--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... Hello everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous conversation for you. We are talking with Dre Baldwin. He is the CEO of Work On Your Game, Inc. And I got to be honest with you guys. When I was introduced to Dre, I hadn't heard of Dre before, checked out his work. My method for bringing guests on, especially guests who I've never met before or don't know, some of the people that come on the show, I've had multiple conversations with. In this case, I hadn't met Dre before. And I don't like to do too much research. I don't like to over-investigate someone because I want the conversation to be real and organic and authentic, and I want to dial in on the things that that particular guest is interested in on that day.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But in this case, I kind of accidentally got sucked in because my philosophy, the philosophy that we talk about here on Finding Peak, becoming the best version of yourself, the pursuit of peak performance, discipline, consistency, perseverance, confidence, all these kinds of things, Dre's work dials in completely. It's not even just the way he talks or what he talks about, but his story of working through adversity, becoming a professional basketball player, how he built his platform as a speaker, as a coach, the work he does in helping young athletes, and how that expanded into the business community, the entrepreneurial community. He's done multiple TED Talks.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was making dinner the other night for my kids and I went all the way through one of his keynotes, and then that went into after we were done and I was cleaning up. I was listening to his TED Talks and I got really deep into Dre's work. I'm a huge fan and I'm so glad that I'm able to share him and what he does with you guys. We're going to have all kinds of shout outs and links at the end of the show as well as in the show notes for ways that you can connect with him. I highly recommend that you do that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, I just want to tell you guys, I love you for listening to this show. If we want to keep getting amazing guests like Dre on the show, I just need one thing from you guys. If you're not subscribed, subscribe. Whether you're listening on Apple, Spotify, whether you're watching on YouTube, wherever you are, I would love for you to subscribe to this show and share the show. Whether you're adding comments onto what we're already talking about or if you disagree with something or you think that we didn't approach it the right way, those types of dissenting or disagreeing opinions are how this conversation expands and how we all get better at what we do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Lastly, if you can, if you're willing to, ratings and reviews of this show help us immensely. Going to Apple, going to Spotify, and leaving a rating review is so incredibly important to growing the show because guests like Dre, who don't know me, we didn't know each other before we connected on this, they go and they look at those ratings and reviews. That's what I do to get a feel. Does this sound like someone who's going to do right by me, who's going to challenge me, who's going to make this a great episode? That's where we get that information when we're guests on other podcasts.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you can go and talk about why you listen to this show, why someone might want to be a guest on this show or listen to this show, that means so much to me personally. It's why I don't run ads. My ask of you guys is not that you support a sponsor because I can make money other ways. My ask of you is that if you enjoy this work and you want this work to reach more people, that you either subscribe, share, or leave a review of the show. That helps me. It helps the audience. It helps us get more guests. It helps us expand this message that through this work we can be the best version of ourselves. I love you guys for listening. Let's get on to Dre Baldwin.
--:-- [Transition to interview]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, my man, I'm very excited to have you on the show. When your people reached out and I started researching, I was taken immediately by this concept that you have of the Third Day. I watched, I started researching and then I ended up watching like two or three of your keynotes. I love this concept. It fits right in with what we talk a lot about here on the show, what I do in my own work and my own talks. I'd love to start there. I'd love for you to break this concept down for the audience. We can start with what this idea of the Third Day is.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Perfect. So the Third Day, Ryan, is all about how you show up and give your best effort when you least feel like it. This came from my background in basketball. At this time I had a lot of ballplayers follow me on YouTube and they would see me in the gym. I would always work out in this gym in Miami that still exists not far from where I am now. It would appear that there was nobody else in the gym. Anybody who plays basketball knows it's hard to find an empty basketball gym to yourself.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Basketball is a very popular sport. So these players would say, "Dre, do you own the gym? Is it attached to your house? Do you rent it out? How are you getting this gym to yourself all the time?" That's where I came up with this concept of the Third Day. On the first day, everybody shows up. They're all excited to use this thing, whatever it is, or to do this thing, or to show themselves off, or whatever the job is. Second day, still pretty excited, but a little bit less than they were on the first day. By the third day already—and I mean, metaphorically it doesn't have to be three days—by that third day, this is when people realize that this thing that they signed up for is real work. It's a real job. There's a real grind. It's not all fun and games. It's not one big party. That's when we find out who is serious about doing the thing versus who is not.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: I went on to explain to the basketball players that the reason why my gym is always empty is not because I own the gym. I don't rent it out. I don't block anybody else from coming in. It's simply because I'm willing to show up more often than everybody else is. Most of my videos, there's nobody else in the gym simply because I'm here more often than everybody else is. Most of the time I'm recording, nobody else is there. A few times there'd be a couple random stragglers. Most of the time it was me by myself. That's where the concept came from, the Third Day.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I love that. I think that this idea—persistence, resilience, these kinds of things, consistency—I'm infatuated with Kobe Bryant. I always have been, his mentality. I feel like anyone who can't relate to him can't see past maybe some of the Michael Jordan-esque personality traits, which also made him so successful. There's a story, I think Kevin Garnett tells it, that speaks to what you're talking about. He was on a podcast and he says, "We're all coming back. This is one of the Olympic teams. They're all coming in at 3 a.m. from the club or wherever they were. They're out partying, having a good time, whatever city they were in. They're coming back to the hotel. And Kobe's already got ice on his knees and he's sitting in the lobby getting ready for his next workout. Already done one workout at 3:30 in the morning."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you think about that and you pull it all the way back, what I love about your story and what you've done is you can relate it not just to the athletic world but into the business world as well. This concept, I think it makes sense in sports, right? You put in more work. You show up that extra day. You're consistent. It makes a lot of sense. I feel like—and this is where I really would love to get your translation—I think a lot of people who maybe haven't experienced that or maybe just played sports in high school and were never super serious, they struggle to translate that mentality into the business world. How does that start to show up in a business context?
--:-- Dre Baldwin: You mean taking the mindset that works in sports and translating it?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, that Third Day concept and continuing to show up. How does that translate from sports to a business world?
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Okay. The story you were telling, I don't know if you said Kevin Garnett or did you say Kevin Durant?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Garnett is who I meant. If I said Durant, I apologize. I meant Kevin Garnett.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: I think you meant Durant. Was it Durant?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, Garnett and Kobe didn't play on the same Olympic team. All right, then it was Durant. Whatever it was, yes. Garnett only played in 2000. Kobe didn't join the USA until 2008. Yes, so I watch way too many of these interviews, so I apologize for bringing the two of them up. But the story is accurate in terms of these guys are showing up at 3 a.m. and Kobe had already got his workout in.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Right. Yeah. I heard those stories about the '08 team and probably the '12 team as well. Yeah. But anyway, to answer your question, there are many similarities and many differences between the sports world and the business world. It's a difficult transition for a lot of athletes. I tell people this to this day: being an athlete is the easiest job you're going to have if you're going to become an entrepreneur. I do a lot more work now. It's a lot harder job now than it was when I was playing sports. A long day in sports is maybe three hours, maybe four if you have a hard driving coach. But in the business world, a long day is the entire day. You go to sleep and you still got stuff you didn't finish.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: The biggest thing that can translate over—let me say it this way. The reason why many people in the business world like to recruit athletes is because we have some traits baked into us from our sports experience that apply very well in business. Number one, we're competitive. Anything that has to do with sales or anything where there's measurements and it's clear who's doing better than who, athletes are great for that because we're naturally wired to compete. Discipline: just showing up every single day and doing the job, even when it's not easy, even when it's not fun, even when it's a grind. Athletes are used to doing that. We got to go to practice every day. But we don't mind going to practice because we appreciate the games. We appreciate the competitiveness that comes with it. We know that there's an end goal far down the road, like winning the championship, that comes with doing the practices every single day. So we appreciate that.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Number three, athletes have to be coachable. You can't be an athlete if you are not willing to be coached. Whether you're doing a solo sport like boxing or golf, you have a coach or a trainer. If you're doing a team sport, your coach is holding you accountable, but also your own teammates will hold you accountable if you're not doing the job you're supposed to do. We are highly coachable, meaning you can tell an athlete, "Hey, you're messing up. You made a mistake. You didn't do what you were supposed to do." An athlete is used to taking that. We're used to taking that kind of accountability to our faces, even in front of everybody. It's not going to cause us to fold up and quit. A lot of people don't have that experience. They can't handle it.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Also, the mental toughness. In the sports world, if you're a boxer, there's no way you can win a boxing match without getting hit in the face a couple of times. You're going to get hit. You can still win the fight, but you're going to get punched. If you're a basketball player, eventually somebody is going to block your shot or dunk on you or cross you over, or you're going to miss a couple of shots in a row. It's going to happen. You can still win the game, but you have to take that and you got to keep going. In sales, for example, there's no salesperson in the world who closes every sale. We get phones hung up on us. We get doors slammed in our faces. We have people telling us, "No, don't call me again." And we have to show up to the next sales call as if the last one didn't happen.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: One last thing I'll give you is performance. In the sports world, you got to perform. We do all that practice, and when we get our chance, we got to go out there and do our thing. It's the same thing in the business world. We do all our preparation and research and learning about our prospect and the product and all that. Then we get to the sales call or the presentation or whatever it is, the expo hall. We got to go out there and perform. There are many similarities from the sports world that apply to the business world. I don't know if you set me up with this question, but the thing is the Work On Your Game philosophy is all about extracting those things from the sports world and then translating and articulating how they apply in business. That's really basically what I do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Well, I'd like to believe that I'm good at interviewing people, so it was a setup for you because I knew what you had coming next, man. I love your whole philosophy, so I tried to put it up on a tee. I play sports too, so I like to put the ball right on the tee. I was a baseball player, but you can roll right into it, dude. This is great stuff. Thank you.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: I tried to play baseball for a while. I wasn't too good, so luckily I switched over to basketball. I always loved basketball, but I just wasn't great at it. I was a football and a baseball player. I played high school basketball, but I was the 12th guy that they'd run out there just so the big guys could beat me up and run into me during practice.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I didn't get my turn. That's what they called it.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Yeah, that's what it was. They're like, "Bring the big football dummy in, let the big guys beat them up for a while and do their skill moves on them. We won't care what happens."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I actually was a ref for 12 years and did some college, ultimately had kids and couldn't keep going. But I love the game. What I found really interesting, and this is completely aside from what we're here to talk about, I just love basketball. I haven't played through high school. I didn't play in college. I played baseball in college. But having seen the game from the referee side, seeing the angles of that sport, now I coach my kids. You get this really interesting view that I almost wish I could share with young ball players today. I'm like, "I wish they could see the ref's perspective." Not for the mentality and that kind of stuff, that's not what I'm talking about. The angles that you have to take to see the game to be a good referee, then go back to playing. You see a completely new set of angles to the sport that you didn't necessarily see as a player that weren't there. It's a really interesting perspective that I try to share with my players now that I coach. A lot of coaches and a lot of players have only seen the game from the player's perspective. They've never actually worked the angles that you have to see from the ref's perspective. What it does is it opens up different opportunities. It's just interesting. It's anecdotal, but it's interesting.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: That is interesting. Have you thought about, or have you ever called a ref and said, "Come to practice and talk to the players about what they see?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, so it's funny. My dad's been a ref for 36 years. He's the one that got me into it. I have had him talk to the guys a little bit because what you see, there are a lot of open passing angles that when you're playing, some guys intrinsically see them, but they tend to be elite. What I've said to some of my guys who maybe just don't have that natural intuition who are still developing that is, there are these angles that are there that when you're playing you might not see, but they absolutely positively are there. If you can fill those spaces, it has a lot to do with—I try to get them to move a lot without the ball because those guys seeing those lanes through this different perspective helps them. Sometimes I'll have them stand on the baseline and watch how a ref will see the game and see that type of angle. Then when they go out and they practice, they can kind of move into different spots that maybe the defense isn't expecting. It's interesting.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: That is interesting.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't know. Someone who actually knows the game better than me should take that and turn it into something really good. But there's something there.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Yeah. It gives you that idea of, we all have—and I think about this from business too—what are the unknown unknowns kind of idea? I think that's what that perspective is. Where I picked up on that is, hey, we know this business really well. Are there parts of it that we just don't even know that we don't know exist that maybe someone else is seeing or a vendor is seeing that we don't see? It's an interesting way of looking at it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But let's get into your philosophy around this particular topic.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Sure. Around which part?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, the Work On Your Game philosophy. That's where we were headed before I took us off track.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: All right. So what you just said there, Ryan, actually goes in line with something that I talk about. I tell people my superpower in business is insight. Working as a coach, there are a lot of coaches out there, a lot of authors. A lot of people talk about mindset or entrepreneurship or even former athletes doing things. I tell people my superpower is insight. What you just described is insight. It's helping people understand what they weren't even aware that they didn't understand. But once they understand that they could use it now, they're like, "Oh, wow, that is a paradigm shifting perspective. Now that I see that, now I see things completely different. Now I realize that I was asking myself the wrong question. Now you helped me see a different question I should be asking myself." That's where all the difference is.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: These days with all the access we have to information, a lot of times people are looking for answers. The problem is they get the answers to the wrong questions. Even if you get the right answers, you still have a problem. For me, my biggest thing when I'm working with people is helping them get insight. "Okay, I see what you're asking and what you're looking to do. Let me show you the questions that you weren't even aware that you need to be asking. Once we answer those, that'll knock out not only the questions that you had, but also the questions that would come up after that that we needed to resolve anyway."
--:-- Dre Baldwin: The Work On Your Game philosophy, to answer your question, is based around four pieces: mindset, strategy, systems, and accountability as far as what we do with business people. But the foundation of it started with—I believe you're referring to the mindset piece—was discipline, confidence, mental toughness, and personal initiative. Those things all came from my background in sports. Where that started was while I was on YouTube. This is before it was YouTube. This is right around the time we started to say social media. I had an audience of ballplayers who were following me, and they found out about my background. I only played one year of high school ball. I walked on and played D3 college ball. At this point, I was a pro player, but I was a sometimes employed, sometimes unemployed pro basketball player. I would be in this empty gym in Miami. They're like, "Wait a minute, I thought you were a pro basketball player. Why are you in an empty gym in Miami? Shouldn't you be playing for somebody?"
--:-- Dre Baldwin: I would answer these questions. I would say, "Well, I'm a free agent right now. I was waiting for the phone to ring." So they would just start asking, "Dre, what keeps you coming to the gym every day to work out? You don't even know when the phone's going to ring again." Sometimes I didn't know if the phone would ring again. Not when, but if it was going to ring again. "What kept you coming to the gym and working out even in your teen years when you weren't making a high school team? How do you get the confidence to perform?" Anybody who knows the sports world, Ryan, knows that you practice all year and tryouts for the high school team is like one day. 364 days of practice for one day. If you don't do good that one day, you got to wait a whole other year before you can try again. "How do you get the confidence to perform in that one chance that you get?" Even at the pro level, often your tryout is literally one day. You barely made the high school team, walked on to college. You're in and out of pro. Sometimes you're not signed. "What's the mindset behind somebody who keeps trying, despite all the reality in front of you that says this probably isn't a good idea?"
--:-- Dre Baldwin: From the first one, I started talking discipline. Second question, I started talking confidence. Third one, mental toughness. The fourth one was people just ask, "How do you get started on things?" There were a couple of things I had gotten started on. Number one, playing basketball overseas. Most of my career was played in Europe. A lot of ballplayers who were aspiring at that time, because that was my target audience, these aspiring 13 to 18 year old ballplayers, mostly male. "How do you get started playing overseas if I actually wanted to?" The overseas basketball world is not like being a lawyer or a doctor where you can read the requirements and you make it. It doesn't work like that. It's a very shadowy industry. I had figured it out and I'd start to explain it back to people. "How do you get started?" Or they would ask, "How do you get started getting known on the internet?" Because now at this point, we're starting to hit this inflection point where the internet went from being a thing for geeks to a thing that people would consume to a thing that people wanted to participate in. Now it was starting to be a participate. Now people are starting to create content and I was already doing it. People are like, "How can I get known on the internet?" Because now it was starting to look like maybe somebody could do this as a full-time job, just be on the internet and put stuff out. I was already doing it. They were just asking how to get started on this stuff. I obviously was a person they could tell just from my experience and the things I would tell them that I'm a big initiative-taking individual. So they would just ask about that. I started talking about personal initiative.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: That's where the four pieces came from: discipline, confidence, mental toughness, personal initiative. As I started sharing those things, the athletes would say to me, two things happened here. Athletes said to me, "Dre, the way that you're explaining this, you sound like a philosopher. You sound like a college professor. You sound like a professional speaker." That kind of gave me a light bulb moment. "Hey, maybe I could just go and talk about this stuff. Is there an industry for this?" I didn't know there was such a thing as just standing on the stage and getting paid to give a speech at this time. This is about 2010.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: The other thing that happened was people who didn't play sports—actually, three things happened. Let me tell you the second thing before I get to the third thing. Second thing was I started explaining these concepts in a video every week. I called it the Weekly Motivation. I did this video every Monday. At this point, I'm putting out videos on YouTube every single day. Six days a week is the basketball: how to dribble, how to shoot, how to jump higher so you can dunk. This is literally on the court basketball or off the court training, but it was all training. Mondays, I would do the Weekly Motivation. This would just be a little two to five minute selfie video before selfie videos were a thing on my cheap little camera, because we didn't even have video cameras on the phones at this point. I did that video every Monday for 400 Mondays in a row. That laid the foundation for what we have now. Those pieces that I laid, those bricks that I laid there, I really just went back and revisited them as I started to put together these things for the non-athletes.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: The third piece, Ryan, was people who didn't play sports started seeing those Weekly Motivation videos. They weren't watching me show you how to do the Kobe move. They were watching me talk about mindset, about discipline, about confidence, because I wasn't relating it just to sports. I was just talking about it, period, even though my audience were athletes. These people would say, "Dre, I don't even play sports. I didn't know who you were, but my son was watching your YouTube video and I overheard what you were saying. These things that you're saying, they apply to people who are not athletes the same way they apply to people who are athletes." That was the moment, Ryan, that I realized, "Okay, I can have an audience outside of the sports world." I always knew I wanted to do something outside of sports. I just didn't know how I was going to do it.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: At this point, this is about 2010. I played from 2005 to 2015. I still played for five more years. The phone didn't ring. At that point from 2010 to 2015, I started to lay the foundation for the business that we have today because I started to share messages that were applicable to people who were not playing sports, with the respect to the fact that a lot of the athletes who were following me at that time, many of them would not go on to even play in college, let alone play pro. They were all going to transition out of sports anyway, just like I would at some point. Athlete careers are very short. Eventually we all move on to something else. I would love to say I was so clairvoyant that I could have laid all this out in 2010. I didn't. I couldn't. But luckily, it worked out that way. I started to put these pieces together because I was thinking outside of basketball. I knew I didn't want to be a trainer. I didn't want to be a referee. I didn't want to be a coach. I didn't want to be an analyst. I wasn't going to be the old guy at the LA Fitness. I was going to get done playing and I was done. I was going to walk away cold turkey, which is exactly what I did in 2015. I was going to move into a different space, which is what I did. Luckily, I already had a runway. My transition from being an athlete to being an entrepreneur was much smoother than it is for a lot of athletes. The main reason for that is because my ride to get in was much rougher than most athletes. It was kind of "first shall be last and last shall be first."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What was that like when you hung them up? Do you have—I mean, you obviously had made the decision and committed to it, but there had to be some residual emotion. I think a lot of guys struggle with that, even if they're confident in their next step. Do you still think about it? Do you still think about the days of playing? How do you handle that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'll give you the context of my question. There are two moments, there are two activities in my sports career. One, sacking a quarterback as a middle linebacker, and two, hitting a home run. I find it very, very difficult in a professional environment to recreate the emotion that you feel in those moments. Maybe that's similar to hitting a big three or dunking or whatever the equivalent is in basketball. Obviously, like I said, I didn't play basketball at a high level. I hung my cleats up a long time ago, outside of the occasional beer league softball game that I get pulled in as a mercenary for. For the most part, I just train to stay fit today. But those two moments, it's funny, I still have dreams. I still will occasionally wake up and have moments where your brain is recreating these moments in your head. I find you just cannot get—or I shouldn't say can't—the closest thing I've found is speaking on stage. That's the closest thing that I've found. I'm a speaker as well. So one, can you relate to that? Do you have that similar thing? And two, have you found aspects or been able to replace some of those electrifying sports moments in your professional career?
--:-- Dre Baldwin: So, several things. Number one, I don't still have the visions of the athletic stuff as much as I did when I first stopped. It's been almost 10 years since I stopped playing.
--:-- One of the things that I would even tell myself, and I did this consciously, is when I first stopped playing and I would get that visionary in your mind, I would always envision something that was athletic, something that you did with your body physically, because that's the world that I came from. That's the way that I could express whatever energy I had. I expressed that energy through the basketball court or through weights or whatever it was.
--:-- But then I constantly started telling myself, "OK, well, if that's going to be over, then we have to shift this mindset. We can't start defaulting to envisioning athletic performance. We've got to start envisioning whatever business performance is going to be." I didn't even know what it was going to be. I had to start shifting the way that I defaulted to thinking because I knew I was moving into a different space. That took some time, but I got there.
--:-- The second thing is I still work out every day. I dropped basketball. I have not touched it. When I said cold turkey, I mean cold turkey. Last game was a three-on-three tournament that finished on a sponsor. We won ten thousand dollars and I haven't played a single official game of basketball since, not even pickup. When I walked away, I just dropped basketball and picked up other things. Now I like to run. I'll run 10Ks. I've done a couple of marathons, stuff like that. I go to boxing. That's the way I can still get my physical rocks off.
--:-- As far as what can emulate that high of getting a nice dunk in a game or getting a reaction from the audience when they realize, "Oh, this guy can do some stuff that maybe we didn't think he could do," I think the closest thing is being on the stage as a speaker. That is the closest. In business, you're doing it online, through email, talking to one client, or you have one consultant gig. The only place you have a crowd in the business world is as a speaker. So yeah, I would agree that that's the closest you get to it. Unfortunately, there aren't 82 games a year, at least not for me.
--:-- The biggest thing that I tell athletes, and we don't always have a choice in this, is hopefully you get it all out of your system so that you're not looking back like, "Damn, maybe I could have did this. Maybe I could have did that." I was lucky enough to be able to walk away from the game. For a lot of athletes, sometimes you're the last one to find out your career's over. You are forced out of the game. You don't choose to walk away. Luckily, I was able to walk away and I didn't have any regrets of anything that I didn't do. Of course, it'd be great to play against this guy again so I could beat him, but other than that, no, I got everything I wanted to get out of it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, I appreciate that a lot. I think that's very useful for a lot of people, myself included. My moment of truth was I was playing semi-pro ball in Washington, D.C., which was the bigger expenses and some other nonsense, but I still had a straight job after college. I walked into a meeting, and my boss looks down at me and goes, "Did you have a game last night?" I said, "Yeah, yeah, we won." He goes, "Yeah, I can tell. There's blood coming through your khakis." I looked down and where I had stolen second base at some point in the game, the blood stain from where I slid was coming through my khakis. It obviously opened up on my way to work. That was when I was kind of like, "I think it's time." I wasn't getting picked up by any pro teams at that point. I had a couple shots and it was all good. I was very satisfied with my sports career, so I have no regrets. But it was funny. She kind of looked me up and down and was like, "Yeah, you might want to start thinking about the fact that you can't show up to business meetings with bloodstains." I was like, "You're probably right about that. Baseball isn't paying the bills at this point."
--:-- There was something you said in your TEDx talk that really struck me, particularly when I'm talking to younger professionals who have gotten past the "brand new to business" phase and are starting to figure out what they want to do. We all kind of hit this moment where we want to be more than we are, but we're hesitant to do the things to get there. You addressed a bunch of things in the TEDx talk, but the one that really resonated with me that I would love for you to address is the idea of a fear of success. A lot of people hear "fear of failure." They understand it. They've heard a million talks about it. But I don't think many people consider a fear of success. I would love for you to expand on this, talk about it, and why it is actually something that we need to think through in order to move forward in our careers.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Man, so that fear of success. I actually recorded some content on it. It was about a 30-part series, 30 points, 10 parts, where I talked about the fear of success. I wish I could recite all 30 to you. I don't know them off the top of my head.
--:-- When it comes to that fear of success, I think it is one of the main things that slows people down these days because obviously we can see other people's success. I think fear of failure used to be the biggest thing before we had the internet and we were all interconnected, because we didn't really know what success looked like if you didn't already have it and you weren't close to someone who had it. But now you can see a lot of people who are successful. You can see all the stuff they're doing and that they have. I think a lot of people now start to overthink it because we have access to so much information. People just get ahead of themselves mentally and start beating themselves before they even get to a thing. It's kind of like driving with the emergency brake on.
--:-- I'll give you a funny example. There's a girl I knew years ago. We were living in the same building. She said, "Hey, can you come with me? Next time I go to the gym, can you just show me how to do some workouts and stuff?" Because she had never worked out in her life. I said, "Sure, I'll show you how to use the machines and show you some exercises." She told me what areas of her body she wanted to work on. I said, "All right, cool." She said, "Oh, one more thing. Before we even do that, I want you to know I'm not trying to be one of those gym girls who has all these muscles and looks like a man. I don't want to be that." I said to her, "Well, you never worked out in your life. How about we just figure out you get into the gym two days in a row before we worry about you having too many muscles?" This is what happens with a lot of people. They start fearing the things that might happen with success.
--:-- I remember once I was talking to some kids. I was working with a volunteer group years ago. These kids were seventh and eighth graders. The question asking them was, "Would you want to be rich and make a lot of money in life?" A lot of these young men consistently said, "No, I don't want to make a lot of money because when you have a lot of money, you have all these problems. People try to take your money from you, they want to steal it, and you get sued." I'm like, "Where did y'all learn this? Where are you getting this from?" Again, it's just slowing themselves down for something that they haven't even achieved yet.
--:-- When it comes to the fear of success, I think one of the biggest things that gets in people's way is the expectations that come with it. When you're successful, the first thing that happens is the other people who are not as successful as you, they are not going to try to catch up to you. Many people think that's what happens. You become successful, all your peers see you being successful, and they say, "Oh, what is Ryan doing? Let me get on that same plane. Let me ride with him." That's not actually what happens. What happens is most people will just stop playing. They go sit on the sideline and watch you because it's easier for them to watch and live vicariously through your success than it is for them to do what you did to become a success. It's not as easy as it looks on TV.
--:-- Why would somebody fear that? Why does that matter? Let's say you've got a whole audience of people now watching you be successful. Why would you fear that? Why would you resist that? The reason people end up resisting that is because people are not dumb. They can think a couple of steps ahead. "Well, if everybody's on the sideline watching me be successful, what does that mean? That means I need to keep being successful. That means whatever I did to become successful, I must keep doing it." It's one thing to make the game-winning shot today, but now the next game, they expect you to do it again. And the game after that, and the game after that. That's an expectation that becomes a weight on your shoulders. Once you show that you can be successful, now everyone is going to expect you to keep being that level of success all the time.
--:-- The thing is, Ryan, it's not that people don't know how to do it. Once you've done a thing to create success, whatever that means, then you already know the formula. You can just deconstruct what you just did in order to be successful. The challenge is not tangible and physical. "Can you do it?" The challenge is mental and emotional. "Are you willing to push yourself to do it?" That's the challenge.
--:-- This is why, and you mentioned Kobe Bryant earlier today. For me, it would be Michael Jordan. What made Michael Jordan who he was is not that he won the championships and the sneakers and the stats. It's the fact that once he became successful and all the expectation was on him to keep being that guy, he actually did it. He delivered on it and he never came off it. He stayed up there and he never fell down. That is the challenge. That's a mental and emotional thing. You can't count that. You can't measure it. There's no film on that. When people talk about Jordan and Kobe and LeBron, nobody mentions that. Most people don't mention that part and they don't bring it up in arguments because it's hard to quantify. But that is the main thing that made him who he was.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the reasons I started this podcast, when I speak or coach clients, it's almost never on tactics. In fact, I almost get frustrated when someone over-indexes on tactics. It's always fine to ask about tactics. Tactics are important and sometimes they can be obstacles. I'm not trying to knock them, but on the realm of importance with all the successful people I've worked for early in my career, or been peers with, or friends who are very successful, when we get together and talk, no one ever goes, "That tactic we put in place didn't work." That's never the conversation. It's never, "We did this sales process and it didn't work, and that's what screwed us." It is always something that has to do with their mindset, how they approach the situation. Maybe there was an employee-related issue and they came at it too aggressively, or they didn't reframe their thoughts before they approached something, or they allowed their emotions to help them make a decision.
--:-- It's why I love conversations like this and talking to guys like yourself. So much of your work is around the idea of mindset and how we connect. I was actually just talking to a buddy of mine who's a very successful speaker, and we speak on a lot of the same topics. I said to him, "What do you do when you're on a speaking docket and you know that someone else earlier in the day possibly had talks on the same topics as you?" His response was, "We could say the same words and half the audience will relate to her and half the audience will relate to me." I think this is speaking to what you're talking about. You just have to keep going. There are always going to be people who, the way I say things, don't get it. Then you frame it in the context of your basketball career, and all of a sudden it clicks over for them. If we just stop because we feel like X number of people or some arbitrary number of views on YouTube haven't been hit yet, we completely miss the purpose of doing the work.
--:-- You've used multiple times this idea of discipline. I think it's cliche to say discipline is important, so I don't necessarily want you to explain why it's important. I would love for you to explain how you cultivate discipline in your own life. How do you bring that out in yourself? And maybe expanding on that, when you feel yourself fall off the path of discipline, how do you correct and bring yourself back on?
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Excellent question. First thing is, most of the time when people are looking for some type of mindset boost or advancement or enhancement, they usually look for confidence. I ask people, "If you could change any internal trait about yourself, something that we can't see or touch, but you can feel it and it matters, what is it?" The answer is always confidence. "I want to be more confident, have more self-esteem, believe in myself more." Which makes sense because people understand by deductive reasoning, if I believe in myself more, I'll try more things. I'll do more things. I'll have better energy when I do it, and that'll lead to better performance and more results. It's true. Confidence will help you do all of those things.
--:-- The challenge is people don't know where to get confidence from. How do you actually get confidence? The truth is discipline creates confidence. If you look at the most confident people you know, or at least people who are most confident in a particular area, they are usually highly disciplined in that area as well. That's the reason why they're so confident. They've done the work. They've earned their right to be confident.
--:-- Now, then the question becomes, let's take another step back. Where did discipline come from? Discipline is a result of structure. When you have a proper structure in place, you will be disciplined because you don't have to force it. The challenge with discipline, Ryan, is that a lot of people try to make themselves be disciplined. I hear from people all the time. I'll ask them, "What's the biggest challenge you're dealing with right now?" They'll say something like, "I need to be more disciplined. I'm just lacking discipline." I say, "OK, well, what are you doing to fix it?" That's always my follow-up question. They'll say, "Well, I just got to be more consistent. I got to push myself more. I got to get more motivated. I just got to be more disciplined at the thing." In other words, "I have a problem doing this, so what I need to do is get better at doing this." They have a circular issue that they can't solve. That's usually the issue that people have when it comes to discipline.
--:-- The reason why I explain to people that structure creates discipline is because when you have the proper structure, if you simply follow the structure, discipline comes out of the bottom of the funnel, metaphorically speaking. You don't have to make yourself be disciplined. All you have to do is follow a process. Discipline comes out. Structure, process, systems, also on a personal level, habits. These are all in this context. They all mean the same thing. It's a process that you follow, the same things, the same way, every time. The outcome is discipline. That's where you get that result of being a more disciplined individual. That discipline produces the confidence, the confidence to the performance, performance to the results, results to the rewards.
--:-- What was the rest of your question? I forgot it while I'm talking.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, it's great. I'm perfectly happy to reframe the second half. When you find yourself off the path, how do you correct yourself? How do you see that? And what do you do to get back on?
--:-- I'll give you the context of this question. I had a good client of mine call me the other day and say, "I'd been doing the things and everything was great. Then the kid gets sick, wife goes out of town, a tough board meeting comes up. Three weeks later, all the structures and processes have been destroyed and I'm back to square one." His question was, he felt defeated. How do you catch yourself and get yourself back on that path when you find yourself falling off of it?
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Well, the first thing is you have to have a system of checks and balances so that you actually notice that you're off whatever you're supposed to be on. At least he knew he was off. That's the first step. He knew he was off and he called you and told you he knew he was off. Someone of a lesser quality, lesser caliber, either would have been off and not known it, or they would have been off, known it, and didn't call you and tell you. So at least he called, he knew it, and he said something, and he knew he needed to get it fixed. So he called you to help him get it fixed. He had to do three things there. Most people don't do one, two, or three.
--:-- That's the first thing. You have to have a system of checks and balances. That's why the fourth piece of our program is accountability. Accountability is not just for the people, it's also for the process. If your process is not producing the desired result, we've got to fix the process. If the person is not following the process and not getting the result, then we've got to fix the person. The number one thing is you've got to catch yourself.
--:-- I'll give you a personal example. I like to try to get out with my son for a walk by 5 p.m. Eastern. For about two weeks, I was leaving at 5:17, 5:20, 5:30, 5:40. I was letting work leak into that time and it was pushing back my evening routine. I was going to bed late and I wake up at the same time every day early, so I wasn't getting enough sleep. My energy was terrible for about three weeks straight this month as we're recording this. I had to catch myself. I said, "OK, I have to stop doing this. I have to be done work at a certain time." It doesn't mean the work I'm going to be doing is less. It means I need to do a better job of getting more work done in the time that I do have, rather than stealing from my time, which is impossible because there's no such thing as managing time. It goes the same pace no matter what you do. I need to manage myself and get my stuff done in the time that I have so that I'm not stealing from one activity in order to finish another activity.
--:-- That's all part of accountability. This is why we have the systems of checks and balances. This is why in anything, anybody has an accountant. Accountants do double entry. Why do you do double entry? To make sure that they made a mistake on part A that part B catches it. That's the whole point. That's the reason why you have accountability. They're literally called "accountants" holding themselves to account. You have to have a way of holding yourself to account or being held to account.
--:-- This is why people in the military perform at a higher level while they're in the service than when they're out, because they are always being held to account when they're in the service. Athletes, we used to being coached. This is the reason why business people like to hire athletes, because we are used to being held accountable. When you hold them accountable at work, they can take it. Whereas someone who's not used to that may bristle and fall apart when they're being held accountable.
--:-- These are processes, and that's a structure. That's a form of a structure. The military is probably the most structured environment known to man. I've never been in the military, but from what I hear. The next closest place is probably the sports world, team sports. The next is maybe certain businesses, not all of them, but certain businesses. Hopefully you get some people who can apply these things in their own lives.
--:-- The answer to your question is you have to have a way of checking yourself. The only way you can check yourself is there must be a structure in the first place, because if there's no structure, then there's nothing to check. Your client who called you and said, "Everything's off structure." How do you know everything's off structure? Because there's a certain thing that is "on structure." Before they hired you, maybe there was no structure. If they would have been in that same situation without hiring you, there would be no one to call and nothing to talk about because there's nothing to hold it against.
--:-- For me, if I say I want to be done work at 5 p.m., even if I just said that and I don't have any other structure to my life, I want to be done work at 5 p.m. and I look at the clock and it's 5:30, at least I have that holding me accountable. When people hear these words "structures" and they hear people talk about systems, a lot of business people talk about systems all the time and processes. People think it's some big, complex thing. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. It can be very simple. The calendar app on your phone that you get for free is a structure. It is a system. It's 24 hours in a day. All you got to do is put all your activities in there and you'll realize that you can't do everything because everything isn't going to fit. That is a form of a structure. A structure can be extremely simple. It can be extremely complex, but there needs to be one in order for it to be disciplined. If you want to be a disciplined person, anyone listening to this, you must have a structure to follow. No structure, no discipline.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. I'm reading this really good book, *The Effective Executive* by Peter Drucker. The core idea is too often we focus on getting things done instead of getting the right things done. I talk to my clients a lot about this because a lot of the people that come to me are not lazy people. They come to me because they're not lazy, but they feel like they're still not getting the results that they should get despite working really hard.
--:-- There are two things I see. One, we just check boxes and consider that activity "getting things done." Reframing that and prioritizing is very important. The second thing that I see, and I think some of this comes out of my Judeo-Christian values, is I have this quote that I say to myself all the time. It's very short: "Grace upon grace." We need to give ourselves grace when you fall off. When you're getting out at 5:22 and 5:17 and 5:16, some people will get really mad at themselves. "I can't do this. What's wrong with me? My son's important to me. This time is..." They allow all this negative emotion to flood themselves when they miss their marks.
--:-- I talk to my clients a lot about this. You're going to mess up 10,000 times all the time. Everyone does. Listen to anyone who's been a success in any way. When they get past the early egotistical years and they get into the reflective years of their career, they will share with you all the mistakes that they made along the way. We need to give ourselves grace. I've found it helps some of these people get back on the path easier.
--:-- With this guy, he was so mad at himself when he called me. We do monthly check-ins. I hadn't heard from him. I said, "How you doing? What's up?" I could tell he was upset. I like to use physical copy for the right things. I think there's something about physically checking a box. It helps people. He said, "I haven't checked the box in three weeks." He was so upset. I just said, "Take a deep breath, man. It's all good. It's three weeks of your life. The key is getting back on the path, not allowing this to derail you for longer."
--:-- To your point, and this is why I love the way you broke this down, once we've built that structure, getting back on the path is so much easier. Now we can say, "OK, all right. I'll be okay. Three weeks is not the end of my life. I know the process. Let's get right back to it. Let's start doing it again." Whatever that thing is, whether it's sports or business or being a good spouse or partner or a good parent or a good community leader. I see so many people derail themselves further because they want to punish themselves for what is just being human.
--:-- I'm interested in how much you've seen that. Have you applied grace or concepts like that? How do you talk to people when they get to that really negative place when they've missed a goal?
--:-- Dre Baldwin: A couple of things that you said there that I want to make sure I say before I even answer that question. When you said you get off the structure and get back on it, it's much easier when you're coming to it the second, third, fourth time than the first time. Going back to that concept of the third day, we call that "first day." Let's say someone was really on their thing when it comes to working out or whatever the process was that your client was following, but he stopped following it. When you get off it for a while and then you come back to it, you're at what we call the "first day." You know what it feels like to be in the flow and be performing at your highest level, but you're not there because you've been off for a minute. You're a little bit rusty. You got to get back, but you have to respect the process. You do have to start back at step one. You'll be able to get to step ten much faster than you did the first time around, but you must respect the process. You can't just go from zero to 100 because we got to build you back up.
--:-- It's kind of like when Michael Jordan retired, went to play baseball, came back. He wasn't exactly Michael Jordan anymore. He was still pretty good, but then he had to spend that offseason getting back to being Michael Jordan. Then he won three more championships. He had to respect the first day. He had to go back and do the work all over again. I wanted to mention that.
--:-- The other thing is when you talk about *The Effective Executive* and the titling is perfect. A lot of people focus on being productive. "I just want to be productive." Productive is checking the boxes, like you said. We all fall victim to that. Just yesterday, for example, I'm finishing up a marketing course I'm trying to create. I could have recorded some content yesterday. Recording content is easy for me. It's my comfort zone. But I said, "You know what?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I need to finish. I'm going to finish making this funnel, which is a little bit more work. It's a little bit more tedious, but creating the content would have been very easy for me. Autopilot. Let me finish making the funnel and the funnel will be ready today. I'll probably be launching that course this weekend. But the whole thing is I had to catch myself not trying to be productive, but instead being effective, because that is going to matter much more for the long run to me making another video or two.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Yeah. And it's the hierarchy is productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, because productivity is just checking boxes and doing anything. You can be productive at doing a bunch of nonsense. You can be efficient, meaning you're getting a whole bunch of things done. But again, the things are getting done. Do they matter? Like what you just said. And then effective is getting things done that matter. That's the level that we all want to be at. Even if you only get one thing done in a day, that one thing can be more important than the other 20 little itsy bitsy things that you were doing yesterday.
--:-- All right. So it's a matter of those things. And can you ask the question again? I forgot what the question was, to be honest with you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't even know because that answer was so good. I said I was a good interviewer, but I was lying. I want to be respectful of your time. I want to be respectful of the audience's time. And I have one final question for you. And you can answer this any way that you want. So take this wherever you want to go.
--:-- I titled this podcast *Finding Peak*. And it was a testament to my own pursuit of peak performance, understanding kind of journey, not a destination. And oftentimes, as I've grown the podcast, it's become even more important to me that this is an archive for my own. I have two boys, for my boys to understand what this journey means and what their father was thinking about at this time. They're younger, they're eight and 10. And some of these concepts, although I try to talk to them about these concepts, some of them still go over their head. And I'm like, "You'll understand when you get older, but let that stuff marinate."
--:-- So, taking into account everything you've already said, and you can repeat answers you've already made. In your own pursuit of peak performance in your life, whether that's your basketball career, your entrepreneurial career, your relationship with loved ones, your son, et cetera. So take this whatever direction you want. In the pursuit of peak perfection or peak performance, I'm sorry, if there was one thing, just one thing that you could instill upon your child and say, "Here is, if you grab this one thing, you got the best chance of becoming the best version of yourself, the best version of however God made you," what would that one thing be?
--:-- Dre Baldwin: That's a great question. I've never been asked that one. The one thing that I would give him to be the best version of himself is tapping into investing in yourself. It's understanding the concept of investing in yourself and that in life we have five forms of investment: time, money, attention, energy, and focus. And anything in which we want to be successful, you must invest all five. There are no shortcuts to that.
--:-- And any challenge that he ever faces, he needs to look at: Has he made the investments that will position him to resolve and handle that challenge that's in front of him? As long as he understands that, then he can look and say, "Okay, I'm having this problem with my body. I'm having this problem with my business. I'm having this problem with my relationships. Have you made the investments?" And then he can just by deductive reasoning—that is a structure in itself—look at and see where he may be deficient. Fix that deficiency. It usually will lead him in the direction, if not completely solving the problem.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that answer, man. It's been my absolute pleasure to connect with you and chat with you. I love your work. I love what you're doing. For those listening to this show or watching on YouTube, where is the best place for them to connect with you, learn more, learn more about the courses you have, your books, your work, or if they want to hire you to speak? Where are the best places to drive people?
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Well, people can get that concept, The Third Day. I got a book on it. I can give people a free copy. Can I share that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Share whatever you want, man. This is full promo time. You gave so much value to us. I want you to get as much back as you can.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Perfect. Well, this is the book, *The Third Day: The Decision That Separates the Pros from the Amateurs*. So as I talked about, I made a YouTube video about this 10 years ago and then I did a TED talk about it when I first got out of sports and then I wrote a book about it. So this book is all about how you show up and give your best effort when you least feel like it. I'll give you a free copy of this paperback version of the book. All you got to do is go to thirddaybook.com. The book is free. We just ask that you cover the shipping at thirddaybook.com.
--:-- As far as everything else that we're doing, once you get this book, you'll be on my email list. And I send out a lot of email. I sent out about a million and a half emails this month. So you'll be on my email list and everything we got going. But workonyourgameuniversity.com is the place where we're most focused right now. That's where we do our coaching, consulting, et cetera. And if you want to reach out to me about anything else that is not covered on one of those sites, you can just send us an email. I am very easy to reach. Our profiles are public. I'm on every social media platform. So just look my name up. I'm hard not to find. So just send us a DM or email and we're easy to reach.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dre, it's been such a pleasure having you on the show.
--:-- Dre Baldwin: Thank you for having me. Thank you for sharing your platform, Ryan.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thank you. Thank you.
--:-- [Outro music begins]
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