purpose. For someone like Musk, it’s about building technology that can keep human life sustainable on this planet, and someday on other planets, too. For someone like Brady, it’s being remembered as the best to ever play the game. And that’s something all of the greats have in common. They come in all kinds of body types, with all kinds of skill sets—but where the good ones stop, the great ones keep going. They’re never satisfied. They’re never full.”
— Chris Bosh
This reminds me of what we have learned from Michael Jordan. He believed that the most challenging thing about keeping a good work ethic is to do it for a long period of time. As Jordan would say, “commitment cannot be compromised by rewards.” In fact, while it is challenging to not give up and to persist with our good habits and efforts when things go wrong, it is even more mentally difficult to be consistent once we have a taste of success.
“Excellence isn’t a one-week or one-year ideal. It’s a constant. There will be days when you don’t feel on top of your game, meetings in which you aren’t at your best, but your commitment remains constant. No compromises.”
— Michael Jordan
In Jordan’s opinion, this sense of commitment can be seen with just about anyone achieving at a high level; he gives the example of Tiger Woods who was back in the gym by 6:30 to work out the morning after he beat Phil Mickelson at the Ford Championship in 2005. Similarly, businesses must also stay focus and committed to what worked for it to continue to grow. Too many businesses have failed by resting on their laurels or by diversifying into worse businesses. As we have learned from Tom Monaghan, too many successful businessmen go into other worse businesses and completely forgets about the details that made them successful in the first place.
“The Jordan brand has continued to grow because we have remained uncompromised. It’s easy to go the other way, though. It’s easy to rest on your laurels, or to get fat on success. I don’t ever want to get fat that way.”
— Michael Jordan
Cultivate Your Mind
“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
Chris Bosh is also an advocate for young athletes to dedicate significant time to mental development, arguing that intellectual growth complements physical prowess. He draws parallels from athletes who succeeded through strategy and knowledge, such as Greg Maddux, a legendary professional baseball pitcher, widely regarded as one of the greatest in Major League Baseball (MLB) history.
Bosh writes that Maddux was “one of the most dominant pitchers when I was growing up. If you ever saw him pitch, you know he was pretty much untouchable in his prime. You also know that the dude looked like an accountant or a middle school teacher. He didn’t have the dominating physical presence of a Randy Johnson or Roger Clemens. His fastball rarely got above 90 miles per hour. But he ended his career in the top ten all-time for strikeouts and wins—and he played right through baseball’s steroid era and home-run explosion. It wasn’t physical prowess that gave Maddux his edge. It was his mental advantage. He knew every single hitter’s tendencies and weaknesses, he knew how they hit against him and even how he’d pitched them the last time they faced each other. Like a chess grand master, he’d played out at-bats before the game even started. He’d beaten 80 percent of the hitters he faced with his mind—with his focus and preparation and understanding of the game—before they’d even stepped into the batter’s box.“
As such, Bosh argues that we should cultivate our mind. He explains that the word cultivate comes from the Latin word meaning “to grow”, similarly to how you cultivate a garden or a piece of farmland. By consequence, he believes that cultivating one’s mind isn’t something that happens overnight and requires a long and patient methodical process.
“You have to plant the seeds—that’s learning the basics, figuring out what you’re passionate about outside of your sport, paying attention in class. You have to water the seeds—that’s coming back to the thing you’re passionate about almost every day, putting in the time, developing your mastery. And then you get to collect the fruit, your reward for all of that work. In this case, the reward is that you get to be an interesting person—to others, sure, but mainly to yourself.”
— Chris Bosh
Furthermore, he mentions in his book how modern basketball has changed purely by the recognition of the use of analytics, demonstrating that even a physical sport can be revolutionised by cultivating the mind. He talks about how James Harden and the Houston Rockets’ succeeded by setting themselves the goal of scoring 1.16 points per possession, leading them to be the most efficient offense in NBA history.
Bosh writes, “In the old NBA, if you were open for a midrange jumper, you took it. In today’s analytically minded sport, that’s the worst shot you can take—because the probability of connecting isn’t much better than the probability on a three-point shot, except the shot is worth a point less. Multiply that difference over the course of a game, and over the course of a season, and it turns into the difference between a playoff team and a lottery team. That’s the kind of math that’s going on in nearly every practice facility right now. And if you can’t keep up with it, the coach will find someone else who can. Think about that. For decades, basketball was essentially the same game—see open shot, take open shot—until some of the brightest minds in the game figured out that it wasn’t that simple. They revolutionized the game by thinking about it more creatively. That was the insight that gave us Damian Lillard and Steph and Kevin Durant. That came from somebody studying the game, not playing it with brute force.”
Finally, Chris Bosh is also a practitioner of multi-disciplinary thinking. As a matter of fact, he believes that a lot of successful athletes get value from exposure to ideas outside of their field of expertise. He explains that “The book Candace Parker credits for her mental toughness is Chop Wood, Carry Water. Tom Brady likes The Inner Game of Tennis, which obviously isn’t about football at all. I’ve gotten real athletic benefits from books about ancient philosophy, martial arts, science, psychology, and so many other topics.“
This makes me think of Herbert Simon, who was also a real polymath due to his interest in various different fields. As he once said, “I have been interested in many different things—economics (especially industrial organization), political science (especially public administration), psychology (especially cognition), philosophy (especially epistemology), computer science.”
Simon’s career is a testament to the power of innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration. He believed that breakthroughs often occur at the intersection of disciplines and that the most significant problems require integrating knowledge from multiple fields. In order to encourage interdisciplinary activity, Simon created the Social Science Research Council at the Carnegie Mellon University where he was a professor. However, he was “was appalled at how often I heard such phrases as, “as a historian, I . . . ,” “as an economist, I . . . ,” “as a sociologist, I . . . ,” and so on. I challenged these phrases each time I heard them, but it was like trying to purge ainnuh (“ Isn’t it so?”) from the lexicon of a native of Milwaukee.”
“The problem is less one of bringing unlike social scientists together than one of bringing unlike social sciences together in one man. There has been failure after failure of interdisciplinary “teams” to integrate anything . . . except to the extent that individual team members became interdisciplinary. I would not give a dollar to assist a typical political scientist to collaborate with a typical economist unless each one of them gave me a sworn statement that he would study seriously and not in a dilettante’s way the discipline of the other for at least a year.”
— Herbert A. Simon
Charlie Munger also believed that people who have a broad mind and who understand many different models from many different disciplines make better decisions. This is mainly because it allows one to have a different box of tools when facing a problem. Peter Kaufman, one of Munger’s most vivid followers of his multidisciplinary approach, mentions the reason why it is important to be a multidisciplinary thinker in his speech to the California Polytechnic State University Pomona Economics Club:
“The answer comes from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, “To understand is to know what to do.” Could there be anything that sounds simpler than that? And yet it’s a genius line—”to understand is to know what to do.” How many mistakes do you make when you understand something? You don’t make any mistakes. Where do mistakes come from? They come from blind spots, a lack of understanding. Why do you need to be multidisciplinary in your thinking? Because as the Japanese proverb says, “The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.” You may know everything there is to know about your specialty, your silo, your “well,” but how are you going to make any good decisions in life—the complex systems of life, the dynamic system of life—if all you know is one well?”
— Peter Kaufman
Beyond the Book
Read "Turning Adversity Into Advantage" by Farnam Street
Read "What You Don’t See" by Farnam Street
Read "The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking" by Farnam Street
Read "Using Multidisciplinary Thinking to Approach Problems in a Complex World" by Farnam Street
Listen to "#120 Chris Bosh: Hunger and Greatness" by The Knowledge Project
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