Imagine you muster up the courage to finally do that thing you've been meaning to do. It's hard enough to overcome your own momentum to get out of the house, but once you've made the leap you might be confronted by the reality of a thousand unspoken rules and norms you never considered. One of the most stressful parts of trying anything new is the unspoken world of context and rules that people seem to just know.
When Josh Gondelman told me he wanted to play pickup basketball for his episode, I was fixated on the unspoken norms that underpin the idea. I have never played in a pickup basketball game, and I don't really have any desire to start now. But how the hell does someone learn what "first to 11 by ones and twos, call your fouls" means?
Luckily, Josh is a fortunate soul who seems to have absorbed this secret language through the osmotic process of American masculinity, so the only thing he really had to overcome was the limitations of his own body, which he admits is less prepared to play basketball than perhaps at any other time in his life.
This is an exciting episode because I learned lots of vocabulary, like: runs, Mikan drills, line drills, and leaving on a make. Also, not to spoil anything, but we also get a really fantastic new euphemism for vomiting.
A transcript of the episode can be found here.
You can listen to Try Hard wherever you get your podcasts: RSS here, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify (if you must). Send me voice memos of the things you're trying at podcasts@defector.com or message me on Instagram @alexlaughs.
