Josh: 2022: Day 8

So I started the year off with a “Writing Every Day” streak of 1 day. This is the kind of thing where I walk myself into a corner. I know that having goals and having schedules are good. I know that if I was to actually hold myself to writing every day I’d be proud of myself. Knowing these things, I set myself up. I make some sort of rule or claim to try and quantify my level of failure / accomplishment.

For example; it’s easy to write about nothing in particular so I should be able to do that every day, at least a little. So, that will be our goal. I say “our” to myself because whenever I do this it isn’t really Me having this idea of Set Goal – Follow Through. I repeat mistakes made a million times, thinking that, eventually, I will reach a point where I can finally accomplish my Goal and then I’ll be able to trust myself or be able to be… happy, I guess.

That strategy, Goal-Follow, has NEVER worked for me. Strategies that are similar have worked in the past, sometimes, but, if analyzed deeply, I recognize that the heart of the strategies are quite different, even when the language is similar. The main reason for error, or at least my best guess, is that this strategy that have been tried on me, among plenty of other strategies, by parents and society and bosses, from birth to present, fail to embrace the reality of who I am, what I am, and what world I live in.

It happens all the time where I tell myself that I must do something the next day, or at a certain point, and when I do it right, it works. The interesting thing is that even before I get to that part of the day where I have to follow through on my commitment, even before that happens I know if I did “do it right”. I know, before it happens, that it will happen. This is not because I can predict the future. This is because… well… it’s obvious.

I want you to imagine that you are watching basketball players going for three point jump-shots over the course of a basketball game. No shot is ever exactly identical. Sometimes they step back before shooting. Sometimes, they catch a pass, from one angel or another, and they have to shoot right away, before the defender can get there. Sometimes, they are wide open and they can take as much time as they want. Sometimes, they decide to heave the ball up from the mid court logo.

Now, as you watch you start to pay more attention to the motion of their bodies as they go through the shot. You watch the ways their feet move. You take note of how much lateral momentum they had before pulling up and shooting. You feel the rhythms of their motions and their decision making. Every player is slightly different but there are some things you start to look for, some indicators of how good of a shot it is might be.

When a player is falling to the ground, off balance, and they still somehow manage to make the shot, there is a reason everyone freaks out about that. We instinctively know that when the body is off balance, it becomes more difficult to maintain the level of fine-motor control necessary to make the shot. One lesson to learn from that impressiveness is that being stable, or in-balance, is gonna increase the chances of the shot going in.

It’s incredibly easy to tell, visually, when a person is off balance but, when looking at the three point jump-shot, it can be harder to recognize the visual indicators of balance. As you watch more three pointers you start to notice some of these indicators. Obviously, there is one huge indicator that everyone notices all the time. Even a child recognizes this visual cue that suggests the quality of a shot. What is this incredibly obvious and simple Quality-Cue that am I talking about? Well here it is: Did the ball go through the hoop? This is level one of Balance recognition. From now on I will use the word “Balance” instead of quality, because I feel like it’s better. Anyway, let’s try to make it past level one, shall we? We keep watching. You’re no expert on basketball but you start to make some connections in your head. You start with the basic “key moments” of the shot.

These “key moments” can essentially be thought of like chapter breaks in a book. The whole action of the shot is all one, comprehensive piece of work but some key moments are obvious: Getting away from the defender, The Jump, The Release, and The Results. We’re still new to basketball so we don’t fully comprehend what happens in each chapter but, clearly, these are tent-pole moments in this sequence we are trying to analyze. Maybe, a pro basketball analyzer has a bunch more little chapters in between but we’re trying to start from square one here.

• Chapter 1: Getting Open tells us how difficult of a shot this should be. We can see how many different variables that the player will need to maintain balance over. If the player is wide open and has all day we know the shot should be easy. If the player is falling over backwards when he decides to shoot, we know the shot will be hard.
• Chapter 2: The Jump is when the player actually attempts to compensate for whatever momentums and forces that were acting on him during Chapter 1. If the player over compensates in one direction, they will not be correctly balanced when they actually make the shot. The more balanced a player in his jump, the easier Chapter 3 will be.
• In Chapter 3: The Shot, the player makes the shot. This is his last chance to affect the ball, his last chance to compensate for any “mistakes” in his jump. If he feels that he is unbalanced slightly any way, he can try to compensate with tiny changes in the motions of his arms, hands, and fingers.
• Chapter 4: Results is, by far, the “loudest” part of the sequence. Most people are so reliant on that simple binary source of information that they don’t even remember to read the other 3 chapters. They simply watch the game, see a player shoot, and wait, with baited breath, as the ball soars through the air. This is the most obviously hype part of basketball. You see the ball in flight and you know it will either go in or it won’t. The shooting player has done his best but that necessitates surrender. He committed to his choices, and, hopefully, trusted himself. Now, he, along with everyone else on the court, must simply wait, together, unified in anticipation, unified with a singular shared question; is it gonna go in?

These structures help us to analyze and understand the action as a whole. We can now more easily realize those Quality-Cue moments. Feeling, understanding, and using, all those moments can give us an idea, before the ball ever makes it to the basket, of what will happen.

Most people fail to see past the most obvious Moments of Information. The Results are the most obvious moment that a viewer can use for his goal. To be clear, the goal of the viewer is to be provided with emotional stimulant, to be entertained. The binary nature of this moment makes it incredibly easy to understand. People, myself included of course, have a hard time dealing with things we don’t understand.

It may not seem important, especially in watching basketball, to pay attention to all those little details in Chapters 1-3. Modern sports are, in my opinion, among the most incessantly binary parts of culture. At the end of the day, one team’s number on the left side of the “-” goes up by one and the other team’s right side number goes up by one and even the most unobservant person in the world can pretend to understand what happened and, more importantly, to know how to feel.

What was I talking about at the start of this? Oh yeah, how the strategy of Set Goal-Follow Through is ineffective for me.

This strategy is, like a team’s Win-Loss number, is extremely binary. You set some goal, arbitrarily, and as a result, all of your choices in the day, can be understood to be either “contributing”, or to not be “contributing”. In this way, you always know the truth of when to feel good, when to feel bad, and, most importantly, why.