Philadelphia 76ers: The Sam Hinkie Manifesto

page 3

We talk a great deal about being curious, not critical. About asking the question until you
understand something truly. About not being afraid to ask the obvious question that everyone else seems to know the answer to. And about the willingness to say three simple words, “I don’t know.”

Tesla’s Elon Musk describes his everyday stance as, “You should take the approach that you’re
wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.” The physicist James Clerk Maxwell described it as a “thoroughly conscious ignorance—the prelude to every real advance in science.” Bill James of the Boston Red Sox (and, I might add, a Kansas basketball expert) added a little flair when asked whether the learnings available via examining evidence were exhausted: “we’ve only taken a bucket of knowledge from a sea of ignorance.”

A way to prop up this kind of humility is to keep score. Use a decision journal. Write in your own
words what you think will happen and why before a decision. Refer back to it later. See if you were right, and for the right reasons (think Bill Belichick’s famous 4th down decision against Indianapolis in 2009 which summarizes to: good decision, didn’t work). Reading your own past reasoning in your own words in your own handwriting time after time causes the tides of humility to gather at your feet. I’m often in waist-deep water here.

The other reason to keep track yourself is you’re often the only one to see the most insidious type of errors, the ones the narrative generating parts of our lizard brains storytell their way around—errors of omission. You don’t have a wobbly understanding of just the things you got wrong, but the things you got right but not right enough. Listen to Charlie Munger talk about how he and Berkshire Hathaway should be measured not by their success, but by how much more successful they would have been if they bought more of something: “We should have bought more Coke.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The necessity of innovation

Investing in disruptive innovation doesn’t ferment misunderstanding, it necessitates it. Jeff Bezos
says it this way: “There are a few prerequisites to inventing…You have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to think long-term. You have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”
A yearning for innovation requires real exploration. It requires a persistent search to try (and fail) to
move your understanding forward with a new tool, a new technique, a new insight. Sadly, the first
innovation often isn’t even all that helpful, but may well provide a path to ones that are. This is an idea that Steven Johnson of Where Good Ideas Come From popularized called the “adjacent possible.” Where finding your way through a labyrinth of ignorance requires you to first open a door into a room of understanding, one that by its very existence has new doors to new rooms with deeper insights lurking behind them.
In most endeavors, it’s fine to be content to woodshed until you get something near perfect. You
want that to be you. Grit matters. But it won’t be long until some innovation makes all that effort newly obsolete. You want that to be you, too.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The longest view in the room

It is critical to be cycle aware in a talent-driven league. In a situation like yours at the Sixers, where a variety of circumstances left you near a trough in the cycle (and falling), amplifying this cycle became crucial.
Today’s outcomes for every team are heavily impacted by decisions past (who to draft, sign, trade, hire, etc.).