Psycho-cybernetics
This whole concept of how people get to be great at something is really fascinating to me. There’s deliberate practice, natural talent, relaxed concentration, and now psycho-cybernetics (as I found out via this article on Allen Iverson).
Then there’s the practice thing. You might not like it, and you might not buy it. But you should at least understand Allen Iverson’s approach to the game. Larry Platt’s Only the Strong Survive, which every Denver Nugget fan should read immediately, makes clear that, petulant as it may sound, Iverson is an artist. Both in reality–he can do things with pen and paper that would amaze you–and in his approach to the game. It’s helpful to understand that. This segment deals with Dennis Kozlowski, who was both the football coach and the athletic director at Bethel High School:
Kozlowski was a staunch believer in psychocybernetics. He’d preach the value of visualization long before such mental gymnastics were in vogue. He had Allen read the book Psycho-Cybernetics, by Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon who maintained that, even after reconstructive nose surgery, many patients would still see their old nose when they looked in the mirror; such was the power of the brain’s imagery. Kozlowski would tell Iverson to tie his shoe while continuing to carry on a conversation with him. Iverson would be speaking to him, looking up at him, while kneeling and tying his shoe. “See that,” Kozlowski said. “See how you didn’t have to look at yourself tying your shoe? See how you didn’t even have to think about it? I want you to play like you just tied your shoelaces–automatically. The way you do that is by having an image in your mind of what you do before you do it.”
“Allen took psychocybernetics to a new level,” Kozlowski recalls. Today, Iverson doesn’t like to talk about how he does what he does on the basketball court. “I just do it,” he says. Partially, like any artist, he is wary of overanalyzing his gift. But it could also be that he’s known since high school that the real explanation defies easy answers, that the answer is, at heart, both beneath and above the level of language, and connected, on some level, to his psyche. In other words, missed in all the hand-wringing about his lackadaisical practice habits in the NBA is the possibility that so much of his work is cerebral. Unlike, say, Jordan, who was a craftsman, someone who would take hundreds of jumpshots a day, Iverson imagines the possibility and then acts it out.
Tags: allen iverson, deliberate practice, psychology, relaxed concentration, talent