Concentration: Words From Coach Bobby Knight

This is a repost from the old blog that was written in May 2008.

During a recent stay at ESPN, former Indiana and Texas A&M coach Bobby Knight repeatedly emphasized what he feels is perhaps the most important trait of a successful team. Talent of coarse plays a factor, as does coaching, but the primary factor he talked about for nearly the entire NCAA tournament was concentration. You can attribute many of the results during the tournament to one team just being more focused on what they had to do than their opponent; whether it was the upsets that resulted in the two 12-13 matches in the second round, Davidson’s upset of Georgetown, or even Memphis’ collapse at the end of regulation that allowed Kansas to walk away with the title. If you watched any of these games you could see the lack of concentration in the teams that lost, and while each of them were upsets when you look at the betting odds, the teams that won were certainly mentally tougher.

Now, the point of all this is not to break down college basketball games that happened nearly two months ago. What I am here to do is take the theory behind Coach Knight’s “concentration” and translate it to real world applications. There are several aspects to this one topic, each beginning independent of the other but translating into a concept that interweaves each of them, including focus, sight and sound, losing, and execution.

Focus

The first concept is focus, which is what begins the process of concentration. Focus allows you to turn your attention to a singular part of a task or goal and incorporate it into your overall thought process. If proper attention is not given to the important details of what you are doing then you can find yourself in a bad situation where you have to do a lot more work than if you had given it the proper respect. When translated to the business world, focus means you are not looking ahead to the next task assuming the outcome of the current one no matter how trivial it seems. If you are trying to piece together a deal involving large sums of money, there are certain steps you have to take to get it done. Not paying the proper amount of attention to one of them, or even skipping one, can result in the loss of funds to penalties, government sanctions, or even the complete loss of the deal.

Focus can also be applied to the entire process that allows you to achieve your set goal. More than just giving each task the attention it needs, you also have be focused on the broader goal that you are working toward, and without doing this you can lose sight of what exactly you are trying to do. This aspect seems like common sense to anyone who has ever done this type of work, but you still often find those who lose focus and become sidetracked by something, whether it is money, fame, or other rewards. In my experience the primary focus killer is the ability to reach something through means that are less than conscionable, also called shortcuts. These shortcuts can be intentionally overlooking someone’s mistake, not giving a task the attention and time needed to do it properly, or doing something outright illegal.

Sight and Sound

The ability to see and listen to what you and others around you are doing is imperative when applying concentration to a goal. Coach Knight talks about the difference between looking and seeing and hearing and listening, stating that anyone can look and hear anything, but those with concentration have the ability to see and listen. Seeing what you are looking at is very different than simply looking at what is in front of you, the biggest difference being that you understand what is there. You can look at a math problem for hours on end and not see what it is telling you to do, what method you should use to solve it. It is through the ability to understand what you are seeing that a person can choose the best course of action to achieve a goal. This is a very broad concept that can be applied to everything a person does, whether it is something as simple as driving to work or solving a complex, multivariable equation.

Very similar, hearing and listening are also two very different concepts. Everyone has the ability to hear, but it is through listening that we gain the ability to understand what we are being told. It is impossible to learn anything without good listening skills, and by that I don’t just mean making sense of the sounds your ears pick up. Even when you are reading a book you are hearing what the words on the page are telling you, but it is only if you listen to those words will you understand what is being said.

While the example I used with sight is based in mathematics, everything a person does during the day can be seen as a glorified algebraic problem, from putting on clothes to writing a paper. There are many different actions involved each decision we make, each with their own, independent outcomes. It is the desired outcome that tells us which direction to go and the only way to detect is by seeing the correct route and listening to what is telling us to take it. Back the math example, when you are solving an equation the elements of that equation tell you the correct way to solve it. By just looking at the problem and hearing what it is telling you there is no way to understand what is going on because you are not applying the proper focus to what is being said. However, if you see what is written and listen to what is being said then you will understand what to do.

It is through the focus that I discussed earlier that a person is able to properly understand how to carry out a task or achieve a goal, but without the proper senses it is impossible to reasonably expect to achieve what you are working toward.

Losing

There are many clichés involving the building of character, through losing or not knowing how sweet victory is without having tasted defeat, but beyond those there is a true trait of concentration revealed when you fail to reach a goal. This trait involves understanding of what kept you from reaching your goal and how to keep from repeating your mistake. This trait is the polar opposite of losing, winning. Winning is what the completion of each goal we set can be translated to, and the only way that we can insure winning is by understanding what it is that makes us lose. Coach Knight talks about everyone wanting to win, but he is also a great believer in understanding losing, “because if we know how we can lose, if we know those factors or reasons that cause us to lose, and we eliminate those things, we stand a much better chance of winning.” These words ring true to anyone who has achieved a goal they have set for themselves.

It should go without saying that in the short term it is possible to make incorrect moves and still be able to achieve a goal. Winning this way does not allow you learn anything except the wrong way to win and over the long term will cause you to lose in much greater frequency than winning. It is possible to learn while winning but you have to pay close attention to everything you do and correct your incorrect decisions while making others, but doing this correctly and in a way that keeps you from losing is very difficult to do. The time when you can learn the most is when you lose. I’m not saying that losing is a good thing, it never is, but learning from losses is sometimes much more important that winning. As Coach Knight stated it is through losing that we are able to understand what made us lose and by doing so we can eliminate that factor from the process that allows us to achieve our goals. More over, understanding why a particular decision is wrong allows us to have a base for making similar decisions in the future, creating a shorter response time and decisions that we can be more confidant about.

Combining this with the other concepts of concentration allows us understand what our losses have to do with our wins.

Execution

Concentration is perhaps the most important aspect of a successful person, allowing them to know what it is they have to do, apply the focus and understanding needed to achieve their goals, and have the foresight to make the correct decisions that make up the process of being a winner. The hardest part of implementing true concentration is understanding that it is more than focusing on what you need to do in order to achieve your goals, concentration is a method of achieving a competitive advantage on your opponents. Concentration involves reacting to what they do and taking action to counter them, whether it is making a better offer on a deal than a competing firm or getting enough sleep and eating a proper breakfast before you go into your arena. Concentration is not losing sight on what actually matters in the big picture, working towards goals that stand up over the long term, understanding what is being presented to you, and how to learn from you mistakes.