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"Win First" vs "Chill First"

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Around a month ago, I found an incredibly insightful quote deep in the Reddit comments about a particular basketball player who had recently changed teams. People who try hard to win first and foremost make it uncomfortable when people are trying to just have a good time and do well. And this is aside from whether they're assholes or not, unscrupulous or not. It's about win first vs chill first. At some point, there's always a conflict between the two types. Someone has to chill, someone has to turn up the intensity, or someone has to leave. - Source, minor formatting cleanup and emphasis added Now, I'm not a particularly avid follower of sports. But this was a rather unusually fascinating case. To simplify a very long story, there's a professional basketball team — the Philadelphia 76ers — that on paper have had a lot of really good players the last few years, yet have consistently underperformed expectations. Last year, they traded for a player who is known as being super-crazy-hardcore-intense. That player was Jimmy Butler, who was an unheralded quite low draft pick (the 30th player chosen his year, meaning almost every team passed on him at least once) who worked very, very hard to turn himself into a star. He wasn't one of those players who was really good right when joined the League — he didn't start in pro basketball until he was 22 years old, and wasn't really good until he was 25. His career stats are here; you don't need to know much about basketball to see the trend of going from scoring 2.6 points per game your first year in the league, to 8.6 your second, to 13.1 your third year, to 20.0 your fourth year in the league is (1) someone who was not-at-all "anointed" or had an easy path for himself, and (2) showed really incredible year-over-year improvements. Eventually, Jimmy became a consistent All-Star. Last year, he joined the Philadelphia 76ers. And it didn't go very well. Although much of the story is secondhand and hearsay, apparently Ji

x "Win First" vs "Chill First" — LessWrong Coordination / Cooperation Motivations Ambition Identity Slack World Modeling Practical Rationality Frontpage 103 "Win First" vs "Chill First" by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) 28th Sep 2020 3 min read 20 103 Around a month ago, I found an incredibly insightful quote deep in the Reddit comments about a particular basketball player who had recently changed teams. People who try hard to win first and foremost make it uncomfortable when people are trying to just have a good time and do well. And this is aside from whether they're assholes or not, unscr

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