What’s A Wemby?

“Don’t go where you want. Go where you are wanted.”

Deep Squats (Thoughts)

I saw a great post on Instagram from Brad Stulberg. No doubt his new book will be showing up in the Timfluencing section soon. But, since this whole thing is Timfluencing, I thought I’d share this idea from him.
Victor Wembanyama was drawing (as in art) in NYC’s Gramercy Park prior to Game 3 of the NBA Finals. People called him distracted. He then played a historic game.

It’s good to have side quests. Build an identity house with more than one room. Wembanyama played poorly in the first two games of The Finals. Rather than stew over it and obsess about what went wrong, he spent time decompressing by pursuing a hobby.

Researchers call this self-complexity. When we have multiple sources of identity in life, we become less fragile to failure and more resilient. It’s helpful to think of identity like a house: If you live in a house that only has one room and it floods, you have to move out of the house. But, if you live in a house with multiple rooms, you can seek refuge in the others while you repair the damage.

The goal is to build an identity house with more than a single room, because you never know when one is going to flood and you’ll need to find strength and stability in the others. When you care deeply about something, you begin to identify with it.

I am an athlete. I am a coach. I am an artist. I am a musician. I am an entrepreneur.

It’s a beautiful thing to identify with your craft, but it’s dangerous when it becomes the entirety of who you are.

If the only activity Wemby had in his identity house was basketball, he’d have been stuck in a hotel room nervously obsessing. Instead, he processed his sub-par performance, leaned into another part of himself, and ultimately reset.

Example rooms in an identity house include: artist, athlete, reader, neighbor, leader, parent, musician, husband, wife, chef, physician, nurse, teacher, writer. The rooms need not be the same size, and you don’t need to spend the same amount of time in each. (You won’t.) The goal is not balance. The goal is making sure you have more than one source of meaning in your life.

The greats are all in. You have to be. There’s a certain temperament that is super driven, even obsessive. But, you can’t be all in, all the time. You need other parts of yourself you can go to decompress. Elite performance depends on it.

See you in class.

Tim