Buzzer Beater

“How you do anything is how you do everything.” -Zen Buddhist proverb

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.” -Anne Dillard, The Writing Life

““Well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.” -Zeno, quoted In Diogenes Laertius, Lives Of The Eminent Philosophers

“The truth is one we know well: the little things add up. Someone is a good person not because they say they are, but because they take good actions. One does not magically get one’s act together—it is a matter of many individual choices. It’s a matter of getting up at the right time, making your bed, resisting shortcuts, investing in yourself, doing your work. And make no mistake: while the individual action is small, its cumulative impact is not.” –The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by Ryan Holiday, Stephen Hanselman

After a painful buzzer beater, the losing basketball coach will often give a version of the following cliche in the press conference…

“We didn’t lose the game because of that final shot. We lost because of so many mistakes leading up to that final shot. If we did our job earlier in the game…protect the defensive glass, limit our turnovers, spread the ball around, etc…it wouldn’t have come down to that final play. But tip your hat to the other team. They executed better than we did…”

It’s true in sports as it is in life. Whether it’s the Final Exam or Opening Night or The Big Presentation, etc…it doesn’t have to be filled with so much pressure to be perfect. Everything doesn’t have to be riding on that single event.

Handle your business earlier and it won’t.

P.S. – “The best buzzer beaters of all time.” Enjoy.