The basketball coach who recruited me to play for his D3 college team for my sophomore season, he got fired after I’d played for him for only one season.
The new coach came in and cleaned house, which in college sports means that some players who played for the old coach wouldn’t survive to play for the new coach. Not because we were not good players — just because the new coach wants to put his own stamp on the program with his own chosen players.
Our new coach cleared out the entire program and replaced the whole basketball team within 6 months.
For the basketball careers of the dismissed players, this was a crisis of the highest order.
And it sped up a lot of outcomes.
The last time I saw our starting center play basketball — this was a guy who’d been First-Team All-Conference the year before — was when he tossed an industrial-sized garbage can onto the court at the end of an intramural playoff game defeat.
Our point guard was entering his senior season. He’d actually made the new coach’s team, but that didn’t last long.
The coach benched him at halftime of the first game of the season, and he never got off the bench in the second game — all this with the senior player’s family, who’d driven 5 hours from out of town to watch him play, sitting three rows up from the bench.
Another player was only a sophomore, and the new coach liked him. The new coach wanted to keep this guy on his team.
But, with the All-Conference center and the senior point guard out of the picture, the sophomore player, who’d been following behind those guys all of the previous year, lost his desire for basketball, I suppose.
He just up and quit the team one day for reasons nobody knows.
I had always believed that I’d outlast my sophomore year teammates one way or another. But I’d thought it’d take years for careers to play out and the results to be clear.
All it really took, was one crisis to hit fast-forward on what would’ve happened anyway.
***
I heard James Altucher recently share that, amongst other things, crisis speeds things up.
Things that would’ve happened in 5 years will instead happen in 5 months.
Businesses on shaky ground, establishments that would’ve gone out of business next year, those that shut down “temporarily” during a crisis, they don’t come back when the coast clears.
The average family that has no savings, thus nothing stashed away for a rainy day, they’re the first to get wet in crisis.
The weak and fragile, people with brittle immune systems, no healthcare and shaky nutrition habits, they heavily populate the first wave of people to get sick, shrivel up and die in a crisis.
If you’re impatient and like to see things happening FAST, you’ll enjoy crisis. It’s like putting all of life — yours and others — on 2.5X speed.
If you’d been telling yourself to pick up the pace, a crisis gives you no choice but to do so.
If you’d needed to slow the hell down, now you’re doing it.
Anything that you’d been neglecting to address in your life, in crisis, it takes the liberty of addressing YOU.
You like when people and processes cut out the niceties and just “get to the point,” right?
Good. When a crisis happens, you get everything you want — and more.
Read my book Work On Your Game to learn how I navigated that basketball crisis and made a career on the back of it — and then made that into a business.
Order your copy at http://WorkOnYourGameBook.com
Make sure to take the following MasterClasses related to this very topic —
#1495: How Crisis Speeds Everything Up
#1445: Why You Need To Implement With Speed
#1444: When To Take NO For An Answer
#1392: Fast Implementation: A REQUIREMENT
#843: How To Start Living, Right NOW
#842: Fast Opportunity: How To Take Advantage Quickly
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