Why My Next Book is About Falling in Love (With Your Process)

I have a score to settle.

When I was growing up in rural Kansas, I had big dreams.

I saw planes arcing across the Midwestern sky and wanted to go where they were going. I checked out books at the Topeka Public Library and read stories about fascinating people who were living the way I wanted to live. I spent hours inspecting the inflatable globe hanging from the ceiling in my bedroom, hoping I’d someday get to go to those cities, beaches, and mountain ranges.

Meanwhile, it felt like I was constantly being told that while it was fine to have such dreams, it would be borderline impossible to achieve them.

My first brush with this attitude came at summer basketball camps, where we were issued nubbly balls and T-shirts with our names Sharpied on them so the coaches could remember who we were. These camps all followed a similar schedule.

Day One: buckets of little-boy nervous energy.

Day Two: someone was late, someone had forgotten his shoes, someone was already hurt.

Then, on the third day, the coach in charge would introduce a guest speaker — some famous(ish) player brought in from a nearby college because he could dunk. We youths would circle up on the gym floor, wiping our sweaty faces with our marker-stained T-shirts. Then we’d listen as the guest speaker told us what it took to make it. One thing that always stood out in these players’ pep talks was the emphasis on how much effort was involved — how hard it was. More than one of these guys said a typical workout included a thousand shots.

I wanted to make it. So one day I tried it out: one thousand shots inside my high school gym. It took five hours and I couldn’t lift my right arm the next day. I assumed this meant my basketball dreams were silly and unrealistic and I resigned myself to athletic mediocrity even as I began to get interest from college basketball programs. At first, this interest was confined to smaller schools like Holy Cross, Lafayette, and the Colorado School of Mines. (That’s “mines”, not “mimes” — something that needed to be clarified when the coach first called.)

Then the programs got a little better: Wichita State, Southern Mississippi, and Davidson. Eventually I committed to Iowa State University, a school with a long basketball tradition and a member of the venerable Big XII league.

As I prepared to go off to college, I’d mostly forgotten about those camp speakers and their one thousand shots. Then a workout program from Iowa State’s Strength & Conditioning Department arrived in the mail — a thick binder with my name on the front. The workouts inside were sadistic, calling for six sets of 12 reps of 20 different lifts, four times a week. The required running was similar, leaving me sunburned, exhausted, and barely able to breathe on the track at the outer edge of Meriden, Kansas.

I got scared again. Maybe those camp speakers from my childhood had been right.

Next came the orientation that all incoming Iowa State freshmen were invited to. Upperclassmen swarmed the leafy campus in obnoxiously bright T-shirts, ready to answer questions about what college was like. During one roundtable session, someone asked how much we’d have to study. At the front of the room, a chipper guy in one of those bright T-shirts said, “Take the number of hours you have each week and double it!”

My stomach sank into my hipbones. I was enrolled in 16 class-hours. I couldn’t imagine where I would find 32 hours to study every week, especially with that whole playing-Division-I-basketball thing. Now it was clear: being a college athlete and a college student was beyond small-town rubes like me.

My first week of class did nothing to disabuse me of this notion. Not knowing what else to do, I’d said I would major in engineering. My chemistry teacher raced through a review that was all new to me. Physics was equally disastrous, and I was pretty sure my Calculus teacher was speaking an alien language.

Maybe 32 hours of studying wouldn’t be enough. Maybe I needed 40 hours. Or 50 hours.

A week later, the basketball team’s pre-season workouts started. My alarm went off at 5:30 and I stumbled with my roommate to the rec center in the pre-dawn darkness. He was from Mississippi, a fellow freshman who was reportedly destined for the NBA. As we waited for the workout to start, the same strength coach who’d sent me that summer workout was pacing the weight room. He looked like a drill sergeant — a crew cut on top of a pyramid of muscle. When he stopped to ask me if I was ready, I had to keep myself from hyperventilating. I couldn’t do this. I was in over my head. Maybe there was still time to enroll at one of the local junior colleges back in Kansas?

Then, an hour later, the workout was over. And while I wasn’t ready to do another one, it hadn’t been so bad — nothing like those workouts that had arrived in the mail. But maybe it had been a fluke. Maybe the real torture was coming the next day.

Once again, I got up at 5:30. Once again, my roommate and I stumbled to the rec center. Once again, the strength coach was terrifying. And once again the workout was challenging but not nearly as hard as those workouts I’d been sent in Kansas.

Afterward, I mustered the courage to ask one of my teammates — a junior — about the summer workout packets. He grabbed another upperclassman and told me to repeat myself. When I did — and when they’d finished laughing — they explained that they’d thrown their packets in the trash, just like every summer.

Something similar happened in my engineering classes. After two weeks of terror, I started asking my classmates how they were doing. They shook their heads and told me they had no idea what was going on. So, were they studying 32 hours every week?

Not even close, they said. Maybe four.

And I’d like to say that the truth hit me at one of these moments, but it didn’t come to me so suddenly. I needed more evidence. Like, the next five years’ worth of evidence — five years that saw me go from college basketball walk-on to future NBA basketball player while also managing a degree in mechanical engineering.

Here’s what I figured out:

Those guys who’d come to talk to us at those basketball camps back in Kansas? They hadn’t been shooting a thousand shots a day. That strength coach who’d sent me that workout? He didn’t think anyone would actually do it. That dude who told us how much we were going to have to study at freshman orientation? He wasn’t spending 32 hours in the library every week. More important: no one was shooting a thousand shots or finishing torture workouts or studying for 32 hours every week. Or, honestly, doing anything they said they were doing.

So what was going on here? Why had all these people done this? Were they straight-up liars?

Kind of, but not really.

These people had told themselves the same story. In this story, they were the almighty, accomplished heroes. They were special, different, unique, and they wanted us to know it. They didn’t necessarily do this to scare us, although that might have been part of it. They did it because they were insecure about their place in the world. They needed to believe they’d done something other people couldn’t.

And you know what?

Fuck those guys.

Here’s what I’d like to tell that kid in Kansas — the one with the big dreams about far-flung places:

To accomplish what you’d like to accomplish, you don’t need to be special or talented. You don’t need to take expensive classes or hire fancy coaches. You don’t need to quit jobs or go on expensive sabbaticals. You don’t need to shoot a thousand shots or study 32 hours or lift everything in the weight room. Instead, keep those big dreams. Figure out a path to those dreams. Then fall in love with that path, committing to it so fully that you forget what your dreams even were.

And that, my young friend, is exactly when those dreams will come true.

My book about falling in love with your process — The Process is the Product — comes out in December. You can pre-order a signed copy.