I had a kid tell me he wanted to play college basketball.
No offers. Small school. No AAU. He was a good shooter, but he was small, and his handle and his footwork had a long way to go. He was lifting occasionally, shooting around a little, playing pickup with his friends, and he genuinely believed he was working toward something.
He wasn’t. He was doing basketball-adjacent activities and calling it training.
And I want to be clear here, because this is the part people get wrong about me. I never told him he couldn’t do it. I don’t do that and I’m not going to start. But I also wasn’t going to nod along while he believed that Tuesday night pickup at the rec, against a 46 year old in a tank top who won’t stop calling fouls, was going to close a gap that was measured in years.
The gap nobody wants to measure
Every player I’ve worked with knows their goal. Every single one. They’ll tell you about it in detail, unprompted, before you ask.
Almost none of them know what it costs.
That’s not laziness and it’s not a character flaw. Nobody ever sat them down and did the math with them, and the math is uncomfortable, so it doesn’t get done.
Research on skill development actually breaks this apart. There’s naive practice, which is repeating something and assuming the repetition itself is doing the work. Then there’s purposeful practice, which sets specific goals, aims directly at your weaknesses, includes feedback, and drags you past where you’re comfortable. Studies show the move from the first to the second is the single highest-leverage change most people can make, and it has surprisingly little to do with how many hours you’re putting in.
Larry Bird said it better than any researcher has. He said he wasn’t just shooting baskets, that every practice shot had a purpose, and that he was picturing specific game situations, specific defenders, specific pressure.
Most players are getting shots up. Bird was solving a problem.
[Image placeholder: player working through a specific skill drill]
Somebody already did the thing you want to do
This should make you feel better, not worse. Whatever you’re chasing, somebody already caught it, and they left evidence lying around.
Pascal Siakam didn’t play organized basketball until he was around 17. Before that he was at a seminary, studying to become a priest, with exactly one hour of physical activity allowed per day. All three of his older brothers played Division I basketball. So he was surrounded by it, related to it, built for it, and he wanted to play soccer.
When he finally called his brother to say he’d landed a college basketball scholarship, his brother laughed at him. Actual quote: “You? Basketball? I don’t believe it.”
Then he made the NBA and could not shoot.
I’m not being unkind. In his second season he took 132 threes and made 22 percent, which was the worst mark in the league among anybody who attempted at least a hundred. His head coach’s public advice was that he should slow down on the threes. That’s a rough thing to hear at your job.
So he went and fixed that one thing. Not “worked hard.” Not “put in the time.” He found the specific hole and attacked it, directly, and his three-point percentage climbed 36 percent. He made an All-NBA team.
Teammates say he’s the first one in the gym and the last one out, and that’s the part everybody quotes. The part that actually matters is what he said about himself, which is that he loves not being able to do something, putting a pile of hours into it, and becoming good at it. He picks a weakness on purpose. Every year. That’s the habit, and it’s the only one that ever mattered.
[Image placeholder: focused footwork or ball handling work]
The kid whose friends thought he’d been to the Monstars
I’ve got a younger player in my junior groups who is obsessed with basketball in a way his parents have described, generously, as “a lot.”
He doesn’t want to play other sports. He doesn’t want to hear about other sports. He wants to hoop, and then afterward he would like to hoop, and if nobody intervenes he will remain in the gym until a staff member physically escorts him out.
So he lived there. Came early, stayed late, and started training with the middle school group despite having absolutely no business being in that room. He was the smallest kid in there by a comfortable margin and he got worked over daily. Then a little less. Then he started hanging. Then he started making it annoying for them.
A few months later one of his friends watched him play and demanded to know what happened to him. Not “nice game.” What happened to you. Like his friend suspected he’d been to see the Monstars and come back with somebody’s game in a jar.
Nothing happened to him. His talent didn’t change. He didn’t grow six inches. He changed what he did with his afternoons, and that was the entire intervention. Every day, in a room where he was the worst player, for months.
That’s it. That’s the whole trick, and it’s available to literally everybody reading this, and almost nobody does it because it’s boring and it stings.
[Image placeholder: younger player training with an older group]
The middle school girl who got tired of the B team
Different version of the same story, and she’s the one I’d point to if you want proof that this isn’t just about being obsessed.
She’d been on the B team for years and she was over it. She wanted the A team. And she had never really practiced on her own, ever, which sounds like an indictment but isn’t. Nobody had told her that was a thing she was allowed to do.
So she went all in. Privates, groups, camps, and actual solo work that she did instead of merely announcing she was going to do it, which is where most of these plans go to die.
The work was not random. We went straight at footwork and ball handling, because those were the actual gaps, and everything else got to wait its turn.
She made the team.
Here’s what I need you to hear about her. She was not naturally an A team player. That was never in question and pretending otherwise would be insulting. What she had was specific work aimed at specific weaknesses, those weaknesses took major leaps, and major leaps in the right places will move you up a level whether you were supposed to get there or not.
Then it does it again the next year. That’s the part nobody tells you. It doesn’t stop working.
And the college kid
He listened.
His habits changed completely after that conversation. Consistent training, deliberate work, real intent behind it instead of doing basketball-shaped things and hoping. He built serious momentum and he was playing well in summer leagues, genuinely well, and for a while it looked like the whole thing was on.
Then he realized he didn’t want it.
Not the goal. The price. He’d seen, in detail, what the next several years of his life would have to look like, because now he actually knew, and he decided that wasn’t a trade he wanted to make. He plays intramural and pickup in college now. He’s happy. He still hoops constantly.
That’s not a failure and I won’t let it be framed as one. The audit worked exactly the way it’s supposed to. He found out what it cost, paid it for a while to see how it felt, and then made an informed decision about his own life instead of spending four years wondering.
Most people never get that. Most people just wonder.
[Image placeholder: player and coach talking on the sideline]
So what do you actually do
Write down the goal. The real one, not the version you say out loud at dinner.
Then write down what you actually did last week. Not what you meant to do, not what you’re starting Monday. What happened.
Then go find somebody who has the thing you want, and look up what they did to get it. Skip the highlights. Find the boring part, the part where they were bad at something specific and went and fixed it on purpose.
Put the two lists side by side and look at them.
If they match, good, keep going. If they don’t, you now know exactly what to change, and that isn’t bad news. That’s the most useful information you’re going to get all year.
The players I’ve watched actually change are never the ones who wanted it the most. They’re the ones who found out what it took and then went and did that instead of what they’d been doing.