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Leaving It All On The Floor

What Giannis Antetokounmpo can teach musicians, writers and artists about maximising their creativity.

By Jackson FordPublished 3 years ago 8 min read
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Last week, the Milwaukee Bucks won the NBA championship, their first such title for 50 years. It's a bloody good thing that Milwaukee is known for brewing beer, because they went through an awful lot of it that night.

(If you don't watch basketball, stick with me. This gets good.)

The Bucks were playing the Phoenix Suns in a seven game series. Tuesday night was the sixth game, at home in Milwaukee, and to say it was an exciting night would be selling it short. I may only see two or three better basketball games to clinch a title in my entire life.

The skill level on show was that good. That was largely down to the best player on the Bucks, Giannis Antetokounmpo, a 26-year-old from Athens nicknamed the Greek Freak, because of course he is.

Giannis’s story is just unreal. It sounds like a joke. His Nigerian parents emigrated to Greece before he and his four brothers were born, changing their original surname of Adetokunbo to better fit with the Greek writing system. The family were ridiculously poor, selling fake clothes and fake DVDs on the street to make ends meet. Giannis himself spent several years doing just that. Until his parents became fully fledged Greek citizens in 2013, he and his brothers had no papers at all. No citizenship.

Fortunately for Giannis, he was good basketball. Like, really good. Good enough to make his way to the NBA in the States, where he was signed with the 15th pick in the draft by Milwaukee. No one, myself included, thought he’d amount to much. While he was unquestionably skilled, he was also rake-thin, scrawny, with no muscle to speak of. The idea of him competing with the big dogs in the NBA was laughable. He was a curiosity, and after a few years when he would no doubt be traded multiple times between teams, he’d go play in Europe or something and vanish into obscurity.

(Giannis in 2013)

Except: that's not what happened at all. Giannis put on muscle. He got more skilled. He became one of the most devastatingly effective players in the league, twice winning the Most Valuable Player trophy. A couple of years ago, when his contract was up with Milwaukee, it was fully expected that he would sign with a much bigger and more prestigious team, for as much money as humanly possible, because that's what you just do. Nobody wants to play for Milwaukee, not really, because…well, because it’s fucking Milwaukee! No offence to that fine city, but it's not exactly Los Angeles, or New York, or even Miami.

Except: Giannis didn't do that. He decided to sign a five-year extension, with the goal of bringing his Bucks the championship. This in a league with players like the LeBron James and Steph Curry, who even non-basketball fans know about. Do you understand how crazy this was? He had the opportunity to go absolutely anywhere he wanted, and he insisted on staying in freaking Wisconsin.

Two nights ago, that faith paid off. Milwaukee won the title. Giannis was beyond brilliant in the deciding game, with 50 points, 14 rebounds, and five blocks. No other player has ever had those stats in a finals game before. Not ever. There are only seven other players who have ever scored more than 50 points in a Finals game, Michael Jordan among them. That storied group now includes a Greek-Nigerian immigrant with an unpronounceable name who once sold DVDs on the street to make ends meet.

To say that Giannis was exhausted by the end of the game is to flirt with immense understatement. He was gassed. After the final buzzer went, as confetti rained down on the court and the fans went ballistic, he found his way to the bleachers. There, he collapsed onto all fours, breathing hard, then slowly made his way over to a nearby folding chair. He finally, finally sat his 6’11 frame down, and let the emotions wash over him. All he wanted to do was sit, just sit, just be still for a few moments, to rest, to take the pressure off his legs and his arms and his shoulders.

It's a moment you'll find at 1:16 in the video below. It's quite something.

Given the game he had, I don't think it matters whether he won or lost at all. He played what was for all intents and purposes a perfect game, a game where he simply could not have played any better. To use that wonderful sports expression, he left it all out on the floor. It was a game where he repaid all the faith that so many people had in him, and where all his hard work came to fruition. He played his guts out, and he did it when it mattered. As a sports fan, the best moments for me are when you can tell that player is leaving nothing out, when they are truly operating at maximum effort. That's when you get perfection.

I've been thinking about Giannis a lot over the past couple days, because I’ve been wondering what it means to leave it all out on the floor as a non-sportsman. How do you know when you've worked the hardest you possibly can, when you leave it all out on the floor, when you come away with the ironclad certainty that there is absolutely nothing you did not do. That applies to anything, but since I'm a writer, I've been thinking about what it means when I'm writing books.

Because what's the equivalent of Giannis winning the title for Milwaukee, in terms of publishing? Getting onto the New York Times bestseller list? Having a movie made out of your story? Having them make a movie of your life? And how, when your job takes place over months and years, mostly alone, do you perform the equivalent of the perfect basketball game? What does that actually look like? Because as much as I love sports, and athletic competitions, there aren’t many parallels in the world of creativity. I don't have a championship game. I don't even, technically speaking, have anyone I'm competing with. Someone buying, I don't know, the new Jack Reacher book does not mean that they won’t buy mine. This isn't a zero sum game. So what does leaving it all out on the floor mean as a writer? These are the kind of things I ponder at 3 AM, when I'm sitting by the dog’s basket trying to get him to calm the hell down, and reassure him that the squirrel that just landed on the ground five kilometres away does not mean us harm.

I really do want to pull off a Giannis. That's what I aim for. I want you to read one of my books, and think, not only will I not read more than two or three better books in my entire lifetime, I don't see a single thing Jackson could have done to improve this further. I'm not talking about perfection; it's a story, after all, and no story is perfect. But I want everybody, even those who didn't enjoy the story as much as everyone else, to say: there is nothing he could realistically be expected to do to make this better than it is already.

It's an incredibly hard state to reach. Harder, I would argue, than what Giannis and the Bucks did. (Note: not more impressive, or more meaningful, just harder). It's harder because in the case of basketball, or any other sport, there's an objective goal to aim for. Beat as many people as you can by scoring more points than them, until there is no one left. With writing, or any creative field, those objective goals do not exist. After all, I could write 10,000 words a day, which is an output that is frankly jawdropping, and which I've never even approached once. But those 10,000 words a day wouldn't mean that I actually ended up writing something good. It just means that I would write something fast.

I don't have all the answers here. Every book is a long and interesting journey, often without a map, and every single time I finish writing one, I inevitably feel like I've had to make compromises along the way. That's just the nature of the beast. But I really am trying to find out how to leave it all out on the field. When I get to the end of my career, I won't be interested in how many books I sold, or how many movies got made out of my work. I want to know that at least once or twice, I wrote the equivalent of a perfect book. A book that could not realistically be made any better. A book that leaves me motionless on the sidelines, utterly spent, wanting nothing more than to be very still for a very long time.

But make no mistake. I want that MVP trophy. I want that championship. Watch me work.

This article comes directly from my weekly newsletter, Sh*t Just Got Interesting. Want to read stories like it a week before anyone else? Sign up here. And you get a free audiobook too, which is nice.

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About the Creator

Jackson Ford

Author (he/him). I write The Frost Files. Sometimes Rob Boffard. Always unfuckwittable. Major potty mouth. A SH*TLOAD OF CRAZY POWERS out now!

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