What a Pro Basketball Coach Teaches Me About Creativity, Authenticity, and Vulnerability
During the pandemic when it was just Kel & I together for months on end, we invented a way to make my “lectures” about random esoteric songs more interesting to her personally as my audience. This was because I wanted to keep playing weird songs, but I also wanted Kelly to still like me.
Basically, instead of me saying, “Here’s a great song I love and here’s why it’s good and here’s its history and oh did you hear that bass part right there and yea I know it’s loud but also it’s only seven minutes long,” I tried to build a bridge to that song starting from others that she already knew, creating mental scaffolding that would enable her to hear some of those things for herself quickly and without too much blah blah blah from me because “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
This game was based on my high school years spent playing tracks from CDs in conversation with each other, and it built many things, including:
Connection and conversation, because we replaced me talking at Kelly with an interactive process that put my audience first.
Strategic thinking, because I’d have to figure out what was most interesting about the song I wanted to play and work backwards to figure out a starting song that I knew that Kelly liked and then decide on a few songs along the way that told an interesting story and were personally tailored to the audience.
Trust from Kelly that because I knew my audience I’d reward her attention with something interesting & entertaining.
And so I ask for that kind of trust now from you as I try to interestingly & entertainingly tell you what Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla teaches me about self-expression without talking about anything a non-basketball person wouldn’t understand.
Who is this person anyway?
Joe Mazzulla is the youngest head coach in the National Basketball Association, he won the championship last year in his second season ever, and Kel & I spend a lot of time watching and listening to him because he coaches our favorite team, the Boston Celtics.
My current favorite basketball podcast Six Trophies refers to Joe as their “Favorite NBA Weirdo” because of his unique personality, and I thoroughly enjoy the ways that he expresses this unique personality with Creativity, Authenticity, and Vulnerability.
Creativity
In high stakes, high visibility roles like “head basketball coach” I think you tend to get a lot more copycats who try and play it safe and fewer original thinkers who try to break new ground. This opinion is partly based on reading The Book of Joe: Trying Not to Suck at Baseball and Life, an excellent book written by baseball coach Joe Maddox with Tom Verducci.
Baseball Joe M. was known for thinking outside the box as a manager, and I think that’s because he didn’t have much use for a box in the first place:
“The more you restrict freedom, the more you restrict creativity. To restrict creativity, which a lot of people do unknowingly, you are losing out on a tremendous opportunity to find out how good someone is. When you attempt to create a contrived version of somebody before permitting that person to show you what they are, you’re automatically setting restrictions.”
-Joe Maddon
How does Basketball Joe M. get rid of the box? For starters, may I present to you a coaching philosophy largely based on the behavior of animals in the wild:
After Joe won the title last year he appeared on my former favorite NBA podcast The Lowe Post, and host Zach Lowe got Joe to talk a little bit about some of the experts Joe solicits advice from. These are not basketball experts, to be clear—they are chess grandmasters, soccer managers, military veterans, and other gurus, and so you end up with non-traditional basketball practices like this one inspired by Nick Lavery and described by Joe:
“So it was a puzzle that the guys had to put together. It was three teams. It was like four teams of three, and there was a puzzle on each side. And they had to recreate, almost like a Rubik's cube. They had to recreate in a Rubik's cube from one side of the court to the other side of the court, but they had to do it using nonverbal communication, and they had to do it with, only one person could communicate, but that person couldn't walk back and forth. So it was a bunch of different variables and restrictions to which they had to get the same cube to look the same on the other side of the floor using a bunch of different things.”
I am a huge believer that cross-training knowledge and experience has exponential benefits and I’m inspired by Joe’s approach to challenges.
Authenticity
So, Joe is not everyone’s cup of tea, for sure. It seems to me this is because he has a few very high priorities and not much patience for anything else, and because his job means he has to talk to the media on a daily basis, and the combination results in some pretty awkward moments that Kelly and I love because Joe is always going to be Joe.
“Joe is very authentic to himself,” says Celtic Xavier Tillman in this article from Jay King in The Athletic. “He loves jiu-jitsu. He walks and breathes that. He walks and breathes war and the battle and stuff like that. And then he’s really all about family.”
I also know that Joe loves jiu-jitsu because of hilarious videos like this one, which one of his players took at the team’s practice facility:
If you liked that, I think you’ll enjoy the team talking about how they know that Joe is Joe:
Vulnerability
Clearly Joe is not afraid to be himself, but at the end of the day, after all of the funny animal comments and awkward media interactions, what I admire most is this: for as much as he cares about the goal of winning, Joe seems to care about his players even more.
When asked about a star player having a bad game, Joe said this:
The sports landscape is not the nicest, most empathetic space in our society, and we don’t have the nicest, most empathetic society in the first place, and so I find Joe’s response here to be a powerful example of how you can be a real human while going about your business. Thank you Joe, I’m happy you’re my team’s coach, and I learn a whole lot watching you work.
Who is one of your self-expression heroes? What have you learned from them? Want to read more about why I like the players on the Celtics for reasons that go beyond basketball? Do you or your business need some help figuring out how to express yourself? jed@kindandfunny.com.