Wilt Chamberlain and the Courage to Look and Be Different

Wilt Chamberlain once improved his biggest weakness (e.g. free throw shooting), but he abandoned it because he implemented a technique that he thought others would ridicule. This episode explores a phenomenon in human behavior known as the threshold theory and why performers may avoid what works due to social pressure. We discuss some of the psychology behind “copycat leagues” form and how coaches can lower the psychological barrier to help athletes perform at their highest level.

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Transcript

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Did you know that one of the greatest players in basketball history once found a solution to his biggest weakness, but then he made the choice to stop doing it? The solution he had found actually worked exceptionally well for him, but he stopped because of how it looked. He was worried about how it would appear to other people's judgments and their opinions. In other words, he traded his personal effectiveness as a player to protect his perception from others. And the truth is, he's not the first nor gonna be the last. This happens all the time, not just in sports, but in business, in leadership, in life. People don't necessarily always choose what works. They oftentimes choose what appears or feels safe, particularly when they think it'll be received negatively by others. So today on the podcast, we're gonna discuss why this happens and how great coaches and leaders can help people push past it. Hey coaches and leaders, I got a quick question for you. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callendly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callinly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. Now the inspiration for today's episode goes all the way back to the 60s, and I want to go back to 1961-62 NBA season, and Wilt Chamberlain was doing things that still to this day seem uh out of this world and impossible. He was not only averaging over 50 points per game, okay, 50 points per game, which is mind-blowing to me, he had a 100-point game, and it was a season where he rewrote many of the records of scoring records that existed at the time within the NBA, and many of which still remain today. But there's a detail from that year that a lot of people may not be aware of and that many might overlook. For example, on the night that he scored 100 points, he actually went 28 for 32 from the free throw line. Now, for those that might be less familiar with Wilt Chamberlain's career, he didn't have a whole lot of weaknesses, but the one main one was his free throw shooting. For his career, he barely shot over 50% for most of it. But in that season, it was his best ever, and it jumped well over 60% of the time. Now, why? It was because he tried something different. In fact, he actually decided to shoot underhand, granny style, as we often like to call it. And it worked pretty exceptionally well for him. But over time, he just couldn't get himself to continue using this unorthodox technique. In his autobiography, he even admitted, like, I felt silly shooting underhand. I knew it would work, and I knew it did work, but I just couldn't get myself to do it. So think about that. Like one of the most dominant athletes in history found an answer to their biggest weakness, but abandoned it not because it had failed, but just because of, again, the appearance that it gave to other people. Now there is some psychology behind this, especially when you start to examine human behavior, and this is related to what uh behavioral scientists will call the threshold theory. So the threshold theory basically states that we don't just make decisions based off of what works, we make decisions based on whether or not they feel socially safe for us to make. Every person has a threshold, the point at which they're willing to adopt a new behavior based on how many others are already doing it. Now, there are some where their threshold is they're willing to go first. Uh, it doesn't matter whether other people are doing it or not, they're happy and they're content being first move movers and they're courageous enough to do so. There are other people that want to kind of wait and see how other people do it first, or if other people do it first, and then they're willing to try it. And some, they won't even do it until it's the norm, and they're like in the minority where they're like the only ones not doing it. So Will didn't necessarily lack evidence that it wasn't working for him, but what he did feel in essence that he didn't have was the social safety to do so. Now in sports, we hear this all the time, especially at the pro level, which is where a lot of my work has been, it's often considered like a copycat league. So, for example, like in the NBA, teams didn't all of a sudden just start to discover the value of like spacing out on the court and shooting from the three-point line overnight. Someone had to go first, had some success, and now you look across the league, and just about everybody does it. Same thing in the NFL, same thing in Major League Baseball, one team, they'll find an edge, and then within a year or so, half the league is running their own version of it. Now, this human phenomenon doesn't just apply to strategy either. It can exist in a lot of hiring practices too. So, for example, like one organization might hire someone with an unconventional background, someone that would maybe fall outside of that normal pipeline or maybe comes from a completely different industry. And if it works, now it kind of can feel safer for others to start to do the same. Not everybody necessarily always wants to be first, but everybody wants to be right and they want to make sure that they look right to others when they're making their decisions. But becoming an elite performer is a courageous endeavor. It's likely going to involve you doing things and or not doing things that other people may disagree with. That's one of the reasons why I love the classic uh Jerry Rice quote when he said, Today I will do what others won't, so tomorrow I can accomplish what others can. We can't forget that. Like if you want different results, like you have to be different. Like it's pretty simple. You can't just do what the majority do. You can't just do what the average does if you want to be an outlier, if you want to be the exception. And we've seen what happens when someone's willing to go first. Going back to that NBA example and shooting threes, like Stephen Curry is a prime example. Like 30-foot shots used to be considered reckless, but now they're about as routine as it gets. And he's even come out and said, like, I'm very comfortable being uncomfortable and doing things that other people maybe aren't always willing to do. That willingness didn't hasn't just elevated his game, it's actually lowered the threshold for others. So, for those of you that are listening to this, especially if you're like a coach or leader and you're trying to help instill this like first mover idea or help people break through their perceived thresholds, um, to be a little bit more courageous and do the things that other people aren't willing to do. I think there's a few things that you can do to kind of help lower that threshold for others. The first, though, is it's very simple and it's come up a lot in the show that like anytime that you want something repeated or more of it, like it's very helpful to recognize and celebrate it. So if you want more care courageous acts and decisions, like we need to call those out. We need to sp shine a spotlight on that. When someone's willing to try something new, acknowledge it and recognize it, and use that as a testament, not only to reinforce them, but also to others that it's okay to to experiment, it's okay um to try new things. Because the other thing that this ties into is that when it comes to growth, like the middle is often very messy. Like, there's a lot of moments where like it's not gonna look good. Usually the first step to being great is the courage to fail and to be uh terrible at it. I think I shared this in a previous episode that for those that are music fans, Ed Sheeran has talked about how he was asked like about his kids and what advice he might give them if they were to pursue music. And his response was dare to suck. You can't start being a songwriter unless you're not scared to feel embarrassed and to fail. So he said, Write a song that sounds bad, then write another, then write another, and eventually you're gonna get a little bit better at it. So, in other words, like failure isn't the opposite of becoming a master at something, it's it's part of that pathway towards it. A quick sporting example that kind of illustrates like this messy middle. Um, this was a couple years ago, but the San Francisco Giants had um kind of this like team mantra around like train dirty, like play clean. In other words, then we're not just talking about like uniform and having like dirt on it, but it's like literally like if you're willing to get messy in training and how you prepare and look bad or challenge yourself or do things outside of your comfort zone, it's a lot easier for you than to show up in the game and play free and play from a space of uh of trust and so forth again because you've developed those habits in how you kind of prepare. So that's the second one again, just being willing to embrace kind of that messy middle. Because if everything looks polished in your training, then you're probably not quite stretching yourself quite enough. And then the last thing is is like this can be a challenge because this is obviously contingent on other people and not just you, but the more you can like reduce the social cost, I guess is what I would call it, of experimentation, that can be helpful because keep in mind that like let's say anytime you do a film session, anytime you have an in-practice huddle and you're bringing awareness to something, keep in mind that your message is one thing that's landing with people. But people are also gonna pay attention to the reactions of others. So if mistakes get spotlighted with a lot of frustration, then the threshold goes up and you're more you're less inclined to engage in behaviors um that can help you kind of break through some of those mistakes. If let's say effort and experimentation gets acknowledged and um you get recognized for being willing to do something that's maybe unorthodox or that challenges the status quo or pushes yourself beyond your kind of comfort zone, then your threshold is more likely to go down. Now, this doesn't mean that you can't critique somebody in a public setting. Um this came up in my conversation with Dr. Paul Zach. He said, like generally the rule of thumb is you praise in public, you critique in private. But what I would say is not that I don't think you can challenge necessarily in public, but if you're going to, it needs to be deliberately thought out again, because it's not just you're not just trying to make sure that your words land, you're also trying to make sure that your message that could be exactly the message they need to hear isn't getting diluted or drowned out because they're fearful of how other people might be reacting to it. So that's kind of again what threshold theory is all about. Um, again, as a coach, you're not just coaching an athlete's behavior, you're helping them kind of manage their perceptions. So all this brings me to, I think the difference sometimes between being good and being great is often who's willing to look and act different long enough to truly become different. So don't just ask your athletes to just do what works and what everyone else is doing. Help them become the type of person who's willing to do it even when it doesn't maybe look normal or when it makes them a quote unquote outlier. Because if no one else is doing it, that might be a good thing. That might be exactly why it works in the first place.