Michael Jordan's Nike ad counts his failures, not his wins. That's antifragile confidence: the kind you build by treating each loss as practice. Not Stuart Smalley affirmations, but earned resilience through repetition.
Questions this episode answers
February 22, 2023
#1,433
“I've missed more than 9,000 shots. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.”
Hey hero, if you're enjoying these daily plus ones, make sure you head to heroic us to check out all of the other goodness we have to help you activate your best every day. And now, today's plus one.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. In our recent series of plus ones, we made it through some wisdom from the first two fables in Darren Donnelly's Sports for the Soul series, Think Like a Warrior. And in Old School Grit, we'll keep the momentum going with a quick look at some wisdom from the third book in the series. It's called Relentless Optimism. First, how great of a title is that? Relentless Optimism? The first important thing to note here is that relentless optimism is very different than just repeating positive platitudes. Stewart says Smiley style. On that note, I just googled Stuart Smiley to make sure I spelled it right. And I didn't. It's not Stuart Smiley, it's Stuart Smalley. Gosh darn it, I hope you still like me now. The first result in my search happened to be a YouTube video of Michael Jordan doing a skit on SNL with Stuart Smalley. It's fantastic. At the risk of sending you down a rabbit hole of distraction, but trusting you'll find it as amusing as I did and enjoy it as a quick six minute dose of entertainment while flexing your conquering digital addiction 101 and digital minimalism 101 muscles. Here's the link. Check out the plus one for all those 101s and that video. Now we're going to save our discussion on the science of relentless optimism for tomorrow's plus one. Today we're going to focus on the true confidence Michael Jordan earned such that he didn't need to whisper platitudes to himself that he didn't really believe. The best way to make that point is to point your attention to another Michael Jordan video. This one is a Nike commercial in which he tells us how many times he failed. The video is so powerful that the godmother of the growth mindset herself, Carol Dweck, references it in her great book Mindset Now. We talked about it years ago. And a plus one on the growth mindset, Jordan Picasso. And you check that out as well. If you haven't watched this 30 second video yet, I highly recommend you join the 7 million people who have and watch it ideally with your kids if they're into sports. Check out the link. And here's what Carol Dweck says about it. I quote, michael Jordan embraced his failures. In fact, in one of his favorite ads for Nike, he says, I've missed more than 9,000 shots. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. You can be sure that each time he went back and practiced the shot 100 times, Carol Dweck tells us. And and that's today's plus one. You want to forge antifragile confidence? Pay attention to how you respond to failures. Do you work harder or do you give up? Remember, the worse we feel, the more committed we are to our protocol. It's time to move from theory to practice to mastery. Not someday. Today.
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