Happy Friday! I hope you’re gearing up for a great hockey weekend — let’s get into this week’s Playbook.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is how uncomfortable the process of improvement actually is.

Not the idea of improvement — everyone likes that part.

The reality of it.

Because when people talk about development, growth, or eventually becoming “great” at something, they often imagine a pretty smooth upward curve. Work hard, improve steadily, confidence grows, success follows.

But in reality, most meaningful improvement looks much messier than that.

It usually involves long stretches of frustration, periods where you feel stuck, mistakes that keep repeating themselves, and a lot of moments where the feedback — directly or indirectly — is essentially saying:

“No.”

Not yet.

Not good enough.

Try again.

And I think one of the biggest separators between players who continue to improve and players who stall is how they respond to that part of the process.

The players who improve fastest are usually willing to struggle longer

I heard an interview recently with MrBeast, who despite being about as far away from the hockey world as you can get, made a point about improvement that I thought was brilliant.

He said when he started making YouTube videos, he basically accepted that his first 500 videos were going to be bad.

Not because he lacked ambition.

But because he understood that improvement requires repetition, experimentation, failure, adjustment, and time.

That mindset is not common, but if you really want to get better at something, it is one you need to adopt.

A lot of people want the rewards of being good at something without going through the uncomfortable stage of being bad at it first.

And in hockey, we see this all the time.

Players want to master a new skill immediately. They want confidence before competence. They want results before repetition.

But the reality is that development usually looks far less impressive while it’s happening than it does in hindsight.

The players who eventually separate themselves are often just the ones willing to stay with the process longer than everybody else.

“No” is usually information, not a final judgment

One of the biggest mistakes young players make is treating mistakes and/or rejection like a verdict instead of valuable feedback.

Not making a team.

Starting on the bench.

Getting dispossessed repeatedly trying a new skill.

Throwing a bad aerial.

Mis-trapping under pressure.

Getting told something in your game needs to improve.

All of those moments can feel personal when you’re in them.

But most of the time, they are not saying:

“Stop.”

They are saying:

“Not like that.”

That is a very important difference.

Because if you can separate your identity and your feelings of self-worth from the immediate outcome, failure becomes much more useful.

Instead of protecting your ego, you start asking better questions:

• Why didn’t that work?
• What needs to improve?
• What am I still missing?

That is where real development starts to happen.

Hockey players often quit mentally before they quit physically

One thing I notice quite a lot with younger players is that they don’t always stop trying externally — but internally they have already backed away from the challenge.

A player struggles with a skill under pressure, so they stop attempting it in games.

A player gets beaten one-on-one a few times, so they stop marking tightly and drop off too far.

A player gets nervous making decisions, so they start playing safely all the time.

From the outside it can look like they are still working hard, but in reality they have stopped pushing into the uncomfortable areas where growth actually happens.

And unfortunately, confidence built purely on avoiding mistakes is usually very fragile.

Real confidence comes from repeatedly struggling with something, improving gradually, and eventually realizing:

“I can handle this now.”

That kind of confidence lasts.

Development is usually less dramatic than people think

Most improvement in hockey is incremental.

• A slightly better first touch.
• A slightly calmer decision under pressure.
• A slightly cleaner tackle.
• A slightly better understanding of space.

Over time, those small improvements compound massively.  But only if the player stays engaged long enough for them to accumulate.

That is why persistence matters so much. Not blind persistence where you keep doing the same thing over and over without learning.

But persistence combined with reflection.

Trying  |  Adjusting  |  Learning  |  Repeating

Again and again.

The takeaway

Every player loves the idea of improvement.

Far fewer enjoy the process required to achieve it.

Because the process usually involves discomfort, frustration, setbacks, and hearing “No” far more often than people expect.

But “No” is very rarely the end of the process.

Most of the time, it is simply part of the middle. Part of the feedback, part of the learning.

The players who improve the most are not the ones who avoid failure — they are the ones who learn how to keep moving through it.