Shot Ready

I leave the house early in the morning while my kids are still asleep. It’s July, so the school parking lot is empty when I drive in, but I know the code to let myself into the gym. This high-school gym is on the short list of courts I can use in the summers without anybody knowing. The key to these summer workouts, as in most things in life, is getting started before everyone else’s day begins.

Usually, I meet my trainer Brandon Payne here and we focus on the technical details of a particular shot that’s on my mind. We practice not until I get the shot right, but until I can’t get it wrong.

But today, it’s going to be just you and me.

With one switch, four lines of fluorescent ceiling lights flicker to life and hum over the hardwood. I give the ball a hard dribble, because even here in the practice gym, intensity and intention are important. Warming up, I look out at the five empty rows of blue pull-out bleachers that line the court—as a kid in an empty gym like this one, I would picture a crowd filling those seats.

It was just this sort of atmosphere—a small gym, away from crowds and distractions—where I put in most of the hours I spent learning the game as a young player. A few years into my career as a Golden State Warrior, I realized these gyms were still where I was most comfortable. Being here now grounds me in the memory of my earliest lessons. No matter how good I feel like I’ve gotten, I always come back to the basics.

I was never the most gifted athlete—not the highest jumper or the fastest runner or the tallest player on the court. In college, I looked like a middle-schooler trying to age himself up with a mustache so thin it seemed drawn on. Depending on my haircut, I’m still only 6’3″ in a league where the average is 6’6″.

But the work carried me through. I fell in love with the grind. You have to. With the sacrifices that it takes to be great, you have to find joy in the work you do when no one else is around. I hate when coaches or trainers on the internet talk about “the unseen hours” that go into being successful, because it makes that sort of preparation sound mysterious and secretive. But when I talk about “the grind,” I’m simply describing the most important hours in any pursuit, the ones we invest in ourselves. I do this work in the gym in isolation—there’s no defense, no live action—but, even alone, I practice with a shot-ready mentality, training as if the stakes are high and the clock is low, so that I can rehearse finding balance in the midst of great intensity. Even in a high-school gym like this one, I can re-create the feeling of a tied NBA game with seconds to go by conjuring the scenario in my imagination and playing through it. I spend so much time practicing in this feeling so that even under the bright lights and crushing pressure of a real game, I can easily fall into an unconscious flow and execute my training. Of course, I’ll still feel all the nerves, but I don’t let them linger. Instead, they pass right through me. What is left behind is a calm that allows my training to kick in. And then I deliver.

Being shot ready requires practice, training, and repetition, but it rewards that work with an unmatchable feeling of transcendence. My peak experience of joy is when I can lose myself in the poetry and rhythm of a fastpaced game—when there’s no time to think, and there are nine other guys flying around me, but I have the ball in my hands and somehow know exactly where it is going to go. This joy is only possible because of what I do in this gym, the hours I invest in practice and watching film. And then when the moment of truth arrives, I can let go. It is the ultimate freedom.

Playing at the heightened level of the NBA for 82 games puts me in a state of sustained, concentrated intensity for seven or eight months every year. When the season’s over and I come back to a small gym like this, I refresh and return to my basic love of the game. And a key part of that love of the game—my love of play—is the pleasure I get in finding ways to play better.

When I’m putting in hours to boost my performance, I don’t know exactly how and when it’s going to pay off, but I have faith that it will. Even after all these years in the league, I still have these aha moments in the middle of a game: I’ll see an action or match-up or game situation developing and think, Oh yeah, back in July we gamed out this exact scenario. Now I have an advantage. In the crucial seconds that follow, everything slows down for me as my nervous system reacts. I feel a rush of adrenaline, but it’s targeted for precision work instead of just flooding my system. My airways open up, adding more oxygen to my blood, because my lungs are already supercharged for efficiency from the breathwork I’ve practiced. My heart doesn’t pound, it simply quickens its beat to pump more of that oxygenated blood through my body. The adrenaline even goes to my eyes, which dilate to see every possibility. My brain processes visual information faster than the speed of thought and sets my muscles into motion, following a ready, proven plan. And I just fly. I might do a double behind-the-back crossover, feel the crowd’s anticipation, see the guys on my bench rise as I pull up, and then focus for a split second on the rim as I take a high-pressure shot. The confidence I’ve gained from my practice keeps me in control. I stay in the moment—in a state of alert calm, intensity, and joy.

That’s the lesson I want to share with you in this book. You can get better at whatever you want. I’m inviting you to stretch your imagination as you think about what that means to you. What do you want? It might be your life’s equivalent of layups and free-throws, or you can dream big about hitting game-winners from the logo. But I firmly believe that success is not an accident. Success may not always look the way you expect, but it’s attainable for all of us when the rigor of our preparation and the depth of our belief meet the urgency of the moment. That’s what it means to be shot ready.

In the league, I’m known as someone players can come to for advice. Rookies come to me looking for the secret to consistency, rising stars ask me how to adjust from phenom to leader, and veterans talk to me all the time about how to sustain high levels of performance so we can stretch our prime.

After I gave one young player advice on his workouts, seven months later he was beating me in Game 4 of a playoff series. People outside the league don’t understand why I would risk giving my competition an edge, but players get it. We love the game and want to see it evolve. We’re always bouncing back and forth a little bit of wisdom or perspective. Now, I’m not trying to give them everything, but I’ll give them something they can use—better players make for better games. But at the end of the day, we are still competitors. NBA players are good about balancing those two impulses: I can be boys with you and go to dinner the night before the game, but still kill you the next day.

My instinct to share is also the Sonya Curry in me. My mom founded and ran the Montessori elementary school I attended, so while I learned the art of basketball watching my pops play 16 seasons in the NBA, from my mother I learned about learning. I’ve watched as she’s lovingly tailored lessons to help students live out a potential they didn’t even see for themselves. From her, I inherited a desire to use my story to connect with people of different backgrounds and help them solve the puzzle of their own potential. Life is intense—and not just in the NBA. How do we make sure we are prepared, motivated, resilient, and calm in the midst of chaos? How do we tap into the root of joy, meaning, and blissful transcendence that makes it all worthwhile? How can we be shot ready in everything we do?

Wherever you’re at in life, I’m glad you’re in this gym with me now. I’m passing the ball to you.

Let’s go.