This week’s email was sparked by a conversation I had with Dave where he spoke about “bore-out” and we discussed how we can keep interest and motivation high for players through the grind of a season. I’ve found it particularly relevant at the moment in Melbourne where training nights have been dark, cold, and rainy!

Table of Contents

• Joy and the Serious Business of Getting Better

  • Quote of the Week

  • An Even Deeper Dive

Joy and the Serious Business of Getting Better

A fundamental principle in learning is that to get better at something, you have to do it. And if you want to get really good, you have to do it a lot. But let’s be honest—there’s a level of banality that comes with repetition. Motivation can easily wane when you know you’re doing the same thing again… and again… and again.

I was talking to Dave about this the other day, and he called it “bore-out,” like burnout, but caused by boredom.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger described boredom as the awareness of time passing. And at the performance and high-performance level, where we ask players to show up day in and day out, often working on the same specific areas from their development plans, it’s not hard to see how “bore-out” can creep in.

There’s that familiar cliché: Amateurs wait until they feel like it. Professionals do it regardless of motivation. It’s repeated so often because it carries truth. But clichés like that put the entire onus on the athlete—to grind through, to persist despite boredom. That got me thinking…

What if one of our key responsibilities as coaches is to design environments that prevent bore-out in the first place?

Because once bore-out kicks in, it doesn’t matter how well-crafted your training plan is, engagement drops, and so does performance.

So how do we prevent bore-out?

What if the answer is… joy?

At first glance, “joy” might seem too fluffy or light-hearted for the serious business of performance. But take a closer look, and it might be exactly what’s needed.

In Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta describes two types of joy:

“One characterised by light-heartedness, and one marked by fierce engagement and deep concentration.”

The mistake we often make is assuming joy only lives in the first kind. But when you consider fierce engagement and deep concentration as a form of joy, it becomes something essential—something that fuels motivation over the long haul.

Albert Einstein understood this. In a letter to his son Hans Albert, he wrote:

“Play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most—when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice the time passing.”

One of the greatest minds of the past century advised his son not to stick strictly to the prescribed work, but to follow what brought him joy. Because when joy is present, fierce engagement follows. That’s what sustains motivation over time. It raises a tough question for us as coaches…

If we ignore what players enjoy, are we actually stifling learning and increasing the risk of bore-out?

If there’s one athlete who seems to embody these two forms of joy in action, it’s Steph Curry. Arguably the greatest shooter basketball has ever seen, Curry has built his success on thousands of hours of training—anchored in joy.

His coach, Steve Kerr, put it this way:

How does Curry sustain this joy?

His long-time trainer, Brandon Payne, says their training sessions started with one guiding principle:

“There is no boring in our workouts.”

They’ve built in a sense of play and variation, not for the sake of novelty, but to help Curry stay, in his own words, “locked in and focused.”

What does this mean for us?

Over a season, player motivation will ebb and flow. The skill of the coach is to notice what sparks joy in each athlete, not just light-hearted fun, but that deeper joy of fierce engagement. Try different things. Pay attention to what players enjoy. Note what helps them lock in and lose track of time.

Then, when bore-out threatens to creep in, you’ve got a reference point. You’ve got what keeps them coming back. And your players have joy.

Here is Steph Curry’s pre-match routine. What I love is it has both kinds of joy - you see Curry’s light-heartedness and deep engagement and concentration throughout. It’s amazing to watch all the different shots he takes. They aren’t all shots out of the standard shooting textbook, but are clearly ones he has discovered throughout playing that work for him,

Note: It is 22mins long, so if you are short on time, skip through the different sections to get a look.

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