Killer instinct.

Enter Bill Simmons:

Jordan was a ruthless motherfucker. Jordan was a killer. Jordan didn't care if his teammates despised him. Jordan never, ever, not in a million years, would have allowed his team to quit in the final two minutes of Thursday night's game the way LeBron did. His teammates feared him, loathed him, revered him and played accordingly. Bird had that same quality. In the second half of his career, so did Magic. Winning meant so much to those guys that their teammates almost didn't have a choice; they had to follow suit. Or else.

Partly, LeBron has never had a good coach.

To illustrate what he could have, Simmons relays this story of Pat Riley, coach of the Miami Heat, who in Game 6 of the 2006 NBA Finals, at halftime threw away the playbook and the X's and O's and took a different tack:

He screamed at his guys like a boxing trainer. You're tougher than them! YOU'RE TOUGHER THAN THEM! Don't let up! They are ready to quit! They are ready to fold! Keep attacking them! Keep getting to the rim! Keep knocking their asses down! No layups! No dunks! Stay together! YOU ARE TOUGHER THAN THEM! YOU ARE TOUGHER THAN THEM! That's what he did for the entire second half. Eventually, his players believed him.

Here's my post on the components of killer instinct. See Chris Yeh's comment about most great men and women of history being bastards. Here's Brad Feld's 45 second advice video to a portfolio company.

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Some years ago I watched LeBron play as a high school athlete at the Adidas Big Time tournament in Las Vegas. The gym was full of NBA scouts and media. LeBron was playing for the Oakland Soldiers (he played on two AAU teams then — the Soldiers and his Cleveland club). After watching LeBron play no defense, score almost no points, and seem oddly detached from the game, I remember telling someone there that he would go down as "severely overrated."

It remains my greatest mis-assessment of talent ever.

"Know yourself" includes knowing when you excel as a principal and when you excel as a lieutenant. Many entrepreneurs I know think of themselves as CEO material. Generic ambition points to the top. But not everyone is best suited for the top job all the time, even if they are sufficiently capable.

You are not either a principal or lieutenant. Teams and circumstances vary. Part of being a good team player is knowing your role within the team. Most of the time I find myself a principal / CEO, but there is at least one area where I excel and enjoy more a lieutenant role: basketball.

My sophomore year of high school and the spring league immediately thereafter was the peak of my basketball career. That year I started on the varsity team. I was a key contributor but a senior was the undisputed team leader. He was a talented player. Together, we worked well, and in a supporting role I consistently racked up 10-20 points a game. That spring I played in the Slam N Jam Development League in East Oakland. Our team consisted of a handful mid-major D1 college basketball prospects. I was probably the weakest on the team in terms of athleticism and skill, but I banged around down low, contributed 3-4 buckets each game, played good help defense, moved well without the ball, and helped communicate coach's instructions on-court. I was a solid role player on a thuggish team of athletic stars.

At most other points in my playing career I was the (or one of a couple) go-to guys. My final two years of high school ball I was a co-captain and more responsible for scoring and winning. Yet, I never felt I performed at my peak level, and our team results, despite one regional playoff birth, were mediocre. For example, I thrived offensively when I could get the ball well-positioned on the block for either a back-to-the-basket post move or a face-the-basket shot or spin. For this to work the guard with the rock needs to know how to pass and be well-spaced, the other post players need to be well-spaced, and everyone else needs to move to get open in the case of a double team. If all this happened and I had my shit together, I was effective. Otherwise, I wasn't good enough to make things happen on my own. On the defensive end, I was skilled at rotating and moving and orally coordinating a man-to-man help defense framework. This relies on the whole team moving in concert. But I was not capable of "shutting someone down" or playing intense in-your-face defense on their best player up and down the court. Finally, I didn't care enough about the sport to lead by example on the "killer instinct" front which is what "the guy" is supposed to do on a team.

By the way, this is just one example of a broader life lesson you can learn from playing sports….

Bottom Line: "Know yourself" includes knowing when you excel as a principal and when you excel as a lieutenant. Teams are most effective when each player knows his role.

(thanks to Andy McKenzie for his feedback)

Bill Simmons on Tiger Woods and the effects of fame during one's formative years:

Did we underestimate the effects of fame in his formative years on Tiger? Become famous at an early age and invariably you "mature" into someone who can't remember anything other than being famous. Most (if not all) of your interactions are with people who are impressed by you or want something from you. You don't have to win anyone over. You don't have to work on being a better person, or funnier, or nicer, or anything. You don't want to make new friends because you can't tell if any prospective friends want to be friends because you're who you are, so you end up gravitating toward other famous people, most of whom are just as messed up as you. You can get away with almost any indiscretion and be forgiven. Your only responsibility is to stay yourself, but you became this twisted, self-aware version of you without even knowing it. And that's when the trouble starts.

Right. One problem with youthful fame in general is that it makes you risk averse at a time in life when you are supposed to be taking risks. Child stars who stumble in adulthood may do so because they did not acquire life lessons usually obtained in conventional youth, when the cost of failure is low and thus benefits of experimentation (of all sorts) are high.

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Robin Hanson once asked Tyler Cowen whether increased influence and fame through his blog has made him less interesting and weird. Robin thinks it has. Here's Clive Thompson's piece in Wired about the Age of the Micro-Celebrity: fame dynamics are at work even on a very small scale.

Over the last ten years my interest in sports has shifted away from closely following teams and players and towards:

1) maintaining cultural literacy and facilitating social bonding by understanding the basics of the most popular sports and the most important facts associated with them (e.g. who Lebron James is or which teams are in the NFL Superbowl).

2) following how sports generally affects culture and the economy. What's the economic impact on a country when its team wins the World Cup?

3) using the rich examples in sports to learn about widely-relevant ideas.

#3 is most important to me. For example, I'd rather read about how Baron Davis manages side projects than follow the Warriors' specific wins and loses. Other examples:

• One way to think about the general idea of whether you'd want to be universally loved or loved and hated to a greater degree is to compare Kobe Bryant and Steve Nash.
• One way to think about the general idea of how superstar contributors affect group dynamics is by pondering Barry Bonds' impact on the Giants.
• You can discover the power of framing by reading about the non-differences between dog fighting and the NFL.

General ideas found in sports are served up regularly by some excellent sports journalists whose writing you can admire even if you can't keep up with all the details. Frank Deford has interesting things to say on NPR. Gregg Easterbrook mixes smart commentary on sports with nuggets on economics and finance. Even if Rick Reilly is past his prime, he's wise and still finds inspirational stories.

But the most famous sports writer of today is Bill Simmons, who writes for ESPN.com. Here's a quick take on Bill Simmons' new book with this interesting nugget:

Mr. Simmons may be the first sports writer to see the games purely from the view of the fan — and a very modern, unsentimental fan at that. As Mr. Simmons sees it, his job is not to get into the heads of the players, but into the heads of his readers.

Tyler Cowen says, "Bill James and Bill Simmons are two of the greatest living social scientists. Seriously."

Bottom Line: Even if you're not a hard core sports fan there are still good general lessons to be taken from the sports world and excellent writers, such as Bill Simmons, who can deliver them to us.

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If you want to experience the fascinating and under-researched phenomenon of goosebumps caused by an emotional reaction and not cold weather, watch this clip of ESPN highlights from the past 100 years. One word: goosebumps.

Matt Blumberg cites a Harvard Business Review article:

Catchers in baseball, by virtue of their physical place on the field and job description, are uniquely positioned to build the skills that later make them good managers of teams.

Matt advises businesspeople to identify similar types of "training ground" positions within their own organization, and to rotate high potential folks through those positions to build a leadership pipeline.