Ozzie Guillen is obviously not a prudent man. He has mouthed off time and again, and his many words have finally caught up to him in a big way. Yesterday he tried to apologize for his positive remarks concerning Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. If you want to call it apologizing. As usual, it was more like elaborate excusing or a pathetic attempt to resist taking full responsibility for what he said. As you can see from the video below, he talks about how bad he felt, but then goes on to explain that he didn’t really mean to say what he said. He was thinking in Spanish something, but then said the complete opposite in English somehow and….uh…uh…

Huh?

It’s just plain foolishness and incredibly difficult to believe. In fact, I found it straight up difficult to watch. It was pathetic.

And yet, here’s the thing…here’s the big point that we all should take away from Guillen’s predicament:  we are much more like Ozzie Guillen than we would care to admit.

Sure, we might not be foolish enough to mouth off positive remarks about Fidel Castro in a public forum (while managing in Miami nonetheless!), but you know what, those public remarks actually aren’t as damaging as the unkind words we use within our own homes. Among those we love. Sure, a community is outraged by Guillen’s words, and he was very wrong to state them, but if we view ourselves rightly – if we really take note of all that we have said and understand the significance of all our words in the sight of God – we will know without a doubt that we are by no means better than him. On the contrary, we are worse.

Our question then is:  Will we do a better job than Guillen in taking responsibility for our words and repenting of them? I certainly hope so.

From all accounts, he is a different character and a Christian. He doesn’t take lessons or have a particular instructor. His swing isn’t ‘perfect.’ His game certainly unconventional. And yet, he is good. And when he wins, he is humble and full of joy. Really, he seems like a guy who is refreshing and easy to root for.

I was actually thinking about this before he even won the tournament, but wouldn’t Tiger Woods do well to learn from Bubba? (And not just Bubba I should add, but many others on the tour.) If you watched Tiger golf this week, you have to know what I am referring to. For unlike Bubba, Tiger was an absolute mess. He wasn’t free-flowing, but clearly over thinking things and putting way too much pressure on himself to perform. I don’t think I saw him relaxed one time the entire weekend. Everything was forced. Nothing flowed. Mentally he looked like a wreck. And his game reflected that.

Naturally, Tiger will say that is because he wasn’t playing well. But I would beg to differ. I think it is the other way around, particularly when you are as good as Tiger. When you have the physical tools to perform, it is the mental that most often holds you back. As concerns Tiger in this year’s Masters, I could tell from his very countenance that he wasn’t going to play well. You could see the tension, the pressure, the need to win.

And in sports (and especially in golf) this is a recipe for absolute disaster. For the more you worry about winning, the more you increase your chances of losing. The best way to win is to lose yourself in the joy of the game. To go out and delight in the gift of play. I am sure Bubba doesn’t do it perfectly by any stretch. But he certainly did it much better than Tiger this past weekend.

I tell people often that as a basketball player, I can’t focus on making shots. I just practice and when game time comes, all I can do is take them. If I worry about making them, I will inevitably shoot poorly. Of course, there is a certain extent in which you can be so good that you can make up for some of this tension. I think Tiger often does this. But only to a certain degree. At some point, you just stifle your ability to reach your potential.

And that is the saddest thing to me when I look at Tiger’s golf game. He is holding himself back. And in so doing, keeping even us from the joy of watching him be at his best. He would do well, in my opinion, to learn a little from Bubba. To get a little free-flowing back in his game. But isn’t that true for us all?

That being said, no matter what your line of work, you would do well to listen to these sermons.

Here are five of them from Keller on the topic of work that you can listen to or download for free from Redeemer Presbyterian’s website. I have listened to each of them and cannot recommend them strongly enough.

Be sure to check it out and ask yourself about your own level of hypocrisy.

You see, we are all moral bankers. Every day we make a dozen or a hundred or a thousand little mundane investments in the hope of gaining some kind of return. You may not consciously think this way, but this is what you are doing. Every person living is pursuing some kind of treasure. Your actions, reactions, and responses in any given situation or relationship represent your deposits, your attempts to secure whatever in that moment is valuable to you.

So what do your deposits say about what is most valuable to you?

Klosterman’s piece is entitled Kentucky’s Death March.

Pierce’s The Big (Kabuki) Dance.

Check them out. I will comment on them in the next few days. I am a little busy now to give the attention to them that I would like. Soon enough though.

(HT: Vitamin Z)

God does not settle for ‘good enough.’ He loves us too much to sit back idly while we struggle with personal weakness, failure, and sin. He is not satisfied to leave us at the level of immaturity and foolishness we find ourselves in today. He has a character goal for you to attain in this life, and by his unrelenting grace and mercy you are going to get there. He is God. We are made in his likeness. His ultimate goal for us in this life is that we be further conformed to his image. So he will not stop doing good to us – good in the most important sense of the term, however painful it may be at times – for as long as we are on this earth.

The factor that seems to explain the most about great performance is something the researchers call deliberate practice. Exactly what this is or isn’t turns out to be extremely important. It definitely isn’t what most of us do on the job everyday, which begins to explain the mystery of the workplace -why we’re surrounded by so many people who have worked hard for decades, but have never approached greatness. Deliberate practice is also not what most of us do when we think we’re practicing golf or the oboe or any of our other interests. Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

He naturally goes into greater detail on what ‘deliberate practice’ actually consists of. Before breaking in down in detail, he summarizes deliberate practice in this way:

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.

I think both he and Malcolm Gladwell are right on in their books. They are both good reads, no matter what your area of expertise may be (or whatever it is you may want it to be).

The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associate with being a world-class expert – in anything,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practices sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true, world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

As Gladwell makes plain in his book, this isn’t the whole story, but it is certainly a big part. At the very least, it makes me feel better about shooting those long-distance threes.

You can check out the outline here. Today we move on to point #7:

Emphasize the Importance and Rewards of Practice

I suppose I could say that as a professional basketball player, I have a somewhat unique style of play. At least on the offensive side of the ball, I tend to be effective, but usually not in the typical fashion. I score, but the way in which I score usually isn’t ‘normal.’ Oftentimes, I score in transition or make shots that most players won’t normally take. I might take a three from 28 feet, for example, or shoot a fadeaway jump shot off one foot.

Because I play this way, I often get some very interesting reactions from fans and even coaches. Oftentimes people have said, “I love to watch you play, but I do think you are a bit crazy!” Or my coaches may say, “That is never a good shot.”

The interesting thing about these statements (and the thing that applies to our point here), is that there is usually a thought process behind them that forgets about the importance and the rewards of practice. For more often than not, people assume a certain shot is crazy (and not a good one) simply because most players don’t shoot that kind of shot. They don’t ask themselves how much I have practiced that shot or for how many years I have been doing it. They just think, “I haven’t seen that much before, so it must be crazy.”

Naturally, I think this is a mistaken view of things. So if I have the chance to respond, I usually say, “I know it might seem crazy, but I don’t think you would think it so crazy if you could have seen the thousands and thousands of times I have made that shot before. Or if you considered the fact that I have been shooting many of those shots on a consistent basis for 18 years of my life. I agree it might be crazy for some people to shoot those shots. But that is because they never practice them. From my vantage point, I would be crazy not to shoot such shots, for I have been practicing them for years!”

More often than not, people will say, “Huh, I never thought about it that way before.” (Though coaches aren’t so quick to come around!) It’s an honest and faithful reply. And a very human one. For somehow, someway, we as human beings oftentimes forget the law of sowing and reaping. Especially, when it comes to sports, we often see only the reaping and thus, forget the thousands of practice hours that were invested into the few hours of play.

And our children do the same. At least when it comes to my children, they don’t naturally ‘get’ the law of sowing and reaping. Or they don’t want to. So I make it a point to emphasize time and again the importance and rewards of practice.

I might do it more than I need to, but I do not want my children to watch any sort of sport or listen to any musician and think only, “My, how gifted they are.” True as it may be, it is certainly not the whole truth. For often enough there is more talent sitting on a couch somewhere watching the same game. While recognizing the gifts, I also want them to recognize the hours of practice that went into developing those gifts.

So when a big free throw in made at the end of a game we are watching, I turn to my son and ask him, “Elijah, why did he make that free throw? Why was he prepared to do well in that moment?” He knows the answer, so he smiles and says, “He practiced.” Or when he watches Lionel Messi (the best soccer player in the world) score some incredible, even outrageous and unique, goal, I ask him the same. And he responds, “Practice.”

And so it goes for sports or math facts or music or whatever. I am desperate for my children to understand that if they want to reap well, they better sow well. If they want to enjoy the pleasures of greatness (or proficiency), they better practice.

But there is one more thing: I want them to understand that although there are many rewards to practice, proficiency really is one of the best. I want them to realize that if I am viewing things rightly, I practice with a view towards more pleasurable play. I want them to realize that when all is said and done, greater freedom and joy in playing the game can only be found when you put in the practice.

That makes sense right? Shooting a basketball is more fun when it actually has a good chance of going in. Playing a game (or an instrument) is more fun when you don’t have to think about what you are doing. You can just play. And guess what? You won’t have to think much if you put in good practice. Practice serves the pleasure of proficient performance (say that 10 times fast). Joyful play is the end goal. The pleasure of knowing God’s pleasure is what it is ultimately all about. Or at least what it should be about.

O how desperate we are for a generation of kids who will understand the importance and rewards of practice (in every area of life)! Let’s serve them well by emphasizing this point the way we ought.