Here’s a post from yesterday about Bill Russell (lost due to internet difficulties), one from last week (missed for no good reason), and one for today too.
Bill Russell, who some of you will know and some of you will never have heard of died today [yesterday] at eighty-eight. The winningest basketball player of all time, he is as important to American history as Muhammad Ali.
In the litany of things being said about him today about his success as an athlete (he was 21-0 in must-win games, for example) and influence as an activist and human being (the way he carried himself, his response to racism in Boston, his unwillingness to join Martin Luther King Jr. on the platform in Washington D.C. at the “I have a Dream” speech because he did not feel he had done enough yet to accept that honor, his key presence at what was called “The Ali Summit,” and on and on), what I have to say about him will seem trite.
Clearly the greatest teammate in the history of American team sports, Russell would go through his team’s plays from all five positions. Despite being the most physically gifted of his teammates, he needed to know how the game looked to them so that he and they could succeed together.
Imagine the mayor living as a teacher or a cop before enacting a policy that might impact them. Imagine the President sending his children to public school. Imagine the partner of the firm sitting at the receptionist’s desk for a day.
That Mr. Russell did this was hardly the most important thing about him, but it is a favorite.
Post from last week:
You probably missed that this pro-democracy activist in Myanmar was executed. A reminder that most good fights against evil do not make the front page, let alone world consciousness.
Post From Today:
Try this: practice hypotheses-driven doing. Forget whether or not something is worth doing and just do it under the hypothesis that it will teach you whether or not it is your kind of thing as you go through it.
And then try hypotheses-driven being. Be your alter-ego or your super-confident self or ‘quiet you’ not talkie you (or vice-versa) just to see if there is some value in that experimental being.
As with any ideation or experiment, you do not have to get it right to learn from it.
Just try something, including who you might be, to see what it offers you.
Love love love each of these posts.