From the journal
275 NBAcareer highs,one tally.
In June 2001 the author of the Secrets Journal looked up 275 NBA players on the night each scored the most points of his career, and wrote down where the three cycles sat. This page is that tally, and an honest reading of it.
Counted June 2001
The tally
What chance alone gives
On the night they did the best they ever did, these players’ emotional cycle was positive nearly twice as often as not. Half the time would be chance. The positive half is 14 of 28 days.
What was counted
A career high is a clean thing to count. It is a single published game, with a published date, for a player with a published birth date. For each of the 275 players the author computed the three cycles for that date and noted the state of each: positive or negative, and which of the eight symbols.
He then counted. The question he was asking was simple: on the night a player did the best he ever did, where did his cycles tend to be?
What the count showed
The emotional cycle was positive, in the top half of its 28 days, nearly twice as often as it was negative. The intellectual cycle leaned positive too, less strongly. The physical cycle did not lean much either way, which surprised the author, who had expected a scoring night to need a body at its best.
He also noted that the players with two or three cycles positive at once appeared more often in the list than those with one or none. From this he drew the rule he used for the rest of his life: in basketball, the emotional cycle together with either of the other two.
What it cannot show
A tally like this is worth keeping, and it is worth reading carefully. Three things limit it.
- There is no comparison group. We know where the cycles sat on 275 great nights; we do not know where they sat on the thousands of ordinary nights the same players had. A positive emotional phase covers 14 of every 28 days, so about half of all games, good and bad, fall in it.
- It is one person’s count, made by hand, and the working was not published. The ratio survives; the 275 names and dates do not appear in the journal.
- A career high depends on much that is not in a calendar: the opponent, an injured teammate’s minutes, a hot night. The journal lists those causes itself.
The larger studies that looked for the cycles in sport, with comparison groups and published data, did not find them. Our evidence page sets them out.
Why we keep it
Because it is what the company is made of. Before there was software there was a man with a calculator and a box score, counting. The tally is a record of that attention, and the app that came from it asks you for the same thing on a smaller scale: notice your own good days, and see where they fall.
The records
- The 1994–95 NBA seasonThe first season Biorhythm Secrets ran on a PC: two teams’ cycle ratios compared game by game through the 1994–95 NBA season, and what was written down.
- The Secrets JournalThe Biorhythm Secrets Journal, begun in 1976: what one record-keeper wrote down about the three cycles, sport by sport, over nearly fifty years.
- The emotional cycleThe 28-day emotional biorhythm cycle: what the theory says it governs, its eight states and their days, its critical days, and what the evidence found.