REFLECTION
It’s my belief that “clutch” is not a trait you’re born with or a switch you can just flip when a big moment arrives. I believe being clutch is the end result of a feedback loop involving failure, learning, practice and execution that produces the kind of fearless self-confidence that any competitor needs to succeed on the biggest, brightest stages. This loop may initiate on one of those stages (with failure), but it runs its course through the quiet mini-moments we create in our imaginations during practice or in the driveway when we’re kids. We pretend to strike out Derek Jeter in the bottom of the ninth with the base loaded. We hit a turnaround jumper with one second on the clock to win the NBA finals.
In my career, my teams marshalled 72 game-winning drives, including 55 fourth quarter comebacks, and I was lucky enough to play in ten Super Bowls. But would you believe, in my mind, that number is much closer to the tens of thousands? Across my entire career, a day didn’t pass on the practice field when at some point it became fourth down in the fourth quarter, down by 4, with the Super Bowl in the balance. That’s how I approached practice in my head—with everything on the line.
I was an incredibly focused practice player. I dropped back at full speed. I sold play-action like a Times Square street vendor with a table full of knock-off handbags—which is to say, I sold it hard. Where appropriate, I threw absolute piss missiles down the seam to tight ends or to the sideline as Cover-2 beaters. I did everything at game speed. I wanted everything to be right on every play. Like I mentioned last week, the purpose wasn’t to work until I got it right, it was to work until I was sure I wasn’t going to get it wrong.
The goal, obviously, was to win games. But to do that, you have to try to win each quarter and each snap. And to do that; you have to win each practice, each practice period, each drill, each film session, each lifting session, each meal, each night’s sleep.
I wanted to make as many things on the football field as automatic as I could. I wanted to sear them into my nervous system and stamp them into my muscle memory, so that on game days I could just let it rip and commit as much of my conscious effort to handling the unpredictable, unforeseeable events that take place in the course of a football game.
You would be amazed by how rare it is that an athlete takes this kind of approach to practice, even when they idolize players who do take that approach. Steph Curry hits hundreds of shots every day in practice—sometimes hundreds in a row. He’s done this for seventeen years and as a result he’s won four championships, an Olympic gold medal, two MVPs, and a 3pt shooting record that will never be broken as long as robots aren’t allowed to play in the NBA. If you’re a basketball player with dreams of greatness, you can’t look at those practice habits next to those results and say to yourself, “I’m just gonna go through the motions today and do whatever the coach has planned.”
Steph does things on the basketball court that no other player can do because he’s done things on the practice floor that no other player will do. You’ll watch him hit crazy shots in huge moments and the announcers will say something like, “Curry is unconscious out there!”, and you know what: they’re right. Steph isn’t thinking. He did all his thinking and visualizing in the thousands of mini-moments he created for himself in practice. He does all the work there, so that when gametime comes every possible scenario you can think of feels mundane to him, which means then he can just play. And a free Steph Curry is a very dangerous man.
That’s how I looked at all those mini-moments I made for myself in practice. Not as a perfectionist, or as someone obsessed with football and elite performance—though all those things are true—but rather as a precondition for making available the physical, mental, and emotional bandwidth necessary to come through in the big moments.
LESSON
Fundamentally, being clutch is about your relationship to pressure. Are you the one who feels it or the one who applies it? Those who consistently apply it to their opponents are the ones more likely to come up clutch in the big moments.
And what’s interesting is that oftentimes the players who apply constant pressure aren’t doing it consciously—or at least that’s not their primary goal—they’re simply not screwing up. They’re doing everything right, which forces their opponents to execute at an equally high level just to keep up. That’s a hard thing to do if you don’t practice like you play, because as the game goes along and you start to fall behind, the pressure ratchets up.
Some players can raise their level when the pressure is applied and they’re able to meet the moment. But then there are players who can’t handle the pressure and won’t raise their level. Some wilt and get crushed. Others do this thing where they try to alleviate the pressure by lowering the stakes of the moment in their mind. They say things like, “it’s just a game” or “it’s just one game” or “it doesn’t really matter.” It’s a survival mechanism, like fainting goats or opossums that play dead when they’re scared. You don’t have to worry about being clutch when you’ve removed any need for it in your mind.
The reality is, you’re not going to win every game you play. I lost 97 games in my career, including 3 Super Bowls. And I lost hundreds more in my mind during practice. But as the years went along and I got better, those imaginary losses in the mini-moments got fewer and further between, while the successes in big moments got more consistent. That was not a coincidence.
Still, those hard-fought losses and failures are important because they kick off that feedback loop I was talking about. You have to lose some of those big games. Then you have to sit with the losses and the pain of letting yourself and your teammates down, until you can’t take it anymore and you have to study every millisecond of the film so you can learn what went wrong and what you should have done instead. This needs to make you so angry that you want to drag your entire unit out of bed and onto the practice field so you can run the plays over and over again until you’re confident that no one—yourself, first and foremost—will get them wrong ever again.
This is how you make things automatic, how you create muscle memory. It’s how bad plays that cost you a game can become routine plays that win you championships and make you clutch. And the more of these you bake into your unconscious through repetition in practice and mini-moments in your mind, the more clutch you will get—even if it just feels like another day at the office for you.
Nothing is more clutch or applies more pressure to an opponent than executing at the highest level, on the biggest stage, and making it look like you’re going for a walk in the park on Sunday afternoon.
APPLICATION
The conversation about being clutch centers around sports most of the time, but nothing about being clutch is exclusive to sports. Doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, is both a skill and an instinct we should all want to cultivate in our work, in our relationships, in our roles as parents and partners and friends.
The feedback loop is the same. First, you sit with the moments when you’ve failed or let people down, you let yourself feel the failure until you’re sick to your stomach, you play the situation in your head over and over again until you figure out how and why you screwed up. Then, most importantly, you get back to work or back into your relationships, and you take every opportunity that comes your way to practice new, better ways of doing the thing you should have done the first time, when you screwed up.
Imagine you’re a hotel concierge and you blew it with a VIP guest. Maybe now, every time a guest comes up to you at the front desk you get all the way to the bottom of their question, no matter how small or trivial, and you over-deliver with your response. Maybe this approach doesn’t produce a bunch of huge tips, but the next time a huge VIP checks in and has a request, you will be so familiar with your process for servicing these requests that it’ll feel like you’re on autopilot but it will look like you’re as clutch as they come. And that kind of person doesn’t just get tips, that kind of person gets promoted.
It’s no different as a parent. You miss a game or a recital. You don’t take some interpersonal drama seriously enough. You make a joke when you should have held space. You have to sit with those missteps. You have to figure out where you went wrong. Then every chance you get, you show up for your kids, you ask questions, you hold space, you take their concerns seriously. And when something actually big finally does happen, you’ll be there ready to rock like it was never a question—because it wasn’t.
This loop maps directly to the way we talk about behavioral change in this newsletter. It begins with self-awareness. It continues with the humility to acknowledge that what you were doing before isn’t working. Then it’s having the resilience to commit to the hard work of change while displaying the perseverance you need to move beyond your comfort zone because that’s where the real learning and growth occurs. And ultimately it’s showing the courage to anchor yourself in your values and priorities, while you apply those learnings to a new set of behaviors meant to change the outcome next time around.
It’s all a process. Don’t allow yourself to fall for the idea that being clutch is a thing that magically happens or that only a special group of gifted people is capable of. Anyone can be clutch in any area of their life as long as they are humble and self-aware enough to wrestle with their failures, learn from them, and then apply those lessons to how they show up in every relevant aspect of their life. When doing the right thing, the right way, all the time becomes muscle memory, you free up all the bandwidth you need to handle the unexpected by doing the unbelievable.
That is how 28-3 becomes 34-28.
That is how down 3-0 in the 2004 ALCS becomes a stolen base and a World Series title.
That is how a kid who got cut from his JV basketball team becomes the legend who levitates over Craig Ehlo, snatches Bryon Russell’s ankles, knows when to pass to Steve Kerr for the game winner, and earns six NBA titles for his effort.
That is how to be clutch.
