Those who read me often know that I tend to look at reality through its blind spots, not through its certainties. I’m more interested in what is missing than in what is abundant; more in what is absent than in what is visible. They also know that I like to define things by their absences, by those invisible lines that trace their boundaries. Today will be no different.

The ideas of Edgar Morin resonate with a particular force when applied to the art —for it is indeed an art— of coaching, of observing, analyzing, and intervening in the living reality that is an athlete.

Morin invites us to focus not so much on the parts of a system as on the relationships that connect them, the threads that weave the whole. At that crossroads of links and tensions emerges one of his most fascinating concepts: what Morin calls “the other, different thing.” Something that arises from the interaction between the parts —something qualitatively new, irreducible to the mere sum of its components.

This idea strikes me as profoundly inspiring. It explains why, at times, an athlete may show clear deficiencies and yet perform brilliantly; and why others, seemingly flawless, remain stuck in mediocrity. It’s not just a matter of strength, technique, or mentality —it’s about how the parts converse with one another, about what is born from their encounter.

There lies, precisely, the vision of the true coach: the ability to discern how to arrange those pieces, how to bring them together so that “the other, different thing” may appear. That intangible something that transforms performance into expression, effort into harmony, and the athlete into a new, distinct, deeper totality.

That is why, when coaches get entangled in the endless debate over what matters most —the physical, the technical, or the mental— they forget that the essential does not reside in each element separately, but in the way they intertwine. Because, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details; and here, the detail is not what is seen, but what happens between what is seen —the interaction, the invisible, that which is not, but transforms everything else.

In the end, Morin’s ideas are so deeply relevant to so many of the things that matter to us coaches that I’m sure there will be more reflections to come inspired by his thought.