Life lessons from Giannis and Klopp
Wins and losses can convey great wisdom.
At the risk of sounding like an ex-jock*, I have to admit that I get a lot of inspiration and perspective for my day-to-day life from a handful of coaches and athletes.
* Having worked as a sportswriter for half a decade, I can counterbalance this by telling you that the vast majority of professional athletes, or at least baseball players, are absolutely and totally uninteresting in this regard. Really, you wouldn’t want to have a conversation about the weather with most of them.
So, yes, of course I love this now-viral clip from Giannis Antetokounpmo on whether his now-concluded season was a failure because he didn’t reach the NBA Finals again.
“Every year, you work toward something, towards a goal … it’s not a failure.” he says. “It’s steps to success - there’s always steps to it.”
This is such uncommon wisdom - not just for a basketball player in his 20s, but for anyone of any age working in any profession. It’s tempting to think that a white-collar corporate job is different. It is not the same zero-sum game as the NBA playoffs after all. But just because there isn’t a final score on ESPN after you close your laptop every night doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all be trying to embrace Giannis’ mentality.
I’d go perhaps a step farther. Success in the context of wins and losses are not any sort of valuable end goal at all. Getting better - taking those steps every day - is the only goal that really matters.
It reminded me of Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp’s perspective on success and what he hopes to remember when he’s 90. It’s not lifting the cup in triumph. It’s all the details and small moments along the way.
The ultimate sports philosopher, of course, is John Wooden, whose book Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court is one I turn to on an almost weekly basis.
Wooden tells us: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”
In other words, only you can really know if you’re successful because true success is derived from knowing you gave everything you had. No one else has the answers on this matter.
When do you know you’ve built a successful design system?
The bliss of hearing someone tell you “we usually get much less than this.”
Much ink has been spilled and countless conversations have been had about what is needed to make a design system successful - indeed about what a design system even is, definitionally.
I don’t have much to add to the discourse there, other than to say I am firmly in the camp that is more of a mindset and a culture than it is a UI kit. An Australian colleague of mine likes to characterize it as a record of design decisions. He’s a much better authority on the topic than I am, but having worked on one for the better part of a year, I find this to be a perfect summary.
Anyway, if I don’t have much to add to this ever-swirling debate, I do have something to say about how you might know when you’ve finally been successful in doing what you’ve set out to do.
“This is much more than we usually get.”
Hear that phrase, as my team did this week from a developer, and it’s a good bet you’ve built something pretty good, especially if what you’re handing off is something that’s already in use somewhere else, and you’ve done little or no work to hand it off.
It was a hugely gratifying moment, of course, to hear that sort of thing after months and months of exhaustive work.
But it was also quite the reminder. Digital design systems have been around for a decade or more now, but to people outside of the experience field - even a software developer at a huge agency - they can still feel new and powerful and even a bit revolutionary.
“There is no substitute for empathy”
You can teach a lot, but not everything.
Pete Souza, who was the Chief White House Photographer during Barack Obama’s presidency, utters this simple, powerful phrase during a new documentary about his work, titled The Way I See It.
I covered the film side of this over at my other Internet home, but I had to pluck this pearl of wisdom out and bring it over here. I am sure Souza isn’t the first person to utter this sentiment. How could he possibly be? Even so, I think it’s worth hearing.
Souza is speaking of Obama, and, of course, contrasting him to President Trump, but he could also be talking about himself. Or you. Or me.
You can have all the skills, and money, and power in the world, and it will always go to waste if you don’t see and seek out humanity. It’s all that connects us, after all.