It helps to know that when Clare Akamanzi talks about basketball, she is not borrowing a metaphor from a sport she watches from a distance. She runs it.

As CEO of NBA Africa, she spends her days building the Basketball Africa League from the ground up, watching young players from Kigali to Lagos to Dakar take real shots, miss real shots, and walk back to the free throw line anyway.

So when she writes, “life is like basketball, you don’t win by watching the scoreboard, you win by taking the shots,” it carries the weight of someone who has stood courtside and watched the metaphor play out in front of her, night after night, season after season.

It also helps to know where she started. Long before boardrooms and basketball leagues, she was a child of refugees, born to parents who had fled their home, in a family that moved often because that is what life asks of people without a home to return to.

From there to running a national development board, and now a continental basketball league, is its own long string of missed shots and second attempts.

She did not arrive at this wisdom from a podium. She earned it the way most people earn anything worth saying out loud, by living through the parts that did not go in.

That context changes how her words land. Picture the half empty gym, late at night, just the squeak of sneakers and a ball clanging off the back of the rim for the fourth time in a row.

Most people would walk away right there. “Some you will miss,” she says, “but never stop shooting.” Her reflection begins exactly at that moment of doubt, and that is what makes it worth sitting with.

Her line works because it names a trap most of us live in without noticing, which is scoreboard watching. We track the score obsessively, the promotion that went to someone else, the deal we lost, the year that did not go the way we planned, and we mistake watching the number for playing the game.

But basketball does not reward the player who studies the scoreboard. It rewards the one who keeps getting open, keeps calling for the ball, keeps shooting even when the first six attempts miss.

That is the part people skip when they quote never give up, the misses are built in. A great shooter in basketball still misses roughly half their shots.

The difference between them and everyone else is not a higher hit rate, it is that they do not let a miss talk them out of the next attempt.

The version of you that is afraid to take the next shot because the last three did not go in has already lost something the scoreboard cannot measure.

Then there is the second half of what she is saying, which is the sharper point. “Stay in the game long enough to win the one that matters the most,” she writes. You do not need to win every possession.

You need to stay in the game long enough to win the one that matters most. That reframes the whole idea of failure.

A missed shot in the second quarter is not a verdict on your career, it is just a missed shot in the second quarter. The only games that count are the ones you are still on the court for in the fourth.

So the practical version of her wisdom is not never lose, it is never let a loss bench you. Keep taking shots. Let the scoreboard take care of itself.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​