YouSaid · the spoken record

John Amaechi

lines on the record: 75
first: 2025-10-01
most recent: 2025-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Think they had a different plan, and also I didn't respond to the anguish of my experience as well as I might. So by the time I left Orlando, I wasn't starting and I wasn't playing a huge number of minutes, and I almost had a mental block on some of my skills. I remember it distinctly and painfully.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did an excellent job recruiting me. I had an excellent dinner at an Italian restaurant with him and Phil Jackson. They laid out the next seven years for me in vivid detail. I went to their practice facility and their arena, they showed me a house. I remember distinctly them showing me a house on the seaside'cause they knew that I loved the sea. And I said to them I can't afford this house, and they said you will be able to I remember how intoxicating it felt, but I am always slightly wary of intoxicants, so.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think one of the things that Doc taught me was that there's a role to play in the locker room and on the practice floor, even if it's not manifest on the court. And I think that I would have had to take that role incredibly seriously in order to feel a sense of my contribution on a team like that. But I'm not sure that it would change me fundamentally because in fairness it is my studies and my experiences outside of sport that most inform my philosophical and psychological approach. It's just that sport gives me better stories to tell to illustrate my philosophy, I suppose.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but I also would have had four championships without lifting a finger, which would have been great, right? But I think the reality is that, again, if it's about principle, I had a principled idea in my head that I should stay and I knew that it would not necessarily be reciprocated. And nowadays, I work with very influential people in business and large organizations. And they often ask me if I can be trusted. They often ask me how much my word is worth. And there's very few people in this world who can say about seventeen million dollars.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dawkin, the team had made a very strong decision to keep me when they need not keep me. It happened that I played very well for them, but there was no reason for that, and I know that they kept me in park because I was cheaper than the veterans they cut. But they made a decision that gave me a chance to do what I'd always said I wanted to do, which is to play a key part and play and start in an MBA team. And at the end of that year I had an opportunity to be a person of principle and reward those who had rewarded me and I knew that it would likely lead to my ejection from the team a year later when more sexy players came along. But in terms of Doc, I felt I had a principle to repay with that.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it was stupid and that I should take the money and that Los Angeles is nice to live in and the weather is hot there, but I lived in Orlando, so it was hot there too. Yeah, most of the advice I had was that I should take the money and run. People should understand I don't believe in loyalty, so I think it's a ridiculous concept. It feels very quid pro quo to me, and I'm not interested in that. But I am interested in principle, and to me,”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ooh, that it's very often mostly useful for one party and not the other, and often the party it's supposed to help most it doesn't. That's just the truth of bentership. It doesn't matter if you're talking about reverse mentoring in organizations or Padawan and Master Jedi relationships in Star Wars. The party that's supposed to be learning doesn't always do the learning and the party that should be teaching is often the one that gets taught.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do like some parts of the prequels. So A New Hope will always be my, that will always be my stone. But I think some of the prequels suffer from the attacks of men who like science fiction but lack imagination and they don't, what they really like about science fiction is that it was always about some bloke who got the scantily clad woman at the end of the story, the 1950s type of robot pal, helpless damsel to And I think if you look at the prequels through a slightly different lens. It actually helps the story evolve and helps the Jedi seem slightly less hapless at times.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jedi are incredibly, I'm so, I am deeply entrenched in it. I have a lightsaber on my desk behind me. But Jedi made so many mistakes, so many mistakes, at the height of their power in the old republic, they had an opportunity to evolve and to not be such a monastic and pointless ritually driven group of people, and instead they Doubled down and they essentially became the galaxy's police, which was never going to lead to ingratiation. It's a really difficult one for me because I'm very much, I feel like I would be a Jedi in the mould of, I don't know, mace windu or Jolie Bindu or something like that, what people mistakenly called a gray Jedi. But I don't know. They made mistakes and Yoda certainly made mistakes. I hope that he made up for them with the most recent actions as a ghost.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Future History is what I like best in science fiction. It is so immensely cool I use this all the time in my work today. The future history is the idea that fine fiction writers write with such clarity, with such vividness, that you can imagine that they're not just writing about something they're making up, that they've visited the place that they're writing about and are coming back to report it to you. It's such a powerful tool in trying to change people's minds. It's the same technique that is commonly called the I Have a Dream Speech by Martin Luther King is a future history. He doesn't say, you know, it's not a list of grievances. Could you stop biting my people with alsatians? Could you let us drink at the same water fountain? It is, I have a dream that white boys and black boys will play together. It's a vision of the future articulated in such a way that everybody involved can feel safe.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at the time, I just retreated. I retreated into books. That's why I read so much as a child. Science fiction, I retreated into worlds that were distant in time and space from my own, and I hid there. That was what happened. That and Hardy Boy's books for some reason, which, although I knew they would always be the same, I somehow liked them. And that's what I did. Instead, nowadays it's different, now I accommodate for the fact that I know most people will look at me and not see professor of leadership. They will see something else, and so I now contrive my surroundings to help people feel safe.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Description that I thought was me. I have always, I still have this experience today, and it's part of the reason I don't leave my house very much, unless I have to for work. And it's that wherever I go, the first look I get from people is usually one of terror and of fear because I am a six foot nine hundred fifty kilo, that's very large in American pounds. Black person, so essentially our society's version of a super predator, and everywhere I looked people thought I was stupid. They thought I was dangerous, and they thought I was emotionally literate too. So illiterate too, and that was the description that was given in passing of the hunchback. So yeah, that was my introduction to seeing myself reflected in literature.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is so long. As I mentioned to your colleague before, I have forgotten half of the book that I've written now, never mind the one I wrote in 2007. But there was a description of the hunchback in that book that when I was a child was”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my goodness, I haven't thought about that for ages so I vibed, if you like, with the why is it escaping me now? The hunchback of Notre Dame and I thought I'm trying to think the story”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, see, the scientist Amisia says there's a thousand confounding factors in that, right? So if you are so remarkable as a player, then you don't have to go into coaching. Your life doesn't have to revolve around sport because you could do any number of things other than that. You could just sit on your laurels and play golf if you wanted to. So there's part of me that thinks that if you're an excellent superstar, maybe you have a thousand other things that you can be interested in because you're sitting on a pile of gold.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, the beginning of the season. I think you talked about rituals at the beginning. There was a ritual that we did. Everybody, we started practice at midnight, and we did in that practice at midnight the ritual of this sprinting exercise. We had to sprint across the width of the court in a certain number of seconds. Everybody had to make it. And if you didn't make it, you couldn't start practice. And it was just this ritual that kept us focused even in the offseason at knowing that we were going to do that. And it set a tone, I don't think, maybe now more than back in my day, but people think basketball was, they kind of worked their way into shape, so they weren't really minded to be in shape in the preseason. And Doc set a precedent with that ritual that we would be in shape on day one. In fact, day zero.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a very, very thin sheet. That's not true. I work with a group of chairs of FTSE companies in the United Kingdom, and there are a couple of them who are notably remarkably interested in learning leadership. That's probably the thing I noticed most about them as people who are extraordinarily experienced. If there's a name for American people, it would be a sports figure. It's probably Doc Rivers, somebody whose leadership was very evident to me while I was in Orlando, really obvious that he was doing things that I hadn't seen before from other coaches.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything is easy to hide behind bureaucracy. If you're not interested in the work, the graft, the effort, the skill gaining that's required to be a positive leader, then bureaucracy is very useful to you, and so I can imagine how some people who aren't interested in the graft of leadership would gather around themselves as much bureaucracy as possible to hide the fact that they I have seen consultants who are minded towards leadership, I will say that they all seem to have come from like I'm thinking in my head of somebody who used to work in the NHS, so they used to be an actual doctor, and somebody else who used to be a physician, sorry, a physics teacher in university. So they all seem to have different orientations before they became consultants.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that my mind was oriented towards it to notice it. What I did notice was that if there's something that they had, it was this constant rhetoric towards the tenets of leadership. I know there were Jesuit tenets, but they were talking about things like being a man for others. That was the we were an all-boys school. That was the constant mantra being repeated. And it did seem like many of the people there teachers, educators believed that mantra to be true. I don't know if I... I mean, I think there's a selflessness part of being a leader that's important if you want to be sustainably high performing. But I'm not sure that I've ever used the man for others terminology myself.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I've railed against the impact of college sports on the athletes themselves. I witnessed, and I will say this, not at Penn State, not to be protective for Penn State. I've been vocally critical of Penn State over the years, but not at Penn State, but other places where I got to know players. It was very clear that no responsibility was being taken for them as people outside of their athletics. They weren't going to graduate. They weren't attending classes. They were protected from doing that as long as they performed on the court. To me, it was one of the most obvious abdications of leadership I saw at a very early age.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have Yorkshire Golden Hour, so there's a tea in Britain called Yorkshire Gold, and it's my favourite tea. And so we have this meeting where all the team comes together, where we explicitly do not talk about work, but it's just a time to catch up. We're a mostly virtual organization. It's one of the few times we get to catch up, and it's a place where we get access to each other's lives if we are. Civil and courteous and kind enough.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kinds of rituals it needs, connective rituals, rituals that let people know that you aren't just a transaction to them, those types of things are important. What are the rituals? Rituals that give direction in times of trouble and strife now? You know, when so many things are going wrong and not just inside work with transformations, but outside of work with wars and socio-political upheaval. So giving people direction and whatever rituals you can have around that, rituals that show you care and that are slightly, that you're slightly human, I think are important too. I know that that's not popular with some very, very, well, certainly some of the leaders you've modeled and talked about. They weren't interested in being seen as human. But as a six foot nine person of some size, I can tell you it's actually quite useful for people to know you're not just a frightening monster all the time.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they might well be. I just would say to anybody who wants to model themselves after Steve Jobs, be that brilliant and that compelling and that insightful and that prescient, and you can get away with it. But I would also say that Anyone whose idea of being a great leader is that their superpower is somehow intrinsically linked with their ability to be an asshole, has misunderstood the human condition, because nobody performs at their best when they're frightened, nobody. It's physically impossible.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it is the thing that defines the culture, especially because the people listening to you and I talk aren't going to pay their aging centre five million dollars a year. They aren't going to pay the vast majority of their players over a million quid a year dollars a year, right? And they aren't going to have a player, even one of the caliber anywhere near of a Michael Jordan. So we can take the example that is as rare as, I don't know, Adamantium and have it be the thing we go by. Or we can say that most companies have extraordinarily average people within it. And so they don't get to play by the same rules. Plus, I would point out, all those people who loved watching, I've never seen it. The program that they did about Michael Jordan and his years in that, look at the number of people who didn't show up. The number of people who wouldn't appear in that program despite having perhaps made their mark, earned their stroke.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is as glib as it sounds, it is the reality that when you go into a space, if you can observe poor behaviors that nobody challenges, then that is the thing that's defining the culture. Even the small, weird things that people do. So I worked in a company recently. I was brought into a company recently where some senior leader 10 years ago must have brought in the habit of emphasizing what you say by banging on the table as you talk, all aspiring senior people, mostly men, and all aspiring junior people, mostly men, bang on the table, and they talked about their benefits and they talked about their pension packages and whatever else. The thing that defined that place was the kind of discursive violence of every meeting being punctuated by fists thudding on desks. So that's what I mean by it.”
2025-10-01 · Conversations with Tyler · John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source