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“I could do it in a second myself” — have you had a night when you caught yourself thinking that?
You thought you explained it carefully, and it didn’t get through.
You showed them yourself, and they couldn’t do it the same way.
You teach with everything you have, and yet, somehow, the distance never closes —
Helping someone grow is far, far harder than you imagined.
A great player does not always make a great manager
A managerial title is something the company gives you.
You get promoted because your sales were the best.
You got the position because you kept delivering numbers — but that proves you are someone who can move yourself, not someone who can move others.
Great players seldom make great managers.
The world is full of organizations like that.
On the way home, alone, do you ever find yourself wondering,
“Why won’t my team follow me?”
A title does not make people follow.
Yet there are people who, without any title, naturally draw others to them.
Someone five people would follow of their own accord, regardless of title.
Someone people think of as “I’ll do it for this person,” “if this person says so” — that, we believe, is a leader in the truest sense.
And that power is deeply connected to the way pool teaches you to think.
Your best shot is not always your partner’s best shot
“This is how I did it. So just do it this way.”
How many team members have closed their hearts at those words?
You don’t mean to force your way on anyone.
But without realizing it, you sometimes judge others by your own standard.
Pool has a format called the pair match.
Two players form a team and take turns, one shot each, aiming to run out — and within that game there is one crucial decision.
After you pot a ball on your turn, it is your partner’s turn.
Where do you leave the cue ball for your partner? A thinner angle gives a better path to the next ball.
But if your partner struggles with thin cuts, you change your position play a little and leave the cue ball where your partner can aim fuller.
Putting first not your own convenience but a layout your partner can play easily — that judgment is what lets the team run out.
Just because you can do it doesn’t mean the other person can do it the same way.
Understand their ability, their tendencies, their stage of growth, and create “the place where they can move most easily next.”
Isn’t that what helping someone grow is all about?
Turn your backward thinking toward the other person
You hand out work, yet you never quite feel they are growing.
Every day is busy, and you feel you can’t give time to developing people — have you known that frustration?
There may be nights when you find yourself murmuring, “Lately I don’t even know what to teach.”
Simply handing out the task in front of you won’t make people grow.
If all you ask is “what shall I have them do today,” their development stays hit-and-miss forever.
Thinking backward is the ability to work back from the goal to what you should do now.
In pool: where do you leave the 8 to pot the 9?
Where do you leave the 7 for the 8? — every single shot rests on a design worked back from the goal.
Developing people is no different.
Where do you want this person to be in a year?
To get there, what should they be able to do in six months?
What should they experience this month? — that backward reasoning becomes the blueprint for their growth.
Even amid busy days, whether you hold that blueprint changes how you engage with them each day.
Hold a goal, work backward, and choose the shot that suits the other person.
That is the thinking pool trains, and the thinking asked of anyone who helps others grow.
👉 More on thinking backward and pool
The first shot decides everything
Do you remember the day a new member joined your team?
A slightly nervous greeting, and then they sit down at their desk.
Not knowing what to do, watching what goes on around them — when you see someone like that, what do you do first?
In pool, there is a first shot called the break.
Where and how you hit it, what layout you create — that first design shapes the whole flow of the run-out that follows.
It is the same with developing people.
It is no exaggeration to say that the first meeting after someone joins decides everything about the relationship that follows.
In that meeting, there is one thing we’d like you to try.
First, set goals together.
Then think together about what a “cool grown-up” means.
What kind of person they want to become, what kind of professional they want to be — have that conversation, properly, at the very start.
What matters is the word “together.”
Not handing things down from above, but beginning the relationship as partners looking in the same direction, heading there side by side.
That first shot becomes the foundation for everything that comes after.
Goals handed down from above eventually become obligations.
But a goal you hold as your own becomes a force that moves you from within — that difference shapes long-term growth.
👉 On intrinsic motivation and the essence of getting better
And the most important of all is making the rules together.
When something comes up they don’t understand, they ask their manager, not a peer or a senior close in age.
They take notes.
They look back at their notes once before asking — and not only rules like these for the team member; you make rules for yourself, too.
However busy you are, when asked a question, you always stop and listen.
When you truly can’t break away, you say so clearly.
And you always come back to them yourself afterward —
Not rules imposed from one side, but rules made with both sides agreeing.
That changes how things are said.
Instead of an emotional “Why aren’t you taking notes?”, you can calmly point out, “We’re not keeping the rule we made together, are we?”
And the one hearing it, rather than feeling emotionally blamed, finds it easier to accept honestly: “What I broke was a rule.”
How do you design the first shot?
That is what shapes every run-out that follows.
Can you enjoy the recovery together?
When someone on your team makes a mistake, what does your face look like?
Are you letting out a sigh without meaning to?
Are the words “The same mistake again?” about to slip out?
However carefully you nurture people, they make mistakes.
More often than not, things don’t go as planned.
Pool is the same.
A perfect run-out is hard even for pros.
What matters is how you rebuild after a miss — the power of recovery.
Not blaming the mistake, but thinking together: “What shall we do next?”
By building up that experience, people grow strong in the truest sense.
And it is in those moments of recovery that a person’s true capacity shows.
The one who sighs, and the one who can think it through with you.
Which one will five people follow? The answer is clear.
👉 The balls don’t lie. — On being a professional.
Not a title, but a person
Let us say it once more.
A managerial title is something the company gives you.
But the feeling of “for this person” is not born from a title.
Trying to understand the person.
Trying to make a place where they can move easily.
Trying to get through their mistakes together — true leadership lives in that accumulation.
Becoming someone five people follow of their own accord.
It is not a technique, but a way of thinking, a stance.
Listening to your team over drinks, you may have a night when that thought quietly comes to you.
When you stand at the table, what shot are you choosing now?
👉 Billiards resources from Japan and around the world, organized by purpose: Billiards in Depth (latest updated hourly)
