There’s a saying about doing your job and letting go of the results. It’s grounded in deep truth. I was always more interested in the doing, in the craft of playing, than I ever was in rings on my fingers. At the height of my game, what I found was the joy of my life.

Commitment means a willingness to put up with adversity, uncertainty, even failure.

The rules, even more than telling me what I couldn’t do, told me what I could do. The more I understood them, the more I was able to use the rules to my advantage.

He is the greatest winner in basketball history—eleven NBA championships in thirteen years. Some players can amass individual statistics. Only one has had the strength and focus to keep his team a champion for over a decade.

I must say a word about an obvious tension that exists between reading and doing. To state a rule, to elaborate a lesson, is one thing, but at the end some heavy lifting must be done, and those who want to bring Celtic Pride into their lives, their businesses, must make sure to do it. No one can ease the way for you.

As a player and a coach, I didn’t look at statistics the way sportswriters and fans did. I wasn’t interested in who scored most, got the most rebounds or assists. I was after clues that would let me see patterns, what it was that enabled the Knicks to succeed against us. The stats, this time, revealed something startling about the Knicks’ defense.

In my life, I have found that integrity is its own reward. What you give you get back over and over again.

I learned from him then, for the first time, that he had attended every one of my high school JV and varsity games, even when I was the last man on the bench and didn’t get a minutes’s worth of playing time. He told me he had sat up in the back behind our bench where I’d be sure not to see him. I asked him why he did that and he told me he wanted

my innovations came from first asking “Why?” and then thinking “Why not?”