Excerpts from Play to Win! : Choosing Growth Over Fear in Work and Life:
Go back to 1970. "Girls" basketball was very different then, and very different from the game the boys played. If you were to go to a 1970s high school girls' game, the first difference you would notice would be that the players dribbled the ball only twice and then passed. The girl who caught the pass dribbled twice and then passed, and so on and so on. It made for a very stilted and slow game. ...
Looking back on it, in the age of full-court, physical women's basketball, it seems pretty silly and, of course, sad. It was sad if you were one of those girls doomed to play a game that limited your potential. It was sad if, as one of those girls, you simply assumed the mental map of your elders: "I am limited because I am a girl. I can only dribble twice and then I have to pass the ball."
But where was the evidence? Where was the research? Where was the critical thinking? Unless the physiology of women has changed dramatically in the last few decades, the logical conclusion is that all those rules were made up. It was a well-intentioned conspiracy of making stuff up, and it limited the thinking and abilities of generations of women and men (who also made up that women couldn't play full-court basketball).
We make stuff up, and it becomes what is true (our maps), and we respond out of those maps. The fatal flaw is that we rarely stop and ask, Is this really so? What is the evidence for my beliefs?
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