I spent the last day and a half binging ESPN’s The Last Dance with my wife, the ten part documentary about the 1997-98 NBA season and the last title run for the Chicago Bulls. There’s a number of threads that have been running through my mind ever since:

• Jordan and the Bulls drink a lot beer, and Jordan still drinks Tequila. They also smoke copious amounts of cigars. In a world of extremes, it was a great reminder that you can push your body to the limit as an elite athlete, while still enjoying life’s many pleasures.

• While I don’t think I’m nearly as good at anything as Jordan was at basketball, I want to win at retail the way Jordan wants to win championships. I’ve been known to push my colleagues or rub them the wrong way when they underperform. It was interesting to see how that same desire played out within a basketball team and I learned a lot about myself in the process.

• Jerry Krause is seen as the villain of the documentary because he was more worried about money than winning. If you want to know why I’m on my fifth job in four years, it has a lot to do with this dynamic. I want to win, first and foremost. The money is secondary. If you don’t want to win, I can’t work for you.

• Looking back on how some of the Bulls viewed MJ, many of them thought he was an asshole, but they understood his motives in retrospect. It made me think about a guy on my high school baseball team that was such a dick to me every season. Yet, now I can see that he was just serious about playing baseball, whereas I was absolutely not. I just wanted to be on the team and say I was one of the guys, but I didn’t have the competitive edge at 15. He clearly saw that and was calling out my heart. And he was absolutely right to have done that because I did not really want to be there.

But the most eye-opening part of the documentary is one of the assessments about Jordan’s presence—his ability to be in-the-moment at all times.

One of the execs says (and I’m paraphrasing): “You think he’s the best because he can jump high, run fast, or make a basket? That’s not why. It’s his ability to be present and in-the-moment at all times.”

He talks about how meditation gurus in India spend their entire lives trying to be more present, whereas Jordan has the innate ability to do so. It made me think about how I hate New Year’s Resolutions and how we use January 1st as an excuse to do things we should be doing normally.

Going back to the first point about extremes, I don’t want to change on January 1st. I simply want to live my life with balance and presence, so that I don’t have to make changes that I don’t want to make. As an example, I want to be able to have a drink every single day, and exercise every single day. Too much of either inhibits that balance.

I also want that resolution to be a permanent part of my being, not a goal for an arbitrary calendar date. Watching The Last Dance was great motivation to do so.

-David Driscoll