Books: Everything and Nothing to do with Coaching
The first part of a series of blog posts about books that have nothing - but also everything to do with coaching.
Author: Robert Greene
I have read this book more than once over the last 2 years. Robert Greene does an amazing job of using past and present day “Masters” to detail the path to mastery. Greene points out their struggles, frustrations, and at times how the significance of taking a few steps back is better than a few forward. The most interesting point he makes is that mastery isn’t an end goal. It’s not a mountaintop. There is no end. In fact, you can reach this level and once there you can find yourself in a reversal going back in the opposite direction. Achieving mastery is a lifelong process not a destination.
Connecting the Dots
As a coach you can draw parallels to the 4 phases of Mastery described in this book. It will show you where you are, or maybe where you should be.
- Finding your life’s vocation
- Apprenticeship
- Creative - Active Phase
- Mastery
This book in particular made me ask hard questions, allowed to me know what to look for in a mentor, and confirmed my feelings when I needed to move on and continue my learning elsewhere. It’s a must-have for coaches or anyone passionate about their vocation in life.
Highlights
“The future in science does not lie in increased specialization, but rather in the combining and cross-fertilization of knowledge in different fields”
“The need for certainty is a great disease the mind faces.”
“Understand: we live in a world of sad separation that began five hundred years ago when art and science split apart.”
“..resented the idea that having money gave them certain rights, when all that mattered was a perfect design.”
“The only real impediment to this is yourself and your emotions - boredom, panic, frustrations, insecurity. You cannot suppress such emotions - they are normal to the process, and are experienced by everyone, including Masters. What you can do is have faith in the process. The boredom will go away once you enter the cycle. The panic disappears after repeated exposure. The frustration is a sign of progress - a signal that your mind is processing complexity and requires more practice. The insecurities will transform into their opposites when you gain mastery.”
“In the future the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them.”
Author: James Gleick
Once I finished this book I let out a sigh of relief. Not that it was a tough read but it made me feel good that presently I feel I have a wealth of knowledge, but I stil know nothing. I have so much more to learn, and instead of feeling anxiety about it, I can feel good about it. Nobody knows everything (We are all Wrong). Gleick does a phenomenal job on showing chaos in everyday life and the sciences throughout the book. How chaos disrupts our traditional views of science and how the future of science - is disorder.
Connecting the Dots
This book allows us to learn and respect the complexities of dynamic systems. If you are a coach that programs for athletes this book is about our need for perfect design and how it doesn’t exist. That the perfect design is written in pencil not ink. We must program to the natural occurring oscillations of the athletes systems. Not to some confined periodization model.
On the flip side it was also comforting to know that simplistic models are needed in understanding dynamic systems. That broad brush strokes are enough, and finer details can distract the practical use. This hits home when defining fatigue models for the different sports we at Train Adapt Evolve program for.
Highlights
“Is it possible that mathematical pathology, i.e. chaos, is health? And that mathematical health, which is the predictability and differentiability of this kind of a structure, is disease?”
“When you reach an equilibrium in biology you’re dead,”
“Dynamics freed at last from the shackles of order and predictability…. Systems liberated to randomly explore their every dynamical possibility…. Exciting variety, richness of choice, a cornucopia of opportunity.”
“The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong.”
“it evolves—evolutionary, adaptive processes being essential in the design and creation of anything so complex that it cannot effectively be decomposed into separate pieces.”
“THE CHOICE IS ALWAYS the same. You can make your model more complex and more faithful to reality, or you can make it simpler and easier to handle. Only the most naïve scientist believes that the perfect model is the one that perfectly represents reality.”
“chaos in the heart—“a dynamical system of vital interest to every one of us,”
By: Aaron Davis
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