The Biggest Mistake I Ever Made T here was a time in my life when I played quite a bit of basketball. I was leading engineering at a start-up in Scottsdale, AZ, my wife was doing her residency, and we didn’t have kids yet. Other than work, I had plenty of time and I filled it with basketball. I would typically play three to four mornings, in one or two leagues in the evenings, and do shooting drills for fun on the weekends. I started a team in one of those leagues and recruited a few players I knew to play. None of us were unusually skilled, just a few working professionals who happened to like basketball and got along amazingly well. As is typical with new teams, we weren’t very good in the beginning. We were all decent players in our own right, but we didn’t gel as a team yet and it showed in the early games. By the end of the first season there were glimpses of what we could be, though we didn’t make the playoffs. By the end of the second season, when we lost in the championshi...