Over ten years ago, I was an intern at the University of Iowa. That’s where I first met Landon Evans, one of the smartest practitioners I’ve ever known. At the time, I saw Landon as someone who mastered complexity by integrating dozens of physiological systems and technologies. It took me another decade to realize his true expertise was actually in his ability to ruthlessly discard noise.
I remember a conversation we had years later, just as I started in the NBA. I was completely overwhelmed by the volume of data at my fingertips. On the phone one day, Landon joked about a tiny detail I was stressing about that "wasn't going to turn the Titanic left." It became the ultimate filter for my career.
So I think about this filter a lot. Last May, while speaking at the NBA Health and Performance Meetings, I argued for fewer dashboards and fewer tools, while just outside the doors a vendor show was promising that the future of player care required more tech, more inputs, and more analysis.
"Practitioners often act like a captain who ignores the rudder to focus on the direction of the wind across the deck. We obsess over obviously inconsequential metrics while our ship is steaming toward an iceberg. We wonder if the athlete should train at 75% or 80% of their 1RM for 3x6, while the athlete is accumulating training load in practice that is wrecking their connective tissue."
The future belongs to those who stop the theater and do less, but better. This philosophy—shifting focus from the "wind" to the "rudder"—is the core of the following five books that have had a tremendous impact on me. Each offers an approach for improving focus and finding the levers that actually move the ship. They've taught me, like Landon, that the highest form of sophistication and expertise is simplicity.
1. Subordinate Everything That's Not the Goal — Eliyahu Goldratt
Context Book: The Goal
In The Goal, Eli Goldratt tells the story of a factory manager, Alex Rogo, who’s been given 90 days to save his underperforming plant. Orders are late, machines are constantly breaking down, and teams are working overtime. At first, Alex does what most of us would do: he tries to optimize everything. He pushes for higher efficiencies at every station, buys more equipment, and analyzes more data. But the more he improves parts of the system, the more frustrated he becomes. The plant is still stuck. His marriage even hits a breaking point.
The breakthrough comes not from speed or scale but from focus. Alex realizes that the entire system is constrained by a small number of machines or processes that are limiting total output. No matter how efficient the rest of the plant is, if these machines or processes are slow, the rest of the system is dysfunctional. He called these bottlenecks.
Once Alex identifies the bottleneck, everything changes. The team stops trying to maximize each individual part and starts subordinating the whole system to the bottleneck. They schedule around it, protect it, and design workflows to serve it. That’s when throughput improves. Not improvement from more, but aligning around what matters.
Performance Application: If you have an all-pro running back who consistently deals with hamstring pathology, their elite speed and vision can't be leveraged. That player will not be their best because of the hamstring bottleneck. Until that becomes the focus of your program and you restore that capacity, the rest is irrelevant. That becomes the goal, and everything else needs to subordinate to it.
2. Less But Better — Greg McKeown
Context Book: Essentialism
In Essentialism, Greg McKeown makes a simple but uncomfortable point: most of what we say yes to is not worth it. He came to this perspective with a painful origin story. His wife had just given birth and instead of staying to be fully present, he left to attend a critical client meeting. While he thought this sacrifice to be noble and proof of commitment to his work, he realized he'd made a choice he couldn't undo. That pride turned to regret. This moment became the catalyst for his philosophy: "if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will."
As Greg started to modify his life to put his priorities first, he discovered that the ability to say no, even to good things, allows you to say yes to the right things. This is the disciplined pursuit of less.
The disciplined pursuit of less is not about doing fewer things out of minimalism or laziness, but about eliminating noise so that energy can be concentrated on the few inputs that truly shift outcomes. Saying yes to everything burns out the system.
Performance Application: In Sport Science, practitioners are inundated with dozens of metrics that are often a distraction from the few metrics that we can leverage to improve performance or lower injury risk. The work is choosing less. The disciplined pursuit of fewer metrics and fewer projects allows the important, titanic-turning insights to rise to the top.
3. Narrow the Focus — Frank Slootman
Context Book: Amp It Up
In Amp It Up, Frank Slootman uses decades of experience leading multi-billion dollar companies to recommend ideas against the grain. He did just this on Day 1 at Snowflake, where he told the entire company to stop what they were doing. He told everyone they were spread too thin with dozens of product directions and customer promises. The wheels were spinning but the car wasn't going anywhere. He told them to kill everything and they'd go all in on cloud data warehousing. This decision unlocked Snowflake's growth, leading to a $68 billion valuation IPO.
This lesson isn't about saying no. It's about deciding what you're willing to bet on and aligning people and systems around that bet.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of what I’d call “data hoarding.” We collect, tag, and monitor everything, hoping the insights will sort themselves out. But they rarely do. The unintended consequence is fragmentation and disconnected insights that don't influence planning, prescription, or large scale decision-making. Worse, we burden the athlete without a ROI that is meaningful to them.
Performance Application: In programming for athletic development, this means being more aggressive in exercise selection. We use our concurrent training model to train the bottlenecks as they pertain to that athlete and their constraints. Fewer exercises leads to greater focus. We don't need 20 exercises a week; we narrow the focus to 8-10 that push the qualities that matter most.
4. One Big Thing — Jim Collins
Context Book: Good to Great
In Good to Great, Jim Collins opens his chapter on discipline with an old parable called the Hedgehog Concept: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." The fox is clever, fast-moving, and reactive, always chasing a new angle. The hedgehog is slower, less exciting, but consistent, simplifying a complex world into a single organizing idea that unifies and guides everything. Hedgehogs see what's essential, and ignore the rest.
Collins believes that purpose sits at the intersection of three circles: what you’re deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at, and what drives your engine.
Performance Application: For me, the Hedgehog Concept looks like this: I’m deeply passionate about athlete development. I’m at my best when I’m simplifying complexity. I provide value by turning insight and anecdotes into action. That clarity shapes how I evaluate every request: Does this new tech strengthen our feedback loop? Does this report shape how we train? It gives you permission to ignore things that might be interesting but aren't essential.
5. You Won't Get to It All So Choose Wisely — Oliver Burkeman
Context Book: Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman opens Four Thousand Weeks by confronting you with the math: the average human lifespan is around 4,000 weeks. His case is about acceptance and prioritization. You will never get to everything. You will always disappoint someone. The question is: Which things are worth doing?
Burkeman tells a story about Warren Buffett, who told his pilot to make a list of his top 25 goals, then circle the top five. The other 20? Not backup priorities, but things to actively avoid at all costs, precisely because they’re seductive enough to pull you away from what matters most.
There’s an endless supply of “good” things to do—new metrics, extra reports, experiments. But most of them are distractions dressed as opportunities. Productivity can become a form of avoidance—a way to stay busy without confronting the hard choices about what we’ll never get to.
Performance Application: We get a finite number of seasons, games, and opportunities with each athlete. If you don’t define what matters, someone else will. I protect time for deep thought. I resist requests that pull me off course from my Hedgehog. I remind myself that every “yes” has an invisible “no” attached to it.
Together, these five books form the backbone of how I work and what I focus on:
- The Goal: Identify the constraint and build around it.
- Essentialism: Do less, but do it better (vital few vs. trivial many).
- Amp It Up: Focus, raise the standard, move faster.
- Good to Great: Know your one big thing and commit to it.
- Four Thousand Weeks: You won’t get to everything. Choose what matters.
So when you ask yourself, What turns the Titanic left?—it's not just a metaphor. It's a deep question of prioritization. If you try to focus on everything, the ship won't move. As Frank Slootman says: "if you have multiple priorities, you have none."
"I believe the way toward mastery of any endeavor is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge. The more you know, the less you need."
— Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia Founder)