Week 3 - 10/3 and 10/5 - Resilience

This post is for the last two weeks, because I got sick last week and had to take a break from practice (and from writing).

It feels like I'm making progress, but it's slow. In recent practices, I shot, from the top of the key, 9/30, 12/30, and 6/30. So no progress there, which is a bit frustrating and discouraging.

This brings up one of the big challenges of skill building: resilience. Although progress is slow (or even non-existent), I can't let my frustration about that negatively impact my practice. I bet some of you reading this have had similar experiences with learning something in college.

I haven't lost faith in my practice methods for three reasons:
  1. I was still a bit sick when I shot 6/30. Being sick could have negatively impacted my shooting and cost me several baskets.
  2. There's an element of randomness in how well I shoot on any given day. So I need to look at longer trends in my shooting numbers before concluding that I'm not making progress.
  3. I feel like the other things I'm working on--the dribble-shoot drill and scoring with my left hand--are going well.
Here's video of me on 10/5 working on the dribble-shoot drill:


Right after that, I played some 3 on 3 with the young man who approached me and his friends. I was expecting to play terribly, but I made two baskets--a left-handed layup and a hookshot from the post.

After the second of those baskets, the guy I was matched up with started throwing around his substantial weight. I got a little "bullied" in the post and he scored on me a whole bunch of times. That was a bit frustrating. But I bet I can come up with a counter to what he was doing. Resilience. He's heavier and stronger than me, but I'm taller and quicker; there may be a way for me to use my advantages if I think it through.

On an unrelated note, there was a guy at the park that night who was high out of his mind and was threateningly yelling profanity at a young woman who was in a large group. When I was walking home in the dark, he was in front of one of the entrances to my neighborhood and still acting crazy (he was yelling and jumped in front of a car). I really didn't want to walk past him in the dark, so I took an extra ten minutes walking around a block to get to the other entrance to my neighborhood.

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