The Brooklyn Nets, led by basketball player Kevin Durant were swept by the Boston Celtics in the first round of the recent NBA playoffs.
Despite playing a team sport, Durant was singled out and ridiculed with memes and insults for the team’s playoff exit.
Even NBA legend Charles Barkley took a swipe, pointing out that Durant had been a bus rider thus far in his career.
Barkley of course was insinuating that Durant was a bandwagoner when he joined the Golden State Warriors in 2017 – where he had won two consecutive NBA championships.
The Brooklyn Nets’ latest failure proved that Durant was not a bus driver who could captain the team and challenge for a championship.
Bus rider or bus driver? Does the distinction even matter? And if it does, why?
Bus driver, bus rider
Unlike team sports, a UFC fighter takes all the glory in victory but must hold the L in defeat. After all, your team stays outside the cage and it’s down to you to execute and win the match.
That makes you the bus driver, bus rider, mechanic, and everything all at once.
In my mind, being the bus driver is not more important than making sure you’re going the right way!
Just because you encounter adversity and failures doesn’t necessarily mean you’re headed in the wrong direction.
Similarly, you don’t put the car in reverse at the first sign of trouble on the road, do you?
The Helsinki Bus Station Theory
Everyone starts at the same station but after some time, we go off in our own directions.
That’s the basic premise of the Helsinki Bus Station theory and one which really resonates with me.
My life turned out quite differently from others around me.
While I couldn’t follow the route of becoming a football player, I took another road and still ended up being a professional athlete.
Defining MY own path
Arno Minkkinen, a photographer, and the founder of the Helsinki Bus Station Theory analogized each bus stop representing one year in the life of a photographer.
The photographer picks a certain path and after three years accumulates a body of work. He goes to a gallery hoping to put his work on display.
The curator takes a look and asks if he is familiar with the works of another rival photographer.
Disgusted that he was blindly following someone else’s path, the photographer leaves and hails a cab to take him back to the bus station.
At the station, he hops onto another platform and spends several years going off in another path.
But when he reaches the next art gallery, the same thing happens again.
This story relates to the bane of human existence – our quest for originality.
Whether you’re in the creative industry or not, the need to feel different and define our individuality is present in all of us.
When I decided to pursue fighting as a professional athlete, you can imagine it wasn’t the most popular career choice at the time.
Fortunately for me, I only realized years later that it was on this less-traveled path that I never felt any pressure to be original.
Also, I wasn’t really following anyone’s path because not many people were willing to get on the same road as me!
It allowed me the space and time to come to terms and be secure in who I am and what I wanted to achieve in the sport.
Becoming a better bus driver
Minkkinen asserts that if the photographer had just stayed on his path, he would have reached the breakthrough he was seeking soon enough.
Success doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes, it can take years to truly become proficient at something.
You spend all that time honing your skills, acquiring new abilities, and practicing your craft.
After toiling in the amateur circuit for about 3 years, I finally made my UFC debut in the spring of 2003.
It took me another 2 years and four victories in between to finally get my title shot.
Imagine if I had quit prematurely because things got tough. That would be no Rich “Ace” Franklin and I certainly wouldn’t have become the Middleweight Champion or make it into the UFC Hall of Fame.
I stayed on the path and continued to become a better bus driver.
With each passing fight, I started to move faster, think better, and learned how to execute efficiently in the cage.
True mastery is about consistent improvement.
The grind is about putting in those reps, day after day, week after week, year after year.
Improvement means you consciously focus on getting better at doing the same things until you’ve become an expert.
It isn’t enough to just put in the grind.
You need to stay on the bus and learn how to become a better driver.