Jeremy Lin: The Most Important Lesson We Learned that No One is Talking About

Linsanity. Linning. Lincredible.

By now, we have heard it all. The dude wins. He shoots. He passes. He is clutch.

The critics are still out there, but Lin continues to ball out and make all the right plays. Suddenly, the New York Knicks matter, and the NBA, for the first time all season, is exciting.

Behind his meteoric ascent into the basketball world is an important lesson.

Ten days ago, he suited up against the New Jersey Nets because of injuries and simply as a necessity. In 10 days, he has won six games, led his team in every aspect and has been the team’s best player in each game.

But this story started five years ago when he was a senior in high school in California.

Although this week was the most successful week of Lin’s life, he has had periods of success in the past. As a high school senior, he captained his team to a 32-1 record and state championship. That same season, he was Player of the Year.

At Harvard, he was the only college basketball player in the country that season who ranked in the top 10 in his conference for scoring, rebounding, assists, steals, blocked shots, field-goal percentage, free-throw percentage and three-point shooting.

He was on the All-Ivy First Team multiple years and led Harvard to unprecedented heights.

But this has nothing to do with Harvard specifically. This has all to do with going to college.

There is little debate that some of the planet’s best basketball players never attended college (Kobe and LeBron), but for almost every other “normal” aspiring professional basketball player, that maturing period in college is required in order to be successful in the NBA.

There is one reason why collegiate basketball is vital to a player’s success in the NBA: It prepares you for failure and humbles you.

Most D-1 college basketball players were the best player on their high school team, were recognized at the district or state level and came into college as the Big Man on Campus.

Interleague play in the ACC or Big East humbles you. And it exposes you to failure, for potentially the first time in your college basketball career.

Additionally, it forces you to mesh your skills with your teammates and disciplines you. If you can handle criticism from Coach K or Tom Izzo, you can handle criticism from anyone in the NBA. Most importantly, these players slowly begin to understand the importance of developing their game for the next level.

Jeremy Lin exudes this.

His growing pains at Harvard prepared him for an unstable start to his NBA career. He hopped on a pair of summer league teams, got cut by two NBA teams—the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets—and signed a transient contract with the Knicks in late December.

At Harvard, he was primarily a scorer as a freshman and sophomore. His ability to facilitate an offense was not there, and he was turnover-prone. He worked his entire career to make up for these deficiencies and was the best player in the conference his senior year.

As the Linsanity continues to take over ESPN, Facebook and Twitter, remember that Jeremy Lin has been preparing for this moment since the day he entered Harvard.

Although he is the first to admit this has been a roller-coaster, his time at the collegiate level prepared him well and has put him in position to succeed today.