The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Sportswriter Kate Fagan Talk About Stoicism in Sports

Episode Date: August 5, 2020

Ryan speaks with sportswriter Kate Fagan about the issues surrounding physical and mental health in sports, how our society promotes sports to children and young adults, and more.Kate Fagan is a sportswriter, author, and former college basketball player. She has written the #1 New York Times best seller What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen. Previously she spent seven years as a writer and commentator on ESPN, as well as three years as the Philadelphia Inquirer’s correspondent covering the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers.Get What Made Maddy Run: https://geni.us/RlF1ejThis episode is brought to you by GoMacro. GoMacro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping.This episode is also brought to you by the Theragun. The new Gen 4 Theragun is perfect for easing muscle aches and tightness, helping you recover from physical exertion, long periods of sitting down, and more—and its new motor makes it as quiet as an electric toothbrush. Try the Theragun risk-free for 30 days, starting at just $199. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Kate Fagan: Homepage: http://www.bykatefagan.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/katefagan3Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katefagan3/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kate.fagan.56See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. of necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest

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You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or wonder yet Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I recorded this episode a little while ago I was actually just coming back from a protest in Bastrop County, where my office is, and they were trying to get a set of Confederate monuments taken down, which we've done some episodes and some talking about interestingly enough.

My guest today had herself just left one. So we didn't talk about that in the episode, we talked about it a little bit in the run up. Good news on both counts. The statue of John C. Cowhoun in South Carolina in Charleston came down, which my guest, Kate Fagan, was there for. And the statues in Bastrop County are being moved as well. Judge Paul Papi, who is the county judge,

sort of like the mayor of the county out in Bastrop, put together what I thought was a pretty brave and powerful statement about it. It was interesting to see democracy at work. Again, this idea that the stills are passive, that they don't try to actively change things. I think it's quite wrong. And it's always encouraging and exciting to see the process work.

And one of the interesting things, there was some talk about making the Confederate monuments, which say, less, we forget on them, put up to a referendum, like put on the ballot. And I thought that the judge made an interesting decision. He found that originally the city council, over 100 years ago, had made the decision to put the statue up.

And he said it was only right that the council owned the decision to take them down rather than putting it to a vote. And so I thought that was great. My guest today, Kate Fagan, is awesome. Her book, What Made, Maddie Run, is one of my absolute all-time favorites. I just posted on Instagram some of my favorite pages from that book. It's a book I've recommended. There's so many different coaches and parents.

It's a sad heartbreaking book, but at the same time I think a really important urgent book. Kate is a former writer for ESPN Sports Reporter and commentator. She's awesome. She was previously on the 76ers beat for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She was a great basketball player in college. She played at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She played in the National Women's Basketball League after that. Great basketball player. I think even better writer, interesting person. I read her book randomly. I don't remember how I heard about it, but it was just one of the best books that I read. And then I happened to bump into her at summit last year in Los Angeles. It might have been the year before. I've lost all sense of space and time. I don't know if you

guys have as well. But this episode is great. We end up talking about what it's like to leave a place like ESPN. Why someone would leave such a prestigious job. And I think her sort of logic is really interesting and inspiring. We talk about depression, we talk about social media, we talk about the power of sports, we talk about what it means to be so dedicated to a craft or an idea.

It's a great interview. I'm a big fan. Check out her stuff and hope you enjoy. I was thinking, I was just reading this this biography of Lou Gehrig, and it's a really old one, and I was thinking of your book, What Made Maddie Run, because there there's this line in the book, and it was saying sort of what we admire in athletes is their ability to sort of suffer quietly. And there's a Bill Bradley quote, like, you know, there's no great athlete that doesn't know what pain is. And what I think so interesting about your book and then

some of the stuff that Kevin Love has gotten attention for is like, what is this balance between the sort of the stoic, quiet endurance of pain that requires, that we demand of athletes and that the sport demands, and then this sort of rising awareness that suffering and silence is not a virtue and that, you know, you have to take care of yourself. Yeah, that's interesting interesting because I think the suffering in silence piece that permeates sports historically has been

in reference to the physical suffering that it takes to become great as an athlete. And that seems to be so much how we think of what athletes endure and how to become one of the best of all time. But what does also happen in the sports world and what so much of Maddie's story was about was how that culture of suffering in silence or just the physical suffering that it takes to be great has so often also meant that the

mental suffering and the emotional suffering that sometimes is related to your sports, sometimes is changeentially related to your sport. That becomes the culture of sports as well is, okay, if I'm supposed to be able to endure these, you know, 10, 400 meter sprints in practice, and not complain about it, then also what's happening inside my brain and my heart, also aren't things that I can talk about without being weak. And I think that's what I was trying so much to explore in Maddie. It's a strange tension. And it weirdly kind of seems like it intersects a little bit even with some of the

that's column sort of bridge issues between mental health and physical health like like concussions. I forget was it last season before there there was some player who got hit in the head and didn't immediately go into the concussion protocol and then the coach got really upset when he found out. This isn't't in the NFL, but I'm forgetting the example, with the point being that this was actually a selfish thing that the player did by not taking care of him or herself, because not only does it endanger their long-term prospects, but it hurts the team too to not take care of yourself. Yeah, and that is what has been so interesting about reporting that

historian and talking to so many, in this case, student athletes, but also professional athletes while working at ESPN was this idea that for too long speaking openly about what's happening emotionally and mentally with who you are. And maybe not fully related to you who is an athlete, but you being showing up as an athlete, maybe having other struggles. For too long, it's been seen that if you speak openly about that, it drags everyone else down, right? It drags the team down that the coach then has to deal with this separate side issue that will affect the overall performance of the team

because you're diverting attention away from the things that, quote unquote, matter, whether it be the drills or the overall cohesion and that you're taking away from that. And certainly don't think that's gone in any respect, as you can see from the story you just illustrated and probably hundreds more that go unreported where just the culture of existing inside sports tells us the simple equation of not being weak, showing up every day, even when you're injured, feeling that if you miss time away,

that's a subtraction from your team, instead of this pursuit of the overall wellness and wholeness of every athlete that will ultimately lead to probably better performance, both individually and as a team, but that at times along the way to that bettering feels like it's drawing away. And that's all part of the culture of sports

that has been in existence since sports began. And we're just starting to see, like you mentioned, like Kevin Love and Michael Phelps and certain other people realize that when they became the best version of themselves, it wasn't when they were performing best physically and not talking about the quote unquote detrimental parts of what was going on with them, but it was actually when they were talking about those parts and they were addressing those

parts and they were taking more rest and they were taking more days to rest their mind and body where they became the better all around athlete. Yeah, it's interesting, obviously, because you'll see that word sort of stoke, appear in sports. And I have to talk about this a lot with people that there's a big difference between sort of lowercase stoicism and uppercase stoicism. So, you know, that word lowercase stoicism

is a problem culturally, because it sort of means in English the sort of, you know, the unflinching, uncomplaining sort of endless endurance of pain. And I'm not sure that helps anyone and anything. Like how many athletes have hurt themselves physically playing through pain as well. Like we say just like push through it, when really like, you wouldn't keep driving your car with a check engine lighter, with an obviously flat tire

or with smoke coming out of the engine because you know, you're gonna do serious damage to it. So it's weird that both athletically and then I think in regular life, people will just, they're like, my heart hurts, you know, like, my soul hurts, I hate this, I'm if you'll empty, I feel sad, I miss this person, but and we'll just like,

we'll ignore that warning sign just forever and ever because we think it's helping, but it's hurting us and hurting other people around us. Yeah, and so this lowercase stoicism, I think is extremely prevalent, especially in college sports. And you see it at high performing high school sports, but college sports was really eye-opening to me in covering them and talking to so many athletes, both who had reached, let's say, the NBA or the NFL.

The lower case stoicism that exists in college sports is that there are days off that are mandated by the NCAA, but no coach, very few coaches would ever give you any more time than they're absolutely like bile loss, supposed to give you. And this just, it goes in the face of all science about the way the human body works. Almost every professional athlete I would end up chatting with Adi Svien, who was in the NFL, the NBA or the WMBA. We'd get around to this topic of how,

when they got to the professional level, they thought that it would be a gear higher in terms of training and pressure on them, emotionally, mentally, and physically, than college, and what they actually found out was that there was a lot of release valves at the professional level, because people were really following the science, you know, that you might need two full days off a week.

That one of those, you know, another day should be spent in yoga or in some kind of cross-training that wasn't as intense whereas at the college level that what, you know, what you're calling that lower, lower case stoicism, it was like the obsessive quality that that coaches had where they, they couldn't look at the science because they just had this thing inside lowercase stoicism, it was like the subcessive quality that coaches had where they couldn't look at the science because they just had this thing inside of them that said, you know, when I'm resting, my opponent's

working. And a lot of that was almost like a generational trauma that had been handed down where you have so many college coaches who had they, themselves, been college athletes and had gone through some sort of like traumatic experience with coaches, right? Where they're doing levels of workout without rest that are so exhausting mentally, physically and emotionally, but they survived it and then they figure the next generation should be put forth under that same pressure system. And all of that kind of led, you know, Navis is back to to Maddie. It led it leads to this breaking

down mentally, emotionally and physically of so many college athletes that you don't see on the professional level as much because the science and the thought are there. And at the college level, there's a lot of places where there's still that when I'm resting my opponents working mentality. Yeah, I I be curious what you think of this, because I asked a couple coaches this over the years, especially the college level, because you're right, they work these sort of grinding almost, like they work hours that would make people on Wall Street think, you know, are too hard, right?

And they work these crazy hours, and as someone who's sort of work a haolic tendencies myself, I was sort of like, if somehow like a coach's association or if the NCAA was like actually began to mandate coaching hours too, like a coach could only work from nine to five, you know, and you couldn't get to the office at 3am, you couldn't demand your your assistants get to the the office at 3am, you couldn't demand your assistance get to the office at 3am. You couldn't go directly from your game in Texas, back to Alabama, and on a red eye, then you're popping up to the facility,

before you even go home in shower. I was like, if it was mandated shorter hours, would the product on the field be visibly different at all? And I'm curious, do you think it would be, or is this all almost like a weird status competition to show that we're doing more? Yeah, I don't think that to the naked eye of a sports fan that you would see a different product on the field.

Right, I mean, I think you'd have more rested athletes, which would probably lead to like maybe 15% better performance. And I'm just arbitrarily home numbers. But I don't athletes, which would probably lead to maybe 15% better performance. And I'm just arbitrarily home numbers. But I don't know that you would be able to see as a casual fan and improved performance. But I think what the impact would be, would be a much better experience for everybody

involved in college sports. Because there's just so many different cycles within college sports, where not just the generational trauma, where so many coaches have been through these rigorous programs, and then they create programs where kids get churned out of them as well. But so many coaches,

and you've talked to so many of them on this podcast, they're daily performance of their identity, and they're justification for taking up space in the world is how hard they work and all of that is just constantly fueling itself. Because you see that their identity, for so many of them, is the sport and so that leads them to project onto these young athletes who are stepping under their college campus, who might have different ideas of what

being a college athlete looks like as they haven't been in it yet. All of a sudden, there's a projection onto these kids that this should be something that they're thinking and breathing every single minute of the day, because that's how coaches are incentivized to behave both culturally and monetarily within this system. And, you know, sports is it's, as I learned reporting this book and living a life in the sports world, like, it's, there's a lot of things in the world

that you can do where your identity can get wrapped up into it. But sports is a particularly like interesting one because so many of our kids are exposed to it. Probably more than you might say, like picking up a violin or other avenues of, you know, young kids like taking on like new extracurricular activities.

Like sports is one that most people touch at some point. Sure. And yet, there's very little on our society that I think is rewarded as much as sports are when you're a young person. Like if you're good at sports when you're 9, 10, 11, like the feedback that you get about that is astronomical. And what I started to realize as I started talking

to more college kids, as we would talk, you know, college student athletes, as we would talk through, this is like, unlike, let's say if you were great at this, like great at the violin. There is way more feedback come into if you're great at basketball when you're 12 than if you were great at this, great at the violin. There is way more feedback come into you if you're great at basketball when you're 12, than if you're great at the violin.

In terms of like all encompassing community feedback, right? The parents can be great, your peers think it's great. And I think it leads to this place where a lot of kids don't have to address whether they even love the sport or why they're doing the sport because they're just so wrapped up in how the feedback that they get.

And I think you see that in sports, as kids go upward through where the challenges and the pressures of it get greater, and there's no really room for them to actually understand if they love it, or it's something that they truly care about, because they're so attached to the feedback loop. And I think coaches have that as well.

And there's not a lot of comparisons in our culture where there's that amount of social capital and feedback loop, like there is in sports. I was talking to Martellis Bennett, actually, not long ago. And he was taught, he was like, obviously, I got really good at playing football. But he's like, now he's into drawing and already has this sort of creative agency

and he's done these really cool books. And he was like how good would I be at drawing? If I had been forced through a system that made my entire life about drawing and you know what I mean? Like if you had world-class experts pressuring you and putting you and testing and mentors and there was the example. So it is weird. Yeah, it's like we have this sort of like almost Spartan-esque system to create the absolute best at something. And we're not trying to pump out the best astronauts. We're not trying to pump out the best. Anything that would be sort of more, let's call it redeeming to society or solve

our biggest problems, the entire system is about creating sort of lopsidedly good athletes. Yeah, and the other thing that comes with that system for the most part is the disbelief from of outsiders that kids and then young athletes and then athletes as they grow older could do anything but love the thing they're doing.

Sure. Because I think a lot of just fans of sports see it as a game and fun and a pastime and especially because of all of our cultural like movies TV shows is shows, it's like if you're an athlete, you're the big man on campus. Like, if you're a college athlete, then you're on scholarship and everything's, your books are free and everything's free and you're playing in front of stadiums.

And so you have the conundrum of being a young person who might have found their way into this very rigorous system of like creating great athletes. And if you don't love it or if it's stressing you out or if there are times when you're like, is this even where I wanna be, it's hard to even start that conversation because from the outsider's perspective,

it's like you have the greatest job in the world, right? Like how lucky are you to be someone who is good at these things and gets all this social feedback. And so it leaves young people when they might be in high school or in college and they're starting to grapple with whether they love this thing that they're doing. If there's not a lot of like released valves to have these conversations because not a lot of people understand what it's like to be in that machine. When and that's where it's sort of the race and class issue comes in, I guess, where it's like, so in Martellis' case, excellence on sports,

that was the only avenue he was given to pursue excellence, whereas I knew and had examples, although I didn't know any writers, I knew people who were sort of top of whatever they did in different fields. And so I think it becomes even harder where it's like, wait, you're gonna walk away from being an elite, college football player or basketball player

across country runner to do what? If that takes so much courage as a 17 year old to be like, I don't know, I'm gonna figure it out. Who could do that? Right. And especially, you know, with the identity wrapped up in it. Like, I don't care how, you know, perhaps there's some 17-year-olds out there who have that kind of self-awareness to understand. They can't let their identity get wrapped up in their sport. But like, I've been on like 30 college campuses,

Division I campuses, talking athletic departments. I've met a handful of those kids who have their identity in something that is within their control, where sports is not fully in your control, the way we think of it, like your performance and all of that. A lot of times it gets out of your control. And so these kids, just the ability to think, or what could my identity be outside of that?

Like their brains aren't working that way until much later. No, it's like very few of us are Pat Tillman, right? That can go like, here's who I am. This is what I wanna do. This is what I'm gonna do next. I don't care if you like me, hate me, whatever. One of the things that I thought was really interesting in your book is something that stuck with me

that I think I sort of accidentally locked into, but is sort of more underrated as a strategy for parents with kids going to colleges. You talk about this seminal moment in her life and I'm forgetting what the two schools were, but where she's basically deciding between one school and then one slightly less competitive school, and you sort of speculate on how differently things

might have turned out, had she gone to the place where she was, you know, maybe she fit in a little bit more, maybe it was a little less centered around sports, you know, maybe she would have had the freedom to, you know, get help or to balance out her life with other things. And so this idea of like, you know, not everyone has to go to Harvard, you know, not everyone has to get in just because it's the most competitive or best place doesn't mean that it's the right place for you. Yeah, and that's a strategy that I see very few young people employing. The strategy of like, what's best for me versus what will give me the most validation within society?

It's hard to distinguish when you're a young person. It's hard to choose the one that you think is best suited for you versus what will get you the most cashier. Like, that's a tough equation when you're a kid and you're growing up. And in Maddie's case, it was, do I go to Lehigh and play soccer, or do I go to an Ivy League school and I run? In one case, it was, do I go to a school that maybe isn't as prestigious as an Ivy League,

although a fantastic school in its own right, and play a sport I love, or do I play a sport,, do I run, which is not a sport that I'm in love with in order to get this huge chunk of social capital. And that's me it was one variable in her story was doing this extremely grueling solo sport in order to earn social capital versus doing something she loved, but you know, go to school that might not impress people as much. And like, in the sports world, I just don't see, and probably across the board, just the way we're raising our kids in like

achievement culture, and we're kind of laying out the steps to what happiness looks like for them, right? It looks like success and achievement. And so not enough kids are being told, like, wait, is even college the right choice for me? Is it the right choice right now or should I take a year off and find out what I want? Like there's just not a ton of space in that in our society for kids to actually take that avenue without being seen as like in anomaly or a failure or we somehow. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's hard for adults to like what you

have this like a exchange in the book that I really like it's it's two girls. Actually, no, is it you you're like you're going back and forth and you say what's your biggest hope. And then Megan says to be able to go day to day and feel excited about it and feel full. And I wonder how many sort of adults like could actually not only describe their life that way, because I think most of them can't.

But how many of you ask them what their goal in life was would be able to articulate that? So it's like, not only are we not working towards happiness, we don't even have an actual sense of what that happiness is. So oftentimes we're working towards the exact opposite of it, right? Like people get opportunities and they ask that they evaluate, like, hey, is this paying me more money or not, you know, is this, and that's sort of almost the totality of how we judge opportunities in our lives. Not, does this get me closer to life, happiness, contentment, you know, fullness? And then we wonder

why we have seemingly everything you're supposed to have and then are deeply unhappy and miserable. Yeah, you make such a good point that it's, you know, it's easy when talking about this book to be like speaking about Maddie and kids who are in high school trying to make decisions. But part of the reason I was so interested in writing it is because I saw myself having the same confusion over what happiness and life look like because no matter how, even since writing this book, no matter how many times I remind myself that I know my version of happiness is, and probably a lot of people's, is not tied

up in like having a cool job to tell people at the cocktail party and having the paycheck and the relevance of the big job. Like I know that. I know that that's not happiness, but it's hard to deprogram from 30 plus years of believing that was the equation that would lead me to the happiness. And I find myself continually slipping into it, because really forming a life where you are constantly evaluating the decisions you make

and whether they did lead to life satisfaction or wellness. Like, that's a challenging thing to constantly be doing. And the much easier thing is to just slip back into the equation that you had learned for 30 years, right? So, and I find myself continually fighting that battle of not slipping back into, like, well, maybe the big job will make me happy this time around. Right. Right, no, it's hard.

No, it's super hard. Yeah, I think to me, this is one of, this is a fantastic book. It's clearly had so much impact. It's changed so many people's lives. And like, I know that's true because one, it had that for me, but like, I get people emailing me thanking me

for having recommended it. So it's this weird thing where you do something that's really good. And that's why you set out to do it. But then I imagine it's very tempting and distracting. Then you immediately go, yes, but how is it selling? And how is it selling compared to other people? Oh, yeah.

I mean, if you take this book in particular because it's about a young woman who died by suicide, there's also the, it's separate than if you write a book that is not about, you know, it's not about someone's death, it's not about such a tragic incident, it's hard enough to verbalize that like you want it to be financially successful. Or it's like everyone has to construct some reason for why they wrote their book and it can't be because I want people to think I'm amazing and I want to

make money, right? It has to be some sort of altruistic pursuit. And so, and this and writing this book was even trickier for me in how to talk about it, because I didn't want to make it seem like I cared more about how I looked as a writer and what the impact of the book was in terms of my own success. Like measuring those things was really, really difficult given the topic, right? Because it's like, I don't want blood money, you know, I don't want to be getting rich off of someone else's story. So trying to balance all of that with also being honest about being a writer and caring that people thought it was good.

I mean, you can't help but care about these things, even in the context of this of a story about a young girl and working with her family. So all of that became very complicated for me when the book was being released, making sure I did everything that gave the right messaging for the book. Was walking away from ESPN sort of difficult on the level that we're talking about? I imagine that's a thing you work your whole life to get. You know there's a huge line of people behind you who think it's

absolutely crazy that you would ever leave that party. How did you think about that? There was a number of reasons why I left ESPN and one of them was writing this book and feeling that within the book I'm talking about some of Maddie's choices about caring more about what people thought than what she knew in her heart and Talking to so many student athletes like the year the book came out where that was also the message was Really looking at why you play your sport or what you're passionate about and getting in tune with those things and about getting in tune with those things and perhaps there are different paths for athletes that they haven't thought that they could have taken because playing sports was just too cool to walk away from. So these are all the things I'm talking about where, and in my own life, I knew that my version of that was working at ESPN was talking about sports and pretending to care about sports

at a time in my life when I didn't care about them and didn't love them the way I used to, but I sure did like telling people that I worked at ESPN and I sure did by passing that check. So it was really trying to be honest with what I wanted, but in full transparency, I don't think I would have been strong enough to make the decision to leave ESPN. If I also wasn't confronted with my dad's diagnosis of Lou Gehrig's disease, I thought it was interesting you brought up Lou Gehrig at the top of the platform. And so that was kind of the last piece where I was like, am I going to be the person who continues moving forward in their life doing something that I know I don't fully love, but that gives me the kind of like, you know, the cashier that I want.

And then sacrifice spending time with someone who I was so close with growing up. I couldn't justify all of those things. Once all of that happened, it didn't make leaving SPN hard at all. It was so fully right when I did it that I haven't really had more than a moment here or there since then of wishing that I could go back and do that. So what advice would you give someone, because I've done that a couple of times in my career, where you sort of walk away from a thing that everyone thinks is obviously

like the greatest thing in the world. And I've had trouble sort of articulating the logic behind it and how to go about it. But it's like, what do you wish maybe you'd heard from people as you were weighing that decision? There was a couple of things. I mean, one of them, one of them, and again, this did relate to Maddie's story, because

I know so many people in Maddie's life just wish that they knew that Maddie could have like taken a year off from school, right? That you can hit pause. Like I know it sounds so obvious, but especially when you're in college and in athlete, but even in college at all, there's this sense of like, I'm in college and I'm like, I'm this escalator moving upward and like, you don't pause that. You just, you're on it, you did the work to get on it

and so of course you just keep riding it. And if I hit pause and I reevaluate my life for me that was like hitting pause on my career by leaving ESPN, there was nobody really, there was a couple people which was great, but not enough being like, oh, if you get off the escalator and you hit pauses, that doesn't mean you can't get back on the escalator. Like I think we're too caught up in our society. They're like, once you're in motion, you just got to stay in motion.

And it was hard for me to really allow myself to absorb that lesson that like hitting pause and not being in motion anymore career wise was about my own ego and my own identity crisis. And it wasn't real. Hitting pause wasn't going to keep me from ever moving forward again. In fact, I started to believe that, as scary as it was, I actually needed the time, not just with my dad, but I knew I was doing something at ESPN that I didn't love doing. And I was lucky enough to be able to say, well, am I just going to keep doing this thing, or or am I gonna hit pause and allow myself to actually sit

in my own discomfort of not being able to tell people where I work and have this same identity and am I gonna be able to be uncomfortable and decide like who I wanna be going forward. No, I think that's a really good point. I think we, it's almost as if we equate hitting pause with death, Like so it feels almost like suicide, like career suicide, life suicide. Like when I, when I dropped out of college,

I remember I went into the registrar's office to drop out of college. I had this job as a research assistant and, and I was like, you know, like I'm, I'm here to drop out of college and they were like, you know, that's not a thing. They're like, you can't do that. You just fill out this form and you take like a semester off and then you re-enroll whenever you want. And it was striking to me how many kids are terrified of dropping out because they think it's an irrevocable decision.

Just like they think that someone I know was thinking about leaving their job and they went to leave their job and their boss was like, you know, we have like a sabbatical program here, right? Like you don't even actually need to quit your job. And so it's like these things are so intimidating and so few people do them. We almost don't have the understanding or the familiarity with them to actually understand that they're less scary than they look from the outside too. Oh, yeah, I think it seems terrifying. At least, I imagine that's how Maddie felt in deciding whether or not to leave track and field to stop playing a college sport, let alone to take a year off. I would assume that would seem to her like a decision that like would just irrevocably change her life. And similarly, even though my sample

size was much larger and I was making my decision at 36, I had to continue to quell the part of me that felt like I was basically abandoning everything I'd ever worked for. But I don't think I ever knew who I was outside of all of these pursuits. And that was something I really wanted to find out. Yeah, it's like for Maddie, a year off is 5% of her life. Right.

So it would seem so enormous. And then without the language about it, it really does seem crazy. And I think for you walking away from her job is something that I think we do a bad job thinking about too. It's like you are not ESPN. We talked about your identity. It's like you are not your identity that made ESPN want to hire you in the first place, which you're leaving. So it's weird too that we think the risk is leaving the job as if we don't continue to possess the most valuable assets, which is who we are. Yep, but a lot of our big companies, ESPN being one of them,

I don't think they do this intentionally, obviously, but you very quickly understand that people are not gonna care if I leave ESPN as much as I tell myself like that it matters, right? It's very easy to start to believe when you're inside one of the bigger companies that you're just a cog in the machine and if you leave, it is a piece of your identity that you're just a cog in the machine and if you leave, it is a piece of your identity that you're stripping away.

That's something I'm still working through. I used to look forward to someone saying, well, what do you do? Because I could very easily impress them. Now, if someone asked me that question, I'm kind of like, I don't wanna be the person who says, well, I used to work at ESPN, like. Oh, right.

So it's still a daily battle. And like when you're inside one of those big machines, and maybe you can just look at our society as a big machine, you get easily reminded that you can be reminded that your skill set is A product of like the platform you're on in some way and trying to unlearn that is was part of the process for me too That I have value that I offer not just with the logo of the SPN by my name No, and I wonder how much of that explains where we are politically right there I talked to David from and I was like, you know, why don't, you know,

I talked to all these different Republicans who are very much not a fan of the president. And again, I don't think this has to be political. It's just an interesting paradox. They're not a fan of the president, but they won't say anything against them because they're worried that, you know, they might lose an election.

And it's like, okay, well, what would happen to you if you lost the election? You'd go back to practicing the law or you'd become a lobbyist or you'd become a consultant or maybe you'd run for a different office, right? And so it actually is really dangerous to have your identity tied up in what you do because it deprives you of the freedom of making ethical or personal or professional decisions that you really need to be able to make. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, that's the scene.

So what was coming up for me there was that, similarly, having nothing to do with Trump, but similarly, when I was at ESPN, because my identity became so tied up and being on ESPN and giving opinions on sports, and I didn't want to lose that, whether it was like the growing paycheck or the popularity, I lost sight of some of my own viewpoints about trying to speak about female athletes in women's sports. So the things I cared about that weren't as popular, that when I first got to ESPN,

I would talk about them and push for them and care about them. The farther along I got and the more I realized that if I just talk about LeBron and I just talk about men's sports, I'm gonna be more popular and I'm gonna make more money. And because that became my identity, I started to lose sight of things that growing up

as a female athlete and wanting to be part of the solution and helping grow and give more opportunities to female athletes. I totally lost sight of that and I abandoned it, not fully consciously, but there were moments where I was like, I know I've stopped doing what I care about in exchange for this growing part of my identity

that was about money and relevance. And I could see how that's playing out so much in our political sphere too. There's an Uptonston Claire quote, it's very hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it. It's like, nobody wakes up and says, just like, I mean, journalism is the same way. When you're measured based on what your traffic is, right, or how many shares you're thinking, it shouldn't

surprise us that people gravitate towards one extreme or the other rather than sort of nuanced or difficult truth or even what they actually care about. And you can see that all across the sports world, and not just on the topics like Kaepernick or any of the topics where they're parallel to politics, but you could see it even in pitching stories on a WMBA player. And in the beginning, thinking, my identity is... When I first got to ESPN, my identity was in telling marginalized stories.

However, you see that, right? Like telling... Telling under told stories, that was my identity because that's who I was. And that's... That's was the experience I had and that was the expertise I brought. But very quickly, I didn't want to be someone who didn't get read, who people didn't tune into and it became so much easier to talk about the mainstream story. And I think, you know, this is a separate media discussion when it comes to sports coverage and what the media covers, but it's very hard to get out of that cycle because it's like, how do you introduce new stories and characters in the sports world if everybody has the same

12 athletes they know and those are the only stories that are getting clicked on. It's a very tough cycle to break out of. Yeah, and I think it, you I think it takes courage either to leave or to stay and continue to march by your, to the beat of your own drummer. There's that Henry Ford quote where it's like, if I listened to my customers out of made a faster horse, you know, whether he said it or not,

it's really problematic. It's like, if you got where you got because you have an original point of view, and then it can be very easily seduced and corrupted as a strong word, but just sort of directed towards what everyone is telling you they want, but over the long term, what people actually want is truth and originality. And so sometimes I think you have to, I think that's an important reason to live outside the system, maybe be somewhat employed outside the system.

It's, there's a reason that whistleblowers are often weirdos, like I'm watching a serpico right now. And it's like, he's a fucking weirdo. And that's why he didn't take bribes, not because he was just this profoundly ethical person, but by being a distinct unique individual, he was able to see a corrupt system from a different point of view. Yeah, and I think I knew, you know, not that I'm trying to compare myself to a whistleblower, but I think I knew that my time was up

within the ESPN world to be heard or say anything different or new, because it wasn't within that world, people weren't reading things that I thought were interesting or different about different athletes and sports. Like they just weren't being read. And so then I could just be one of like a hundred voices saying the same thing about the same 10 topics.

And I felt like if I, in one small part, if I left, maybe my mind would be open up to see it from a different perspective. Maybe there's a way to actually tell the stories I wanted and get the ideas across. And it didn't have to be at ESPN, which was like, which to me would have been an unheard of thought for the first five years I worked there.

Because it's like, you want an idea, convey ESPN's the place. But I started to feel toward the end that it all started to sound the same and it was hard to say something different within that noise. No, I think that's beautifully said. I mean, life's too short to show up every day at a job you don't want to be doing. All right, so last question because this has been really awesome, but have you read what makes Sammy run yet? No, I haven't. Where did you get the title then? Did you know that the one was sort of in homage

to the other or was it totally independent? Well, in full transparency, I fought very hard for a title for What Made Maddy Ron. I wanted it to be called filtered. Because, and now I agree that What Made Maddy Ron is much more visceral title, but I wanted it to be called Filter because I, you know, I felt like it was, I don't know,

more, it felt like this more philosophical title to me, and it was about social media and all the filters she put on her photos and the filters she put on herself. So I didn't even name the book. Is your editor, your agent? The publishing house, Little Brown named it. I put up a fight, but now I do recognize that it was a good name for the book. Well, you have to read what makes Sammy run because it's it's it's an amazing it's it's one of my favorite books of all time. I

rave about it here all the time. I'm trying to think I just pulled it off the shelf. I was going to see if there's a good passage for you. I mean, to me, it's a great example. Like, what makes Sammy Run is this sort of endless ambition. It's not really about anything. It's just about getting ahead. And there's this beautiful quote in the book where he says, you know, it's sort of got this narrator who's observing it all.

But he says something like, you know, what an impressive light, you know, ambition is when light, you know, ambition is when it's when there's something behind it. And then he says sort of what, you know, what a puny flickering flame it is when there isn't. And I think, you know, we, we underrate that. And there's that I'm just pulling it up. There's this great, this, this goes almost exactly to the, the quote we were talking about in the book where he goes, it says, Sammy, I said quietly, how does it feel? How does it feel to have everything? And like he ultimately gets everything and then he realizes that it's totally

meaningless and empty. And so I think, yeah, I just, I think you would love the book. So that's my, that's my impassioned plea for you to read it. I think you've mentioned that to me before in email So I'm I will make it my next read good good amazing. Well, thank you so much I seriously I love the book. I think it's a parenting book I also think it's just a book about life in the modern world I think and I think you've got some amazing we didn't talk about it But we have some amazing stuff in here about social media. I very much related to your, your lost days

after you publish an article and you're just like refreshing to see what people thought of it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the social media being a huge part of Maddie's story too, yeah. Okay, thanks so much. All right, thanks Ron. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps and tell a friend. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.