- “Few players in my era prepared and practiced with my intensity. I was so driven to be the best player that I actually deprived myself of enjoying my success. I was obsessed with preparation. I was convinced that if I dedicated more time, focus, and sheer hard work to the game than my opponents did, I would eventually end up on top. And I did.” Clearing the Bases (Schmidt, Mike;Waggoner, Glen) Kindle Location 1206-1209
- “Practice doesn’t make perfect,” he used to say. “Perfect practice does.” Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success. Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty. Kindle Loc. 471-72
- “In the foreword to his adaptation of Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell compares non-action to athletic performance. “A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will,” he writes. “This is the paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.” Or as Lao-tzu proclaims in Mitchell’s work: Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.” Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success. Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty. Page 238