Young Phil Jackson is a stone cold fox and this book definitely left me wanting more. It’s extremely general with not enough juicy details about his fleeting bachelor days in a Chelsea loft, psychedelic journeys, grasps for meaning, or game-level anecdotes. He does mention enjoying sex a few times but that’s *not* the level of interior detail I’m looking for from this championship-winning minx. Maybe Eleven Rings is more personal?

I really loved this book which was especially fascinating to read while watching The Last Dance. I have found myself having a greater appreciation for basketball and how the focus, strategic thinking, conditioning, etc translates to the business world and other off court spaces. I took notes in the form of questions to myself...the sign of a great read...that it gets you thinking beyond the pages of the book and certainly beyond the final sentence. I must say that I found the interwoven zen Buddhist concepts especially thought provoking.

Not sure why I read this book - it was on the shelf at my parents and I grabbed it a while ago. I’m not a huge basketball fan but it was interesting to see how Jackson could make some aspects of a basketball team seem so personal but that seemed to contrast with how spoke with a bit of distance about Michael Jordan’s basketball abilities and fame. Though it wasn’t always seamless I enjoyed how he intermingled his life views, Buddhist ideals and coaching philosophy with his descriptions of the wins and loses of his team.

Phil Jackson brought a Zen attitude and Native American philosophies to the Chicago Bulls, and magic ensued. Oddly, it wasn’t the basketball stories that had me engrossed in this book. It’s a truly outstanding book on leadership. Jackson has a servant-leadership style that engenders teamwork (we, not me) and motivates players to be their best within the team. That he has done this in competitive athletics is astounding. His results as a Coach speak for themselves.

If you’re a leader of any size group of people or simply want to learn more about living in the moment, I highly recommend this book.

A very entertaining memoir from basketball coach Phil Jackson, who was the head coach of the legendary Chicago Bulls during the 1990s. The team won the NBA world championship three years straight, from 91-93. Michael Jordan was their star player and arguably the most famous athlete in the world at that time.

What's truly engaging about this memoir are Jackson's reflections on how his spirituality helped him in his coaching and leadership and how it helped the players on his team as well. Jackson drew from a wide range of inspiration, from the worldview of the Lakota Indians to Taoism to Zen Buddhism.

Highly recommend reading for anyone interested in incorporating spirituality into their leadership style.

Sacred Hoops is a great book about spirituality, teamwork, and competitiveness. It's written by Phill Jackson, an NBA coaching legend who was a surprisingly good author. My parents got me this book for Christmas my sophomore year because I had been getting more into basketball. I read most of it, but I never got around to finishing it until the beginning of this year. I had forgotten most of it, so I decided to just start from the beginning. I liked this book, and I loved Phill Jackson's approach to life and sports. I liked his infusion of zen and meditation into sports and it's something that I've never thought of before. A golden line from this book is "The Lakotas’ concept of teamwork was deeply rooted in their view of the universe. A warrior didn’t try to stand out from his fellow band members; he strove to act bravely and honorably, to help the group in whatever way he could to accomplish its mission." I love this line because I am a lacrosse player, which was a sport that was invented by Native Americans and played by the Lakota tribe. I really like the idea of not standing out on a team and only doing what you need to help the team. This is great advice that I bring to any team that I'm a part of.

This philosophical treatise poses as a book about basketball. I think that's its biggest strength. While the basketball fanatic will get more joy from it, it serves as a guide to life. "You can't step in the same river twice." Basketball is transient, just as life is, and drawing from Phil's philosophy will help one see failure or losing simply as a "different lens through which to view oneself more clearly."

You don’t need to be a fan of the NBA, the Chicago Bulls, or sports to benefit from this book. In “Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior,” author Phil Jacksons uses his experiences leading the Bulls to six national championships as a way to share his philosophy of life. He writes, “In basketball—as in life—true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment, not just when things are going your way.”

Jackson writes about his personal journey to maturity through introspective Zen thinking. He began meditating while in his 20’s and carried it through his career as an NBA player and then a coach. He admits to his own vulnerabilities and imperfections while showing how continually reminding himself of his philosophical grounding motivated him to improve. But once he became a coach, he needed to extend his philosophy to others. And, in the case of professional athletes, the challenge of convincing others of his way of thinking proved more challenging. Jackson set an example for others throughout this career.

Many fans dismiss some of Jackson’s accomplishments on the court, given that he had a superstar like Michael Jordon to coach and dominate on the court. Yet, the challenges of managing the ego of Jordan and other players like Scotty Pippin and Dennis Rodman serves as an excellent example of how his approach to the game and life kept the team from self-destructing.

Here are five of the lessons Jackson shares that can be applied to our individual lives, in business as well as on the basketball court:

1) “I’ve learned that the most effective way to forge a winning team is to call on the players’ need to connect with something larger than themselves. Even for those who don’t consider themselves “spiritual” in a conventional sense, creating a successful team—whether it’s an NBA champion or a record-setting sales force—is essentially a spiritual act. It requires the individuals involved to surrender their self-interest for the greater good so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

2) “The trick is to experience each moment with a clear mind and open heart. When you do that, the game—and life—will take care of itself.

3) “Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the “me” for the “we.”

4) “What pollutes the mind in the Buddhist view is our desire to get life to conform to our peculiar notion of how things should be, as opposed to how they really are. In the course of everyday life, we spend the majority of our time immersed in self-centered thoughts. The thoughts themselves are not the problem; it’s our desperate clinging to them and our resistance to what’s actually happening that causes us so much anguish.

5) “Our whole social structure is built around rewarding winners, at the perilous expense of forsaking community and compassion. The conditioning starts early, especially among boys, and never stops. “There is no room for second place,” the late coach Vince Lombardi once said. “It is and always has been an American zeal to be first in anything we do, and to win and to win and to win.” How can anyone, from sports figures to entrepreneurs, possibly maintain their self-esteem when this attitude dominates our cultural mindset? Eventually, everybody loses, ages, changes. And small triumphs—a great play, a moment of true sportsmanship—count, even though you may not win the game.

I found this to be a fun book to read that left me with a lot to think about.

Book 28 of my #2018readingchallenge is Phil Jackson's Sacred Hoops.

Brad: "Really. I read the galleys when it arrived at Huckabees, and you know what? Seriously, that book's got some good questions. You should read it."

Albert: "Isn't it sports questions in that book? [ Laughs ]"

Brad: "No, wise ass. Phil Jackson's a smart guy."

So this is basically a book about how to lead and live through zen principles, reduce your anger and work as a team, and how mindfulness and visualization can help you. And it is VERY much about Michael Jordan, obvies because he was the greatest and I am never not going to be in awe of him because I grew up watching him change the world of basketball. Long story short though, if you're not into sports or metaphors explained through sports (I am mildly obsessed with top tier superhero level athletes and their drive, hence my Olympics adoration), you'll find this book crazy boring.

Some tidbits I'm taking with me: patience, stop trying to control the uncontrollable, build trust with others and believe in them to follow through, and this: "the farmer who's so eager to help his crops grow that he slips out at night and tugs on the shoots inevitably ends up going hungry."

Even though Jackson strives to make Jordan seem human, btw, I'll never believe he wasn't superhuman.

Sacred Hoops is a fascinating account of Phil Jackson's career as a basketball player and a coach with a special focus on the evolution of his thinking that led to exceptional success with the Chicago Bulls and later with the Los Angeles Lakers. The genre of the book is sports genre because it's mostly about basketball. The book Sacred Hoops is set around the late 1900s following the return of Michael Jordan to the Chicago Bulls. Michael Jordan had retired during the 1993–94 NBA season to pursue a path in baseball, but returned in March 1995 and led the Bulls to three straight championships. Although the author, Phil Jackson, outlines his early life and childhood as part of his road to becoming a professional coach, the main events discussed in the book come later in his life around his 30s. All of this can be achieved by mastering the rituals of Buddhism, according to Phil Jackson. Phil Jackson also describes the success that Michael Jordan has achieved and his motivation for it. Jordan’s family was economically unstable, which only fueled Michael Jordan on his path to becoming a professional basketball player. He sought to provide for his family and care for them in a way that would bring his family together and be financially stable, and so he did. Not only was Michael Jordan a professional basketball player, but he was also a businessman. Michael Jordan had endorsement deals with some of the biggest brands in the world including Nike, Gatorade, Hanes, Upper Deck, 2K Sports, and Five Star Fragrances. The book also talks about Jordan's biggest moments in his career like when he won multiple NBA championships, The tough 1990-1991 playoff game agents their rivals the bad boys when they were on the Detroit Pistons. Unfortunately, all good things have to come to an end so the Bulls dynasty was officially over they achieved 4 championships as a team and Michel Jordan retired due to him not having joy with the game of basketball anymore and how Phill wasn’t badly affected by his departure. I would recommend this book to athletics because it shows the struggles your coach can have and how important your role is as a player. It also shows the mindset that players have during games and how star player Michel Jordan handled the difficult tasks during his career and the life lessons you can learn through the reading.

This is a much different book about coaching than most. Phil Jackson took a much different path than most coaches, but became one of the most successful coaches anywhere. I found the the latter parts that were mostly just about basketball and the glory years to be the least interesting part of the ook.

As a kid, I was obsessed with Jordan and The Bulls, but as a kid you don’t appreciate the impact of the coach.

I work in the coaching realm and take the skill of coaching as seriously as the skills I’m teaching.

I think you have to learn how to be a good coach.

This book does a masterful job of showing what coaching looks like past the point of thinking that you could help others improve.

This book does a really good job of showing people how to elevate their coaching skills past the initial decision.

Highly recommend to anyone who is in leadership.