Bob KnightThe Power of Negative Thinking: An Unconventional Approach to Achieving Positive Results

Don't buy it unless you love professional basketball AND it's on deep sale.Bob Knight's life experience has been limited, by choice, mostly to the study of professional and college basketball. The game is well understood. The rules are well defined. The best strategies are studied, rather than developed. It's no surprise that he thinks games are lost by mistakes rather than won.Life is not like playing basketball (with some rather obvious exceptions).The rules are not always clear. The playing field isn't always clear. The referees are often absent, or not even trying to appear impartial. But most of all, we are not constantly at war with one another with only two possible outcomes: win or lose. More often, we work together or separately to achieve our common or individual goals. If the only way to succeed in life were to beat Bob Knight, somebody would have already hunted him down and eliminated him. Happily, Bob's success does not limit my own freedom to succeed, or that of anyone I know. (And I hope that doesn't change in a future world of: one internet search engine, one internet store, one physical store, one chip maker, one...)I'm glad somebody has written a Captain Obvious book showcasing how some negative thinking is helpful and therefore important to success. I'm sorry that the writer was Bob Knight, who's lived in such a specialized little slice of the world all his life. His manic concentration on winning basketball games has been great for him, but is nearly as helpful as he thinks for teaching people how to get along with one another and live life to its fullest. This mindset SEEMS to be the sort that allowed coach Joe Paterno to ignore one of his assistant coaches raping young boys. It SEEMS to be the mindset that encourages excellent basketball players to ignore their other life skills so much that two thirds of the pros are broke within a few years of being cut from their teams. In short, it SEEMS to be a rotten mindset. But great for winning basketball games.I only got 17% of the way through this book. All the general advise seemed blindingly obvious. All the applications of the advise seemed related to basketball, baseball, or when applied to real life, were dubious and/or vague. "Sometimes you only get one chance" to beat your Dad or your son at pool? Yeah. So that needed to be included?But if you want to know how one extremely successful basketball coach thinks, give it a try.Edit: Bob even disparages mother's kissing away hurts to make it all better. Living in the real world needs to start before kindergarten!

The main argument of this book seems to be that you can win more games by reducing mistakes (excellent defense) than by improving offense. I recall reading about this same idea in Mauboussin's excellent book  The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing , as follows: In amateur (low skilled) matches, games are won by making points (offense). In professional (highly skilled) matches, games are won by not losing points (defense). So I think the main theme of the book is a good one, and is backed up by the author's track record.The writing in this book is reasonable, with no big grammar or typo issues. Quite a few of the game stories were interesting and well described too. It's an easy, fast read.However, I felt the book was quite disjointed, with no overall story line that I could find. The book wandered away from the main idea (defense, not offense, wins professional games) in many places. Many of the wanders seemed to be efforts to emphasize the subplot idea of "negative thinking", or random pages of facts or stories that didn't seem to contribute to any point or story line, or (as other reviews have said) pokes at old sayings or "nuggets" that had nothing whatsoever to do with the theme of the book.The subplot of "the power of negative thinking" didn't seem to be well executed either. Thinking and focussing on what could go wrong, what areas need work, what offensive forces you have to neutralize, etc, all seem to be part of normal defensive preparation. So I can't really see them as good examples of negative thinking, or even as unconventional thinking (some teams focus on offense, some on defense, some on both, ... how can any of this be considered negative or unconventional?).The book also dragged in various examples of "negative thinking" from history, apparently to support the subplot of the power of negative thinking. But it seemed to me that the author was really reaching for meaning that wasn't there on most of them.Maybe the title The Power of Negative Thinking was just a play on words, and I'm making too much of it. I think a better title would be "How Defensive Thinking Won More Pro Basketball Games", or something similar.Sorry to say, but I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone except basketball enthusiasts who like to read about famous coaches, players, and games.

This book is so good that I would give it six stars but I can't; so I will give it five stars. The only thing I didn't like is that the author uses the word "a**" a few times.

Coach Knight makes a really good case for the basic philosophy, especially in the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the book. I had two problems with the later stages of the book. First, he cites examples of positive thinking from his career that were contrary to his negative-thinking approach, then unconvincingly rationalizes it - he in effect says, "it sounds positive, but it was really negative." Second, he spends a considerable portion of the book recounting tales of glory with only weak ties to the theme; this portion of the book gets tedious, unless those moments have special meaning for you and you can enjoy reliving them with him. Fortunately he recovers and gets back on point toward the end.Overall, though, the message works, and Coach Knight does a good job of connecting the philosophy to business management without trying to make it a management book. In other words, he doesn't say, "this is how to manage, and here are examples from my coaching career." Instead he says, "this is how I coached, and it can be applied to management like this."Bottom line, it's a relatively easy read and does have good lessons for business managers as well as coaches.

If you like Basket Ball of follow it FINE. If not Don't bother. If you hope to explore a theory and compare it to other philosophies its a let down. It is more about the author his team's and other Basket Ball coaches.

Es un libro muy facil de leer y muy facil de entender y seguir. Me encanta el coach knight y sus perlas de sabiduria tenian que ser enseñadas en todas las academias e institutos y federaciones de basket del mundo.

This is book for people who play basketball and coaches,the writer is just talking about his coaching experience,the title of the book should be basketball coach 😄

I've now given away 6 copies to people who have read 'The Secret' and believed it...

Although the message is good ! The interest is not maintained within the reader ! A lot of money sent for what could have been a newspaper clip !