WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A STAR?
Does a star have less responsibility to the team than other players? Is it just
their tole to be great and win games? Or does a star have more responsibility than others? What does Michael Jordan think? "In our society sometimes it's hard to come to grips with filling a role instead of trying to be a superstar," says Jordan A superstar's talent can win games, but it's teamwork that wins championships
Coach John Wooden claims he was tactically and strategically average So how did he win ten national championships? One of the main reasons, he tells us, is because he was good at getting players to fill roles as part of a team "I believe, for example, I could have made Kareem Abdul-Jabbar] the greatest scorer in college history I could have done that by developing the team around that ability of his Would we have won three national championships while he was at UCLA? Never"
In the fixed mindset, athletes want to validate their talent. This means acting like a superstar, not "just" a team member But, as with Pedro Martinez, this mindset works against the important victories they want to achieve.
A telling tale is the story of Patrick Ewing, who could have been a basketball champion. The year Ewing was a draft pick-by far the most exciting pick of the year-the Knicks won the lottery and to their joy got to select Ewing for their team. They now had "twin towers," the seven-foot Ewing and the seven-foot Bill Cartwright, their high-scoring center. They had a chance to do it all
They just needed Ewing to be the power forward. He wasn't happy with that Center is the star position. And maybe he wasn't sure he could hit the outside shots that a power forward has to hit. What if he had really given his all to learn that position? (Alex Rodriguez, then the best shortstop in baseball, agreed to play third base when he joined the Yankees. He had to retrain himself and, for a while, he wasn't all he had been) Instead, Cartwright was sent to the Bulls, and Ewing's Knicks never won a championship.
Then there is the tale of the football player Keyshawn Johnson, another immensely talented player who was devoted to validating his own greatness When asked before a game how he compared to a star player on the opposing team, he replied " you r trying to compare a flashlight to a star , Flashlights only last so long . A star is in the sky forever."
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