6.6 Reggie Miller: Keep Shooting

“You have to be willing to fail, because you're not going to make every shot.” - Reggie Miller

Do you know that messing up and even failing is a part of the process?

I was coaching a basketball team, and we were scrimmaging against a much older team, so I expected us to mess up a lot and lose.

What I wanted was for us to compete with courage and learn from our mistakes.

I told them, “You are supposed to lose; it’s part of it. So don’t go into this worried about messing up. Not only should you mess up, you should want to be in position to mess up so you can learn from it.”

Reggie Miller was one of the most clutch shooters in NBA history. He made a lot of tough shots against Michael Jordan and others. He once said, “You have to be willing to fail, because you're not going to make every shot."

That was the message I had for my team. If you want to be great, you have to be willing to fail because no one is perfect.

At the end, some of them got better, and some of them didn’t because they were too afraid to mess up. The hard part about messing up for me as an athletes was always worrying about what other people were going to think or say, but you can’t let anything keep you from doing what you need to do to become who you want to become.

Don’t be so afraid of failing that you don’t try.

Question of the Day: How do you put yourself out there when you are afraid of failing, and how do you bounce back from failure?