Technique, Practice, and Craft

Last week, Sports Illustrated published an article about Georgetown’s basketball program and its coach, John Thompson III. Georgetown has a long tradition of producing skilled big men, starting with Thompson’s father in the 1970s and 1980s. And while Thompson has continued that tradition, he’s gained a reputation for something different:

Much has been made about the Princeton-style offense that Georgetown runs under Thompson, about how difficult it is to defend and prepare for. But what is unique about Georgetown’s system has little to do with anything that is written in a playbook. Everything the Hoyas do offensively is based on reading the defense and reacting to those reads. Most systems involve a player being told something along the lines of: cut here, run off of that screen there, set a pick for him and roll to the basket, lather, rinse, repeat.

Georgetown’s theory is different.

Thompson doesn’t tell his team what to do on any given play. He doesn’t give them specific instructions, rather he teaches them, from the day they set foot on campus, how to make that decision for themselves based off of what they see on the floor in front of them. In his words, “the ability to just be a basketball player is something that we stress. Don’t be a position.”

And that is the most difficult point to get across.

“A lot of freshmen want to be told specifically what to do,” he said. “The difficult part becomes understanding that they have to make the read, because they’re so used to being told where to run in the play next.

“It’s new for most players to have to make reads and have to make decisions based on how they’re being played and how the defense is set. But once you grasp that way of thinking, I think it is very simple.”

I’ve loved basketball my whole life, but I’ve never played it competitively. So I’m intrigued by what this actually means in practice. I totally agree with it in theory. However, before you can learn how to make your own decisions, sometimes you have to learn things by rote.

I recently heard chef extraordinaire Jacques Pepin on the radio talking about cooking, and he gave a wonderful definition of technique:

For me, technique is very important. Technique is really a repetition, repetition, endless repetition of a certain movement, whether you use a knife or whatever, so it becomes so engrained, so part of yourself that you can afford to forget it, because it’s there forever.

You learn a certain movement, a certain reaction over and over and over again until, as Pepin said, “you can afford to forget it, because it’s there forever.” That, to me, is the essence of craft, whether it’s sports, cooking, or my own craft of collaboration. Learning certain things by rote ultimately gives you the freedom to express yourself.

After a recent playoff game, Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers had this to say about his point guard, Rajon Rondo:

“He’s got to be in attack,” Rivers said. “I thought the second quarter he was attacking and attacking. I thought he was reading a lot instead of playing on instincts. I think sometimes his IQ hurts him at times. He’s trying to read the defense, but you can’t read and play with speed at the same time.

“We go through it a lot — at least Rondo and I — about, ‘Rondo, just trust your instincts. Your speed has to be part of it. Your instincts will take over. You’ll make the right decision.'”

Doing any craft well is all about trusting your instincts. You get those instincts by doing your thinking in practice rather than in the moment.

Eight Random Facts

I’m breaking my longest blog silence in a while (over a month!), thanks to prodding from Mark Oehlert, who tagged me with the “Eight Random Facts” blog meme. I actually enjoy these memes; you learn a lot about folks that they might never otherwise reveal. Plus, it’s a good way to get people to post something. In Mark’s case, not only were all eight of his facts interesting, I was surprised to learn that he knows how to count to eight in Korean. How many non-Koreans know how to do that?!    (MFV)

Here are the rules:    (MFW)

  1. Post these rules first, then give the facts.    (MFX)
  2. List eight random facts about yourself.    (MFY)
  3. Tag eight people, listing their names and linking to them, and letting them know they were tagged.    (MFZ)

I’m actually using Mark’s modified rules, tagging seven people and leaving the eighth open to any and all of you.    (MG0)

Here are my eight random facts:    (MG1)

  • I sang in a Korean children’s choir when I was ten. My singing career included a “music video” of me singing a Korean folk song at the beach, which played on the local Korean television station every night for a week. Unbelievably, no agents ever contacted me, and my singing career ended soon thereafter.    (MG2)
  • My body is on the March 1997 cover of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. They replaced my head with a computer monitor, leaving me with head-image problems that persist to this day. My boss at the time promised to serve as my agent, but once again, no one ever contacted me. I tried to fire him, but he claimed that I couldn’t fire someone I wasn’t paying. (That, of course, was libel. I was paying him on commission.) Thus ended my last foray into what we from Los Angeles call The Business.    (MG3)
  • I discovered a bug in the very first computer program, Ada Lovelace‘s code for computing Bernoulli Numbers, which she published in 1843. I briefly mentioned my findings in the sidebar of an article I coauthored with Betty Alexandra Toole on Ada Lovelace in the May 1999 issue of Scientific American. Frankly, this alone should qualify me for my own Wikipedia page. Take into account my glorious accomplishments in the entertainment industry, and the fact that I don’t already have a page is even more mystifying. What’s up, Wikipedia community?!    (MG4)
  • I am the proud owner of three bobblehead dolls: Steve Garvey (my favorite baseball player growing up), Tommy Lasorda (my favorite overweight Italian baseball manager), and Mr. T (everybody’s favorite mohawked, bejeweled tough guy). I’m looking to add James Worthy (my favorite basketball player growing up) and Bruce Lee (everybody’s favorite butt-kicker) to my collection, but I’m not sure they even exist.    (MG5)
  • I have two non-family portraits hanging in my office: Doug Engelbart and Thomas Kuhn.    (MG6)
  • My favorite book is Robert Penn Warren‘s All the King’s Men, which I read at least once a year. All of my computers are named after characters in the book.    (MG7)
  • My secret passion: Watching cooking shows. I’m a bit of a cooking show snob. I think the shows on KQED are much better overall than the ones on Food Network. My favorites are Lida Bastianich, Rick Bayless, Bobby Flay, Jacques Pepin, and of course, Iron Chef. I was also a big fan of Julia Childs, the most famous alumnus of my junior high and high school.    (MG8)
  • My two sisters (one older, one younger) are my favorite people in the world. My nephew, Elliott, is my favorite person under three feet tall, although he’s growing like a weed.    (MG9)

As for folks I’m tagging, it was hard limiting myself to seven people. Please participate even if you weren’t tagged! Those I chose in the end are all great people doing brilliant work and writing interesting, insightful pieces. They all also have lower Technorati rankings than me. In some cases, it’s because they don’t blog that often, although each of them has posted at least once in the last two months. In other cases, it’s because they’re not as well known as they should be. If you’re not already following them, you should be. It will be well worth your while.    (MGA)

Clean Hacking Stations

Fun Fact About Eugene #322: I’m obsessed with cooking shows. There’s nothing I like better on a Saturday morning than rolling out of bed, turning on PBS, and watching Jacques Pepin work his magic. What’s amazing about these chefs is that they always have a clean cooking station. Always. It’s apparently a principle they teach at cooking school, and it makes a lot of sense. It also seems to apply to other areas of life. Getting Things Done. Project Management. And of course, hacking.    (K95)

Ingy dot Net (The Hacker Formerly Known as Brian Ingerson) was in town this past week, and we hacked a little bit on Wednesday night. “Hacking” with Ingy for me so far has mostly consisted of me watching him in action, catching a typo here or there and occasionally pursuing some philosophical disagreement. But it’s cool, because I enjoy watching other folks code, especially folks who are better than me.    (K96)

(Earlier this month, while working on the Ruby YADIS library with Brian Ellin, I learned for the first time about command completion in Emacs using meta-backslash. Emacs has been my primary programming environment for about 15 years, and yet, I never knew about this. Very embarrassing.)    (K97)

One thing that surprised me about Ingy is that he doesn’t code very fast. On the other hand, one thing he does incredibly well is that he always has a “clean hacking station.” Even when he creates temporary directories or inserts debug statements in his code, he does it in a very clean way. It’s a practice I’d like to do a better job of emulating.    (K98)