“[N]obody thought [Jeremy] Lin could make it in the NBA. He was too short and too weak, with a mediocre jump shot.” – WIRED

We are not basketball fans—though, on occasions, we’ll watch a game or two when there is nothing else on TV—but this story about Jeremy Lin being picked to get some game time with the New York Knicks caught our attention. We love this story as well as have some dislike for it. We love that it features a guy who breaks steoreotypes. He’s academically successful and he’s a basketball hero; and he proves being smart and being able to play professional basketball don’t have to be mutually exclusive. And despite not fitting the image of what coaches, scouts and whoever else thought, is a basketball-star-in-the-making, he manages to prove to them that he didn’t have to fit this mold of theirs to become the missing ingredient to posting a winning streak.

    Now, the part of the story we don’t like: it took a time of poor team performance and a last-resort decision to get him some game time. How often does this happen, where just because people didn’t fit the profile or did things not quite to what is the standard of doing things that they were turned away and never given a chance to prove themselves? A lot. It happens during sports team try-outs, school applications, job interviews… just basically anywhere where you’re being judged whether you’re the right person for something.

    Sometimes, the vetting process that’s in place doesn’t work. We don’t know all that much about how prospective basketball players are found, so we’ll use candidate selection for jobs instead.The words in the resumes, the words that come out of a person’s mouth may look and sound good and on point (or not good and off-point as the case may be); but they don’t always reflect the true value of the person. Sometimes, what it takes is being given a chance to show their skills and talent on the job, in-field, over a reasonable period of development time that the person’s true worth is finally grasped.

    It was just fortunate that the New York Knicks suffered a loss to Boston Celtics (source: Wikipedia). Otherwise, they would have not discovered Jeremy Lin, someone that didn’t meet selectors’ standards, but was more than capable and very worthy of a starting member, as he meant the difference between a struggling team and being back on the winning side. To find his true worth, they just needed to give him real chance to see him in action and prove himself.