580. Two Mental Keys to Dominance

Shawn Green's book The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph opens with him in Toronto, put in timeout by his manager, everything stripped away except hitting off a tee. Hitting off that tee over and over he found a meditative state, then realized he could enter it on purpose, then realized he didn't need the tee to repeat it in games. Two principles come out of it: constraints create freedom, and the ability to find refuge in the basics is everything. Every day you are building a new building, and the foundation has to hold whether it's a ten-story day or a one-story day. If you're slumping, strip it down to one drill and one thought and give it a week.