The Power of Focus: Watch the Tar Heels. Watch the Tigers.

As students and as teacher, we each have some similar lessons to learn.

A key one is focus. Don Murray highlights FOCUS as a key element in his template of the writing process.

Focus allows completion to happen.

I read a Hannah Karp story this weekend, March 31, 2009, in the Wall Street Journal, about Idan Ravin who is training NBA basketball players such as Denver Nuggets player Carmelo Anthony.

Headline:

Meet Idan, the Hoops Whisperer
How a Former Lawyer With No Basketball Experience Became the NBA's Hottest New Trainer

He uses unorthodox methods, including throwing tennis balls at his clients while they dribble down the court. He has them try to run from one baseline to the other and only dribble twice.

Excerpt from story:

Mr. Ravin's goal is to create so much chaos and stress on a player during workouts that the physical game becomes less cerebral and more automatic. He uses a combination of humbling psychological tactics and exhausting, unorthodox and sometimes spontaneous drills. He's been known to fire tennis balls at players while they're dribbling or make them stare straight ahead while dribbling two balls in each hand in uneven rhythms and walking from side to side.

In one particularly exhausting drill, Mr. Ravin throws 25 balls, one at a time, in different directions. The player's job is to catch them after only one bounce and then shoot.

One day this summer, as Mr. Anthony's 15-month-old son Kiyan sat in a stroller nearby, Mr. Ravin put the one-time All-Star through a drill called the "full court lay-up," in which Mr. Anthony had to run from one baseline to the other while making only two dribbles. Mr. Ravin times every drill and never hesitates to let a player know how much faster another superstar client completed it. "He knows exactly how to get into [players'] heads -- especially mine," says Mr. Anthony.
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I thought about the tennis balls, all of you and what you are trying to accomplish, and then thought about this quote from former UNC basketball coach Dean Smith.

BEWARE OF THE LURE OF THE BARKING DOG

“Dr. Phog Allen, my college coach [at Kansas], said: ‘The postman doesn’t stop for every dog that barks. He’d never get his mail delivered.’ ”

---Dean Smith of UNC Chapel Hill in speaking of how to handle critics. He ranks as the number three college basketball coach with the most wins (879).

I also was reading something this weekend from management guru Peter Drucker. He said the key focus question to ask is not what are you doing, but what have you STOPPED doing.

Your power will increase when you focus. You can get immense satisfaction when you complete assignments. You can complete these best by ignoring the Tennis Balls, or to use another example, the Barking Dogs around you.

David Allen talks about the idea of becoming a "COMPLETIONIST."

I sent out a book chapter draft last week. About five weeks had passed from the original deadline. I felt badly about the delay. But I had been in communication with my editor about the delays. And it felt great to complete this phase of the project.

Last night I watched my beloved UNC men's basketball team win the NCAA championship. Ty Lawson, Wayne Ellington, Tyler Hansborough. They've got focus. For that matter, the losing Michigan State team had incredible focus to make it to the championship game. The Mizzou Tigers men's basketball team also is learning focus under the leadership of Coach Mike Anderson, the co-winner of 2009 Coach of the Year. Anderson has transformed a lackluster team into "the fastest 40 minutes of basketball." That kind of basketball demands practice. And focus.

How do you focus?

What helps you to focus? How do you ignore the barking dogs, the tennis balls coming at you? How do you distinguish what matters and what does not matter?

BH, who is still learning the focus lesson