Steve Kerr says Roger Federer taught his Warriors team the secret to sustained success wasn’t outworking everyone, it was building a life around your craft you never want to escape from “I’ll tell you a great story about Roger Federer. We were playing in China with the Warriors in 2017. Roger was in Shanghai for the Masters tournament, so we invited him to come speak to the team.” “Draymond Green asked him, ‘How do you sustain success? How have you managed to win majors 20 years after you first won one?’ Everyone was expecting him to say, ‘I work harder than everybody,’ the will, all the clichés.” “Roger Federer says, ‘I get up every morning and I make breakfast for my kids. Then I take them to school and drop them off. Then I go practice tennis for about two hours, and I’ve figured out a really good routine where I don’t destroy my body, but I can get all the work in I need.” “‘Then I go have lunch with my wife. In the evening, we cook dinner together. The kids are all home from school. We ask them about school. There’s so much joy in the house. We put them to bed, and then I put my head on the pillow and go, “Man, that was just a great day.” And I’ve been doing that for 20 years.’” “And it was like, yes. That’s it. That’s the formula. That’s what leads to sustained success. He loves tennis. He loves his family. He loves life. It’s not outworking everybody and banging your head against the wall, ‘I’m going to be better than everybody.’ It’s allowing your natural talent to shine through with a work ethic, with a great family life, with perspective, with peace, with mindfulness.” “It’s perspective. It’s joy. It’s passion. It’s mindfulness. It’s an awareness that we are truly lucky. To get the most out of ourselves, it’s our daily rituals and experiences and love and joy.”

Joe Mazzulla refuses to call himself a championship head coach, because he doesn’t want his identity to be attached to outcomes “I’m not a championship head coach. I’m just a guy that won a championship with a bunch of other people. It comes back to the identity piece. You start walking around saying… Oh, I’m a championship head coach.’ There’s coaches who are better than I am who may have never even gotten to the playoffs. You can’t start looking at success because of that.” “In your wording is the most important thing. I’m just a guy that won a championship with a group of people. We did it together. My identity cannot be wrapped up in that…Or else, you’re just a failure for the rest of your life because you may only get one.” “If you coach for 20 and you go one out of 20… Did you have one successful year and 19 unsuccessful ones? What does that look like? The first test is being very specific about the story you tell yourself and the words that you use.” “Knowing that, I didn’t do anything. There’s a group of us that did this. And then it’s over. When you are fortunate enough to win… It tests your willpower. How are we going after more? After the first one, you’re kind of like in purgatory.” “You now have a sense of what it’s like… But you might not get back. It may take one year. It may take 10. You just don’t know.” “It tests… Are you in it for the right reasons? Because it may never come back around. But you still got to show up every day.”