A long time ago, I was approached by a Little League coach. “Hey John, would you like to be my assistant coach this season?” He asked me. I replied, “I do not know anything about baseball.” He smiled cheerily and said, “Oh, I know that!”
I was confused about it for a while, but it had more to do with getting my son as a free draft pick than any actual ability on my part.
This was how I started going down a deep rabbit hole for several years. I now know far more about baseball than I thought could even exist. So why am I writing about baseball? Because there are some interesting things to learn about software development from baseball, including how teams function and, more importantly, how to learn new skills.
Today, we are going to talk about hard practice.
The first thing I remember after signing up for baseball coaching is sitting through the required “new coach” meetings. Little League, like so many youth sports organizations, gives you a tremendous foundation in how to work with young people and also how to not get sued. The next thing I did was go and find something on Amazon to throw some money at. Yes, that is correct — I bought some books on how to run baseball drills, including this one (disclaimer: cheerfully linked to Amazon even though you won’t buy it).
I have a lot more to say about youth sports at some point in the future, but I have about one more year of being silent about it because my son could still technically play baseball for a few more years at a college level. Yes, I have unkind things to say about the whole experience.
The one thing I personally learned from the experience is that you can learn how to develop new skills and habits by coaching youth sports. You get a great opportunity to see young and impressionable athletes applying themselves to become better players and achieve success or, in some cases, mastery of various skills needed to play the game.
Watch a college baseball tryout near you if you want to see some of this in action. You will observe that several assistant coaches will be near home plate conducting simultaneous drills in the infield, hitting balls to two different players simultaneously and having them throw across the field. Your first thought might be that this is dangerous—I was admittedly surprised nobody was getting clocked in the head by a baseball. This is done deliberately to help build situational awareness. While very few baseball games are played with multiple balls, you have multiple base runners, and being situationally aware is super important to the game’s success. I learned that around “13u”, for players thirteen and under, players realize that just because you can make a throw to attempt an out, sometimes it is better to hold onto the ball. I have seen kids many times airmail a ball over the head of a baseman, creating an opportunity for chaos and the other team to score.
So, how do we help players achieve these kinds of realizations? It is a mix of game time and hard practice.
Hard practice is practicing something at the edge of your competence, pushing yourself as hard as possible. If you are just half-assing your practice, you are not learning anything. I do not have any additional affiliate links to share for books you will not buy. Still, it was definitely discussed in several of them and clearly observable as I attended more and more tryouts and camps for my son.
I think that hard practice is also important for software development. I always try to determine the best tools to help teams develop their skills. Many companies and industries hold “hackathons” that are an opportunity for hard practice. The problem with hackathons is they generally run at unfortunate times for parents. Some are held over short bursts of time, including all-nighters and weekends. A few companies offer hackathons internally. Some product managers use hackathons to lobby engineers to make features that did not make it through the greenlight committee. Some engineers use hackathons to pretend that product management does not exist and demonstrate that they can also design features.
I like to work on some of my own projects on the side. I am trying to figure out if I think this is an important part of my professional success. I am also trying to figure out if doing a side project is a structural part of career growth in general. It is certainly an opportunity for hard practice, and hard practice is good for you. I do know of at least two instances in the past two years where some of my work projects have benefited from things I learned while wandering around in the side-project desert.
When I am helping people grow through mentorship or direct job responsibility, I ask them if they are working on a side project. While it is hard to maintain a solid work-life balance, having a small project will help you accelerate your professional learning. If that is important to you, you have to make your own decisions on whether or not it is worth an hour or more each week to invest your own time in your own success. I think this goes without saying; it is important to let people make their own decisions about the pace of their professional development.
Thank you, as always, for reading along. Writing this blog is hard practice for me, and I appreciate all of the responses, likes, comments, and shares. I would appreciate the Roosevelts if you ever bought any of the stuff I link to Amazon, but even not making any money there has its own level of reward. I am not a shameless sellout if I continue to suck at affiliate marketing. If suddenly it starts to rain cheddar, then hey, I got paid. That is some win-win right there. Alexa, insert a smarmy picture of a product manager winking and doing double-finger-guns.
See you next week.
