How to Be Great

Installment Two: Focus

Michael Jordan did many amazing things as an athlete. Before he ever dreamed of playing for the Wizards, back near the peak of his abilities, he had a career scoring average of 32 points per game, the highest all time. Someone asked him how he could possibly score so many points, every single game, over and over again. Being a kind of genius, he didn't fully understand the incomprehensability of his feat and said something to the effect of: "Easy. I break it into quarters. It's just eight-eight-eight-eight." Indeed. No one is amazed at scoring eight points in one 12-minute quarter, so why should it be so hard to do it again and again? Focus.
MJ never allowed himself to relax in his pursuit of greatness. He had the strongest focus of anyone to the achievement of his goals. It wasn't good enough to get three straight quarters of eight points each, he had to have all four. And then he had to do it again, every game, it never stopped. It takes an amazing focus to combat your natural laziness, or to deal with the myriad obstacles that will crop up to derail this stoic approach. And yet he did it, for years.
Michael Jordan is of course an extremely rare talent, not just physically, but mentally with his determination and focus. Mere physical mortals though, can honestly strive to replicate some of his focus. You've got to start small.
When most people start shooting a lot of free throws, they will count their results per five shots, or ten shots, then make an observation of what's just happened: "Ok, that was 7 out of 10, 70%, not bad but a couple of those makes were a little sloppy." Then the person will try another ten and make another mental judgment. After some time and practice, this person's goal will be to make all ten in any ten-shot set. They will have built up the focus to make perhaps ten in a row before relaxing. Let's say then that a person succeeds and hits ten straight. What will likely happen then is that they will push on and keep shooting until they miss. The problem here is that their brain has been coached to focus for only ten shots at a time, so if they start mentally counting 12, 13, 14.......then very soon they'll be out of their element. What a person needs to do is stop and start over with a new set, while forgetting about the first ten. Eventually math probability will take over and the person will miss a few, but they'll keep their focus much easier by breaking the greater achievement into smaller more manageable ones.
When I was at the top of my shooting groove, I was recording with pencil and paper every 100 shots, and making around 95 of them. Of course keeping focus for 100 repetitions is too much to ask, even for a shooting savant such as myself. So I broke every 25 shots into sets, with the goal being to miss only one per set. This amounted to 96 out of 100, which is almost exactly what I made at my peak. (Of course this makes you wonder what more the brain would be capable of. With more practice and a revised goal of missing just one out of 50, could I then have made 98%? Who knows. As it turned out, I didn't devote enough time.) Counting 25 at a time required focus, but it also helped to instill extra confidence. It's one thing to say ok I'm going to hit 24 out of 25 shots right now, it's another to have to slowly do it one at a time. Mentally I knew I had to make at least the first ten shots in order to have a good chance to go 24-for-25. Of course I would pretty much always make those first ten, because I knew I had to, and because I was able to focus on the larger goal at the same time so that the single shots were merely inevitable. Before I knew it, I'd be up around 20, when it would take enhanced focus to make the five more to close off the set. Do that four times, voila, one hundred.
Of course no person is a machine, so it's never quite that easy. I plowed through robotically for a long time, but when I got up to about 80 in a row, the specter of what I was approaching started to become palpable. This is when you need to turn up your focus even more, since it's not good enough to overcome the banality and sheer volume of the task; you've also got to control your nerves and your brain.
There is a very small zone between being too tense and being too nonchalant, but that is the zone of focus you need to find. You're not merely shooting a basketball at a hoop, but you're also not letting your whole existence ride on the result of each individual shot. It's about trusting yourself as much as anything, and of course tuning out all the things that can cause problems.
I was able to do all this and keep chugging along, crossing over the magic 100 barrier and not stopping like I normally would but letting the string play out. Of course after I achieved it I started to ease up and my focus started to fall away. That I made 16 more after hitting 100 is a testament to the muscle memory I had built up more than anything, because my head wasn't locked in anymore.
Focus is a slightly tougher thing to master than repetition, but it is master-able nonetheless. Some of the trick is truly convincing your brain that what you are doing is the most important thing, so any random stimulus doesn't affect you as greatly as it otherwise might. I think that most of it is in your approach to the problem, having the ability to focus on pieces of the whole, and the discipline to hold that focus for a long period of time.