Steph Curry: Bad misses vs. Good misses | YouTube Short

June 21, 2022

Steph Curry doesn’t seem to miss.

When he does, he hopes that it’s missing long or short instead of left or right.

• If you miss long or short: It’s an easier fix. Your touch is a bit off. Use your legs a little more or less.
• If you miss left or right: Your mechanics are off. This is a little harder to diagnose. There are more factors to account for that could be causing you to miss left or right.

What’s the life lesson here?

If you’re learning a new skill, pay attention to how you mess up. Talk to an expert to learn if there are better types of mistakes than others.

• In writing, having a bunch of typos is easier to fix than writing about a bad premise in the first place
• In weightlifting, having too much weight on the bar than you can actually handle is easier to fix (just remove some weight) than bad form repeated over years
• In design, a small visual bug at the end of the process is easier to fix than finding out that you’ve been designing for the wrong type of user from very early in the process

If it’s easier for a robot to fix (typos, weight programming, debugging), then it’s a good mistake to make.

That said, Steph Curry’s value is probably that he still knows exactly what’s wrong and how to adjust when he’s missing left or right.