John Wooden Will Make You a Better Writer

Step 1: Smooth the Wrinkles Out of Your Socks

I love Coach Wooden, the famous basketball coach. If they don’t already know of him, people don’t believe me when I tell them about his career at UCLA.

• Head Coach at UCLA from 1948–1975
  
  
• 10 NCAA National Championships in 12 years
  
  
• 7 consecutive national championships (1967–1973)
  
  
• 88-game winning streak
  
  
• 4 perfect 30–0 seasons
  
  
• 6 NCAA Coach of the Year awards
  
  
• Inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as both player and coach
  
  
• Coached legends including Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Bill Walton
  
  
• Developed the “Pyramid of Success,” a character-based philosophy of excellence
  
  
• Retired at the top, after winning the 1975 championship

But what I love about him is that his dominance was built on deliberate practice of the component parts of basketball, what coaches call “fundamentals.”

The idea is that if you can do each part well, then the whole should take care of itself.

If you’re a basketball player, the parts are:

1. Stance and balance
   
   
2. Footwork
   
   
3. Dribbling
   
   
4. Passing
   
   
5. Shooting form
   
   
6. Conditioning
   
   
7. Defense
   
   
8. Rebounding
   
   

The principles were:

1. Practice before glory
   
   
2. Strong team culture
   
   

I played basketball in high school and I remember clearly our coach following this same playbook.

All we wanted to do was scrimmage. That is, we just wanted to play.

But before we were allowed to do that, we drilled.

And we drilled.

And we drilled.

Dribbling.

Rebounding.

Shooting.

Repeat.

My position was low post. The coach wanted me to learn to catch the ball in a certain place in a certain way. He wanted me to step back a certain way, and jump a certain way.

And then shoot, you guessed it, a certain way.

He stood there tossing me ball after ball after ball.

Then, magically, in a game, the same situation would arise, and my body would not even ask my opinion about what to do. It did what it had drilled.

On defense, my feet did what they were trained to do.

How we practiced is how we played.

Did my coach learn this from Wooden? You bet your best writing pen he did.

Now here’s how it applies to our writing.

Writers want to scrimmage too.

We want to just write and publish.

We want to post.

We want the finished piece.

We do not want to drill. But drilling is necessary if you want to play, that is, write at a high level.

Whenever Coach Wooden started a new player, he gave him lesson number one. Tying your Chuck Taylors.

He showed them how to smooth their socks so there were no wrinkles. Because wrinkles cause blisters. Blisters cause missed practices. Missed practices cost games.

Wooden was not teaching footwear.

He was teaching care.

He was telling his players:

Nothing is beneath you. Nothing is too small.

Excellence begins in the small details.

The enemy was sloppiness.

So what is lesson number one for writers.

It is not platform.

It is not voice.

It is not finding your niche.

It is sentences.

Clean sentences.

No wrinkles.

No wasted words.

No lazy verbs.

No hiding behind abstraction.

Sloppy sentences cause blisters.

Blisters in writing look like confusion.

Confusion costs readers.

Lost readers cost impact.

Great writing does not collapse because of big ideas. It collapses because of friction in fundamentals.

If you want a drill, here it is

For the next 30 days, do not publish a paragraph you have not rewritten at least once.

Smooth the socks.

Read it out loud.

Cut what is unnecessary.

Strengthen the verb.

Make the thought clear enough that your body would not even ask your opinion about what to do next.

Deliberate practice removes hesitation: in basketball, in martial arts, in dancing, in piano…and in writing.

When the blank page appears, your mind should not panic. It should execute what it has drilled when your big idea meets fundamentals.

Before you chase greatness, learn to prevent blisters.

How you practice is how you publish.

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