Just Saying, Is All... | The Most Important Lesson for LeBron James

(Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)

Excellence is its own education.

LeBron James is a force to be reckoned with. He's also, apparently, a subject to be pontificated on. Three weeks after the Upset in Orlando, the blogosphere is still buzzing with unsolicited counsel for the King—which would be better news if wisdom weren't such a solitary pursuit.

Inexperience means listening to every voice that shouts at you.

Maturity, on the other hand, means hearing the only one that whispers.

It’s not that the peanut gallery is ill-intentioned. All nosiness is born of empathy, and most would-be gurus really do care about LeBron’s future. But a well-meaning blowhard is still a blowhard. In an age of instant and unthinking information exchange, the only intelligence worth sharing is the kind that can’t be beamed through an Ethernet cable.

Talk is cheap.

Advice is free.

If LeBron’s in the market for valuable input, he can’t afford to buy the rabble’s two cents.

Sports fans are notorious know-it-alls. Armchair quarterbacks, barstool analysts, shamelessly self-referential keyboard jockeys—they’re founts of errant guidance, wells of obtuse insight. The problem, alas, is that two heads are very rarely superior to one. Populists will argue that LeBron should heed the logic of mass opinion. I’d counter that the only smart crowds are those peopled by discriminating individuals.

It’s good to lean on your friends.

It’s better to stand on your feet.

LeBron has plenty of supporters, but some journeys have to be made without a crutch.

There’s no carpool lane on the road to the top. To be the best is to lead the pack; to lead the pack is to walk alone. The most important lesson for LeBron James is that which he’ll have to learn by himself, because no priest or publicist could ever teach it to him. Every pilgrim sets off on the path of his predecessors. The righteous one ultimately finds a way to call his own.

Rudyard Kipling never saw his face on a billboard, but he did know a thing or two about self-discovery:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And—which is more—you'll be a Man my son!

Which is a sound game plan for any impressionable young icon.

Because every star gets an earful from his audience, and he who can't trust the expert in his heart is liable to fall for some hack who's only just saying, is all... 

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