Practice, game, game tape

The last few weeks I've been on more of a summer rhythm for work, with a couple of weeks away from home and in general a bit of a slower pace. With some of the downtime, I came across a podcast describing the fascinating biography of Michael Jordan. In it, you can get a sense of the exceptional work ethic that led him to be the greatest basketball player of all time. A question that inevitably sticks with you after hearing his story is how can you apply that same type of work ethic to your work?

I've been putting some thought into this recently and I've broken it into 3 categories: practice, game, game tape. For a basketball player, these are pretty self-explanatory, but what set Jordan apart was his dedication to practice and game tape. He would bring a ferocious intensity to practice and put more time in than any of his teammates, while watching game tape was something that often consumed large parts of his downtime.

It's easy for someone who is running their own business to take his example and simply say you should work longer and harder. In fact, this is probably what most people will try to do for a few days after reading his biography until they burn out or move to the next thing. But I think it's more important to study these 3 categories of work and see how they can be applied to entrepreneurship.

Let's start with the game as this is where everything else comes from. To me, this is the value-added work that actually moves your business forward. Forget all of the admin work, this is essentially product and marketing. In order to max out your gametime performance, you need to have block out 3-4 hours of good work each day that moves these parts of your business forward.

Second is practice. In the context of our game above, practice is about making yourself better at marketing and building product. For example, as someone who has a SaaS product, practice for me is about really understanding the underlying technologies that I'm building on. Not just the functionality that I need in that moment, but digging deeper into the underlying fundamentals. A lot of this is simply reading the manuals and then trying to get something new working in that way. Or for marketing, it is about trying out new copywriting techniques and studying other's work.

Finally we have game tape. For an entrepreneur, this is about studying the greats of the past and looking back inwards on yourself to see how you can improve. This can involve reading biographies, business books, personal development material, and listening to relevant podcasts. But the key here is to not get carried away and thinking this is the same as practice or the game. If you spend too much time watching game tape, you are just someone who likes watching sports, you're not a player. This is only something that should be done in your downtime and ideally you should be taking actions tangible actions away that you can use in practice.