"Win First" vs "Chill First"

I think the proper lesson here is that the absence of a culture of excellence can destroy the potential of even very talented people. But that culture of "win first" is a necessary but not sufficient condition for victory. Otherwise, the Miami Heat would have made the playoffs without Jimmy Butler.

You need to value excellence and intensity, but also to be excellent.

We see this in our forced group projects in my undergraduate classes. The best students (mostly post-baccs like myself in our community college setting) try to band together as often as possible. We know that we can trust each other to do good work. And we know that our mutual devotion to high-quality work will be appreciated, so we don't have to do any apologetics or song and dance routine to motivate each other.

My two takeaways:

• If you feel like you're not making as much progress as you want, maybe the problem is you need to work much, much harder than seems reasonable to the people around you, or even to yourself.
• If you're working your ass off and it's annoying the people around you, time to find a place where your intensity will be appreciated.

I agree with all this and think it can be generalized even more.

Whenever there are multiple ways to define success of a system, the parts of the system need to be aligned on which one they are going for. The whole can be less than the sum of its parts if not.

I agree that win-first and chill-first personalities often clash, but there are two (implicit?) points that I... I wouldn't say I disagree with them, but I am unsure of them, or maybe bearish about them.

1) That win-first and chill-first personalities can't mesh.

I think that they can. For example, imagine if Jimmy Butler was the "keep my head down and work hard" type instead of the "in your face work hard" type. The later can be thought of as a type A personality, and the former a type B personality. I think the lesson here is a more general one of type A personalities clashing, not specific to win-first vs. chill-first.

Another lesson might be that when working in groups, it's important to be adaptable. Ask yourself, "What mindset would best help my group achieve it's task (my team win a championship)?" Maybe the answer to that is to get all Michael Jordan in-your-face-intense. But it's also possible that the answer is to chill and fit in.

2) That win-first is optimal (in the NBA and similar situations).

They certainly make for a great narrative, but there are also counter-examples (sort of).

• If you look at players who's careers took a sharp downward turn and never panned out, burnout, stress and anxiety are themes that keep coming up. To use an extreme example, Andrei Kirilenko ended up getting addicted to WoW. Kevin Love talked about how anxiety and expectations affected his game (and more recently Paul George). Then there's a bunch of examples of careers being killed by drugs. I suspect that the win-first pedal-to-the-floor mindset contributes to all of this and that putting your pedal to the floor a) can only be taken so far and b) requires a certain psychological skillset as a prerequisite (something I've personally screwed up, have been meaning to write about, and is one of the first things I'd tell my past self).
• Sports and exercise science have been showing us more and more how important rest and recovery are. This isn't necessarily incompatible with win-first, but in practice I think a lot of win-first types tend to wave their hands at it. Same story in the intellectual world.
• Greg Popovich, one of the best coaches of all time, is famous for his team dinners. He knows when to focus on basketball, and when to take his foot off the pedal. "'Hey, we're together' Popovich tells his troops after the 103-81 loss. 'Let's eat. That's basketball. ... We'll get back to work tomorrow.' The Spurs close out the series in the next game." I could imagine a win-first type insisting that "chilling" over dinner like this is wrong and instead calling everyone to the gym.

I guess my point isn't against win-first — to be a world class performer I think you do have to hit that gear sometimes — it's just that there are caveats and that it has to be executed properly.

From the perspective of a 76er, Jimmy Butler seems like a servant of Moloch [? · GW].

The 76ers are NBA players.  They've worked to their limits all throughout high school and college to get there. Now they're semi-wealthy and semi-famous and still pretty young.  I can completely understand why they think it's time to enjoy life.*  The cheerleaders are right there, for crying out loud.

If Jimmy Butler got his way, some of them would start working harder.  They'd get recognition in the short run, but pretty quickly it would become a culture where the higher standard of effort was obligatory.  They would all do more of what they don't enjoy and less of what they do enjoy.  They might win more games, for what that's worth.  They would get little of value for the extra sacrifice.  So they don't.

*Keeping in mind that even a "lazy" NBA player is well within the top 1% of Americans for physical effort.

Interesting.  I'm trying to fit this Peter Thiel's thoughts that startups need BOTH competitive spirits (win first) and cooperative spirits (maybe not chill first but perhaps "cooperate first").

One way to point at the difference in perspectives is to simply say that "cooperative" and "chill first" are different... but in my mind they seem to be  pointing at similar perspectives.

Interesting! I have often seen this difference when playing board games with friends. There are some who will take forever to make each move because they want to win first. Whereas for me the point of playing a game is to chill first.

I never thought I'd be posting about my mancrush here on LessWrong... but Heat’s Udonis Haslem ‘ain’t really here trying to be friends with nobody provides more context into the Heat's win-first culture.

“I didn’t want to get too comfortable. I didn’t want to feel like home. I don’t want to get relaxed. I want to keep my edge. I want to stay focused on the task at hand. So, I’m sleeping on the couch right now, dog, with a room full of Chunky soup.”

What kind of impact have you had on Heat culture?

I don’t say much, but I want to let everybody know, make no mistake, when you come to this locker room, I’m who you got to answer to. We have a lot of leaders on this court. Dwyane was the greatest player to ever come through the Miami Heat organization. He is the leader on the court. LeBron [James], all those dudes. … I understand who scores all the points, but when you come in that locker room and you got to get with this culture, and the expectations of what we expect from you, I’m who you got to deal with. You see how that works out for some people. Everybody ain’t built for it.

For the people who don’t know, how would you define the culture?

If I’m 40 years old, and 6% body fat, I go running and do 10 suicide [sprints]. What do you think I’m going to expect out of a 22-year-old? I have no understanding why you can’t. There is no, ‘I can’t.’

Now that you’re seeing Butler up close, what makes him special?

You don’t see guys that attack every game and every possession and really try to win every game and every possession. This league, you’ll see a guy that’ll say, ‘We’ll get on the next game. I’ll take this possession off and take a break.’ I know guys that rest throughout the game. I was never one of those guys that rested throughout the game. I literally tried to play every possession as hard as I could, offensively or defensively.

That’s what I love about Jimmy. He literally doesn’t give a s—. Don’t care who he got to guard, really doesn’t care. He’s going to play as hard as he physically can, every possession. I never have to have a conversation with Jimmy about his effort. Never. That’s what I love about him.

Great post.

I’m not parsing this line, what did the coach do? I don’t get why instructing a player would be embarrassing.

...obvious examples being when a coach publicly instructed one player who refused to follow instructions, a star player being noticeably out of shape and heavyset and suffering at the end of games, things like that

Yes. Great post. See here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kq8CZzcPKQtCzbGxg/quinn-s-shortform?commentId=gFvzzBwdsoeRjGicA [LW(p) · GW(p)] for related discussion.