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Showing posts from November, 2024

How Coaching 6 Year Old Rec. Soccer Made Me a Better Product Manager

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The summer/fall season of our local recreation soccer league has to a close, and I'm pretty thrilled with how well we did this season. We're not supposed to keep score, but the team of 5 & 6-year-olds I coached was  nearly undefeated, with just one game slipping away from us. I've been doing this for 6 years now, and each season has been a blast, but something was different about this season. 5 & 6-year-olds are still learning the basic rules of the game. They're still adjusting to the shock that, after a "lifetime" of being taught to share their toys, they will be given a ball and told to keep it from others. They're also easily distracted - by planes, migrating geese, dandelions, dogs. They're also, depending on any number of factors, reluctant to play. Yet, somehow, by the time we took the field to play our first game, my team looked like veteran pros. So much so, I grew self-conscious about just how   good  they had become. There was such

Practice, not Production

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Like most kids, my 6-year-old loves to draw. But, unlike what I've seen in other kids, my son likes to draw the same thing repeatedly, trying to improve upon it with each pass. He'll intently watch time-lapsed sketching videos by real artists who have recorded their process - and then he'll try it out for himself. The result is he'll produce drawings that are pretty advanced for his age. But he's still young, so his motor skills are still catching up with what he wants to get down on paper. And that leads to easily getting frustrated - something every parent finds themselves coaching their kids through. It reminded me of something I once heard: When you're talented at something, you can spot the imperfections that other are faster to write-off. While most people will praise the work, you are left feeling it could be better and obsessively pursue perfection. Knowing when to stop and getting to "Good enough" is an important skill otherwise you risk "

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