The Daily Stoic - Choose To Become Your Best | Paul Rabil PT2

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

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Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily. And we're the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And we are really excited about our latest season because we are talking about someone very, very special. You're so sweet. A fashion icon. Well, actually, just put this on. A beautiful woman. Your words, not mine. Someone who came out of Croydon and took the world by storm. Kate Anna, don't tell them where I live. A muse, a mother, and a supermodel who defined the 90s. I don't remember doing the last one. Wow, Emily, not you.

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Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are

and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, the founding of Stoicism is this, the choice of Hercules. This is the story that Zeno hears when he washes up in Athens. The choice of Hercules is the choice between the easy road and the hard road, virtue and vice,

the difficult way with the delayed gratification, and then the short-term immediate gratification. And it's funny, today's guest, his book starts with something very similar. Paul Rabel is asked by Bill Belichick to put this lacrosse thing aside, which is in some ways Bill Belichick's first love. He just loves the game of lacrosse.

But Bill Belichick offers Paul a chance to put lacrosse aside and try out for the New England Patriots, like in the middle of the dynasty. And later a player would do this and make tens of millions of dollars and win multiple Super Bowls. So it wasn't like this far-fetched thing.

He's asking Paul if he wants to play in the NFL. And Paul really thinks about it. And then Belichick, I wouldn't say he sort of takes it the offer away, but he goes, but look, you know, it is special. You have a chance to be the greatest of all time at what you do. And that's not something to take lightly.

And it's true, like I think about this, I know authors have decided to start companies that don't really matter or they sort of go down, they're like, I don't, why read another book? It was hard. Well, of course it's hard. But when you're good at something, there's obligations that come with it.

That's my view. There's obligations that come with greatness or talent or potential. That's just actually something I talk about. In the justice book, which by the way, you can pre-order now at dailystoke.com slash justice. I'm talking about how like you, the parable of the talents, right?

You know, the parable of the talents, the idea that you've been given these gifts. Are you gonna make it grow or are you gonna turn it into something? Are you gonna bury it underground? And that's sort of the moral of today's guest. Keeping this intro short, cause I already introduced the illustrious Paul Rabel,

one of the greatest lacrosse players, most dominant athletes in the history of his sport. One at basically every level, sort of a peer. People who know lacrosse talk about him like he's Tom Brady or talk about him like he's Steph Curry or Sue Bird or, you know, anyone who has been just the, an incredible game changing presence in their sport.

And Paul has been that in another way in that he ends up buying the league that he played in and he's turning it into literally the premier lacrosse league. It's awesome. You may have seen it on TV. They got a television deal for it. And it's really been sort of taking

what was a kind of a small insular sport by Storm. So I'm really excited that he wrote this new book, The Way of the Champion, Pain, Persistence, and the Path Forward. It was published by my publisher, Portfolio. I was really excited. I introduced Paul and them, and I did some work on this book

because I wanted Paul to bring his unique way of thinking about sports to other domains. And I think he did a great little book here. It's sort of the war of art for sports, but like the war of art, it doesn't really matter what you do. Those lessons, I think will work for you. You can follow Paul on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube,

Twitter at PaulRabel, go to paulravel.com. You can pick up the way of the champion pain persistence and the path board at the painted porch or anywhere books are sold. I think this one's great. I think you're really gonna like it. And thanks to Paul for coming on. Paul had me on his podcast many years ago,

which you can check out a link to that in today's show notes. And here's a conversation I was very much looking forward to and I think you're very much going to enjoy. I was very much looking forward to, and I think you're very much going to enjoy. What's the point of being great and successful in doing this thing that you used to love if you suck all the fun out of it and you make it this artificial life and death thing?

So the ability to be like, I demand high performance for myself, and also, isn't this so cool that I get to do this, and I feel so lucky and I appreciate it, to be able to have expectations and appreciation at the same time, that's where the magic is. And it's maturity and is a delicate skill that comes with a lot of work, just like any skill.

You know, you and I can sit here and talk about it, but for it to actually work, you have to put it in practice because the first five years of therapy, I vehemently contested my sports doc, but for it to actually work, you put it in practice. Cause the first five years of therapy, I vehemently contested my sports doc, his name is John Elliott, the fact that I could have both. I personally was pursuing self-actualization with him

because it made me feel better. I felt like a better human being, more well-rounded, and I also felt like I was losing my edge. I challenged him, challenged him, challenged him. He was like, nope, we're gonna get to a place where it's gonna be a switch for you. Because you need all that edge when you play if you wanna be the best,

but you don't need all that edge all the time. Well, is that sustainable to have that edge all the time? Cause it makes you a monster or it makes you miserable and it burns you out. Yeah. And so one of the things that I challenged, I was challenged with as an athlete is when I lose games, it was hell.

I would stay up all night and play every former play back in my head. When we'd win games, I would stay up all night playing back the plays in my head that I could have done better in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's just not sustainable. Yeah.

So, you know, I've learned this in business too. How do we approach it? You build processes. Well, that goes to what we're saying, right? Cause also you're gonna lose. So if you can't figure out how to manage losing, if you have a long career, eventually that losing will kill you.

Totally. The very, statistically certain losses will eventually be cumulative enough that it breaks you. Totally. Yeah, and so there's processes, there's tactics and there's boundaries. On the tactic side, for example, one thing I worked with, it might seem small, but like I would get so edgy on game day

and we'd play at nights that I would, I wouldn't know what to do with myself, so I'd take a nap, take a two and a half hour nap. Just turn yourself off. Turn myself off, which wasn't great from an athletic performance standpoint, but it's just what I wanted to do. And it worked for a long time, but we changed.

We built a new tactic. You said, okay, you're gonna go to Whole Foods after your morning walkthrough. You're gonna get the nutrition in that we know is gonna work. And then you're gonna take a walk with a friend, or you're gonna read a book, or you're gonna go to a movie.

You're gonna book a matinee. But I want you to stay as active and as intellectually engaged as you do during the week versus like all of a sudden change your game day routine where your sports scientists, your strength and conditioning coach and your nutritionist would be like, wait, why are we taking a two hour nap today?

We haven't done that all week. Sure, sure. Don't treat the game as special, cause it's not. Yeah, so you have to be willing to challenge what you were doing, even if it was working, in an attempt to solve for this really difficult balance of having two things at the same time and both things being true,

high expectations and appreciation. There are things that a lot of the greatest athletes in the world have worked on to create better appreciation. Mindfulness is one. And then boundaries that must be set, written down, practiced and practiced and practiced so that it becomes sturdy. You know, a boundary that I would set for myself, for example,

is after a game, no matter what, winning or losing, I wouldn't watch the game tape. I wouldn't review the stat sheet. And I would focus on how important, reframe how important that night was from a recovery standpoint, sleep capacity, nutrition, into allowing me to become an even better player

the next week. Yeah. So there's a little bit of like games that you play with yourself. You're corralling the kind of primal energy, the ambition, the drive, maybe even some of the self-loathing that makes you get great at something.

So you have a little bit of space to be a person after. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. No, I think about that because obviously when I'm not writing a book, and I am writing a book, those are different modes. But I've been on for the last several years,

I'm writing all the time. Yeah. And there's no off season. And then you get married, you have kids, you have a life, you have success. You wanna be able to appreciate it and enjoy all that. You wanna be a functioning person. And so basically I was sort of faced with this choice. Am I someone who's writing all the time

and you give yourself over to the thing and you understand it's gonna destroy all these other things or are you gonna figure out how to be, or I guess the choice is not right, right? Like not do it, like this is what it turns me into, so I'm gonna walk away. Or can you figure out how to do the thing more sustainably, more balanced,

have some boundaries around it? And that third choice is the harder one, right? And I remember when I sold one of my books, I forget which one it was, but my editor called my wife and she was like, hey, I'm so sorry. She was saying she understood that the cost of this thing were paid by people other than me, right?

And the decision to go like, I don't know if it needs to be that way. There's obviously, to do anything at a high level, there's costs associated with it, but the costs don't have, you can mitigate or minimize some of those costs. You can find a way to do them more sustainably. So yeah, that's something I've had to think a lot about.

Like how can I do it, but it not define everything, overwhelm everything, and maybe even destroy everything. Yeah, and you've probably taken a lot of the greatest attributes that have led you to the book's success that you've written and applied them to your personal life. From a focus, from an effort, from an intention standpoint.

And that act for me has helped balance me out more. And my identity, as I had mentioned, was the lacrosse player is now Paul Rabel, who happens to play lacrosse or did play lacrosse. And it might seem nuanced, but it's not. You also sparked the thought that, going back to both things being true, and this is largely a part of the middle of the book,

and when you're a professional, is working smarter, not harder. I actually think that you can work smarter and harder. But it's the way that, you know, how I explored these lessons is challenging norms, going a step further with evidence from examples from other athletes, but there is a truth to it. An example is, you know, as an amateur,

I worked out every single day, hard as hell. My body, as a younger younger kid would recover faster. As a professional, one of the other differences we talked about monetary is like, okay, college is four years, high school is four years. There's limited time leading up to that. When you become a pro, you wanna play for 15, maybe 20 years if you're Tom Brady.

So everything's gotta change. The reason why option quarterbacks work in college is most of the coaches don't really care about the longevity of the quarterback. They don't run an option in pros is because like, they're not able. They don't want them to get fucking hurt. They want Lamar Jackson to play for 15 years. And so if you're Lamar too,

you're not gonna train at some point pounding the pavement as hard as you did when you were an amateur. And being able to have the self-talk and regulation to be like, okay, I'm actually working out compared to my college career, maybe a little bit less, such that my return is going to be a longer playing career. And there's these little concessions that you have to make

and that's all fascinating. Yeah, like if you could have given Tiger Woods a glimpse into his future, he probably would have taken care of himself better. Do you know what I mean? He was working so hard at being very strong and pushing himself very hard and pushing through injuries that, of all the games,

he was lucky, golf is a game you can be great at into your 50s or 60s, right? And he treated himself more like a football player that had two or three or four years. Unbelievable. And he grinds down the gears. And that, literally, his joints are nothing, there's nothing there.

That famous victory is playing on a leg with no cartilage in it. And if he could have conceived that he'd still be paying that bill 10, 20 years later and what it would deprive of the potential victories it would deprive him of in the future, maybe you make a different bet. And that's what I think about writing is like,

a lot of the writers I really admire are still doing it when they're quite old. But if you hollow yourself out in the middle, there's not gonna be anything left when you get there. Totally. I spent a lot of time studying Tiger and wrote a little bit about him as well. And we mentioned Michael Phelps being dragged into a pool.

Tiger was a prodigy. Yeah. And his experience came from his father's introduction to Tiger to golf, and then his father's hardcore coaching. It's like Serena and Venus's father doing the same thing. What it actually was, was child abuse, to be clear. Straight up child abuse. No question.

And it's important, I felt, to cover that experience that Tiger had, paired with other experiences, because I have no clue, if any, but who would read this book and what their experience is. So I felt like something that didn't exist was really a wide ranging guide to performance. And let's call it what it is. Tiger's one of the greatest, probably the second greatest,

if you look at championships one to Jack Nicholas, but many would say that the greatest golfer of all time that came with his challenges. It's unbelievable knowing what he's been able to accomplish with the trauma of his upbringing. Yeah, yeah, it's insane. Insane, like that, unfortunately is not uncommon. Especially in today's day and age

where like helicopter parents have emerged more than ever and hoping that their kid becomes the next Tiger Woods. And there haven't been any. It's hard to watch at times, but Tiger also did something that I think a lot of athletes can think about and whether it's what they apply to their discipline or not, where he was at his peak

winning majors and tournaments left and right every single week and then he decided to change his swing. Yeah, sure. Because he was looking downstream around some things that he was getting away with because of his athleticism that would require a little bit of a dip initially to swing back up better than he ever was.

And that's what happened. He struggled for the first two years of remaking his swing and then he went on another huge run. And that was all, you know, as a professional. So tying back to the different experience of various experiences that athletes do that has led to their success and longevity. I remember a therapist said to me one time

she was like, okay, like let's say your kids follow you in, like following your's say your kids follow you in, like follow in your footsteps, they achieve what you achieve, or they achieve like a fraction of what you achieve. Would you want them to feel about themselves the way you feel about yourself? And it's like, no, of course not, right?

Because so often what drives us to achieve is some sense of inadequacy or some sense of needing to prove. So even if it's adaptive, very rarely would you wish it on another person. And so to me, the thing that we're all trying to figure out, the really powerful, important thing is, can you figure out how to do what you do

from a place of fullness rather than emptiness? Like, can you find a better fuel? Yeah. Right? Like Jordan understands that anger fuels him to be great, but like I'm sure if he ever saw one of his kids just manufacturing some like feud with someone, he'd be like, dude, this like, you don't need to do that, right?

Cause like even if it works for you, you understand on some level, there's probably another way. And that you also understand as time goes on, what it's taking out of you to operate that way. Yeah. Yeah, I think letting go is an ongoing practice that we often think we do when we have to,

but we're doing it regularly. So the big ones are, for me, we're getting traded. You were afraid of being traded? No, when I was traded was an incredibly difficult, excruciatingly painful time because there's shame, there's embarrassment, there's self-worth that are all being magnified. Even if you can frame it as,

oh man, which team got the better end of the trade? You know, they dealt three players and two picks for Paul. But in the end, that team has decided. They don't want you anymore. They don't want you anymore. Yeah. And so our ability as athletes or individuals to move on and potentially soar to all new heights

is that ability to let go. Yeah. Of all that shit. Yeah. And so that was one example. I went through a divorce. Relationally, when something's not working, we grip to it. Yeah.

We have these attachments and stuff. But a lot of the commonalities are there. And then retiring, which I talked with you quite a bit about. Letting go of something that was, for a large portion of my life, my identity. Something that I love to do, something that fills me up every day.

Letting that go. So those are like the big ones, but we let go of small things all the time too. So if you are a high performing person that has the gift of edge, you should leverage that mentality around the things that are painful. And being really good at letting shit go is another reframe that all athletes

wanna be really good at everything. So the decision to be good at this thing that's hard is a way to put yourself into it rather than fight it. Yeah, I mean, the most difficult thing to unravel to what your point is like our self-worth and to that question of, do we want our kids to feel the same way as we do now? And what I hear is, I hope that, you know,

me and you that feel the things that we feel don't think that we're at a dead end. We can work on ourselves. And I know you know that. And then we hope to leave that stuff that we're working on as the foundational work that our kids. Yeah, hopefully they can pick up where you left off as opposed to just repeat the same cycle.

Yeah, I mean, I think about you related to this book in your journey as a professional. Okay. You're largely considered, I mean, I've told you before, my favorite book is, this one is Destiny, and the first book of yours that I read was Trust Me I'm Lying. And I really enjoyed it and still recommend it.

And it was a part of your life that led you to becoming known in the industries as one of the greatest performance marketers and creative marketers on the planet. And part of what you learn in this book is the art of storytelling, the art of hacking growth and things that I know almost run in conflict with stoicism and the stuff that you write on today. It's impossible for you to be writing intellectually

the way that you do, having not done all of this incredible work as a performance marketer. And performance marketers aren't bad, it's just, you have to do, I think, the more experiences we have, the better we become become and the unknown future that sits for all of us, we're going to be more prepared for it when it comes. Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island? Well, that's exactly what Jane, Phil and their three kids did when they traded their English home for a tropical island they bought online.

But paradise has its secrets, and family life is about to take a terrifying turn. You don't fire at people in that area without some kind of consequence. And he says yes ma'am, he's dead. There's pure cold-blooded terror running through me. From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine and this is The Price of Paradise, the real-life story of an island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder. Follow the price of paradise wherever you get your podcasts, or binge the entire season right now on Wondry Plus. Hello, I'm Hannah.

And I'm Saruti. And we are the hosts of Red Handed, a weekly true crime podcast. Every week on Red Handed, a weekly true crime podcast. Every week on Red-Handed we get stuck into the most talked about cases. From the Idaho student killings, the Delphi murders and our recent rundown of the Murdoch saga. Last year we also started a second weekly show, Short Hand, which is just an excuse for us to talk about anything we find interesting because it's our show and we can do what we like. We've covered the death of Princess Diana, an unholy Quran written in Saddam Hussein's blood,

the gruesome history of European witch hunting, and the very uncomfortable phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction. Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behavior. Like, can someone give consent to be cannibalized? What drives a child to kill? And what's the psychology of a terrorist? Listen to Red Handed wherever you get your podcasts and access our bonus shorthand episodes exclusively on Amazon Music or by subscribing to Wondry Plus in Apple podcasts or the Wondry app.

["Wondry Plus"] No, that's really interesting. One of the things that Stokes talked about is that like, okay, look, your whole life has been a series of changes. You were not born and then you were born and then you were a baby and then you were an infant. You were transitioning all the time. You were becoming something different.

And some of those changes were not fun. Like, you were married and then you were not married or you were popular and now you're unpopular. You had two legs and then you lost one of or you were popular and now you're unpopular, you had two legs and then you lost one of the legs, right? Like things happen, right? And in meditations, Marx really says that all this change is a form of death, right?

When something happens, the old you dies and sometimes a new you is born. But his point was that where we are now was a product of an unlimited and ceaseless amount of changes. And then where we are now, we're like, but I have to keep it this way. Yeah. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Like, and most of those changes you had no control over and you in retrospect realize you should have just accepted them and shouldn't have fought them all along. But then you get to where you are now and you're like, I have to keep this how I am. And obviously the ultimate version we do this is with life, we cling to life, we wanna live forever as though, you know,

death isn't its own kind of transition. And we don't know what happens after. The point is like, you just have to get comfortable with this idea of change and you have to accept it. And you have to embrace it because who you were isn't alive anymore and what you're gonna be in the future is only going to happen if you die multiple times, right? Like the athlete you dies,

the person who lives in this town die, like to get where you're going, what you could meant to be some amazing future or just some future that, what you could, meant to be some amazing future or just some future that is what it is, is only going to happen if you accept all these changes between now and then, most of which you have zero control over.

Yeah, I mean, it's well said. It's staging the art of letting go. And I think athletes struggle with that probably more than most because our discipline is ageist based on our biology and we become less athletic and males lose 1% of total testosterone per year when they turn 30. And you just, it's a young man's game.

And so it's gonna end a lot sooner unless you play golf, is it a stew point? Then my parents, my dad sold paper, my mom's an art teacher and they've been doing it for 40 years. And there's not like, oh, they're 60 now. They're not gonna be able to do it anymore. Actually, they get better at it.

And so you don't in sports. So you have to really build that skill. You have to later on reframing and the stages that we go through, I think those threefold. And after you're a professional, what are you gonna do? Yeah. And there's a lot, the truth is a lot you can do.

Well, when you're used to imposing your will on the game, but also reality itself, like you can imagine, Tom Brady's not supposed to be able to play football, right? Like he's not supposed to be able, he's not supposed to be a starter. He's not supposed to be able to come back when you're Like he's not supposed to be able, he's not supposed to be a starter. He's not supposed to be able to come back when you're down 28 to three in a Superbowl. He's not supposed to be able to play into your 40s.

So when you build up this track record, whether it's in sports or business or life of defying the odds of bending reality to your will, it becomes natural for you to assume you can always do that and things are always gonna go your way. But like life is undefeated, you know, like the house always wins.

At some point, you're gonna bump up against unavoidable reality. And you get humbled and then you have to become, that thing ends, you have to adjust, you realize, oh, it felt like I was imposing my will on reality, but I wasn't in as much control as I thought I was. I've been contemplating bending,

you mentioned bending reality, I think about bending time. Yeah. You mentioned bending reality, I think about bending time. Yeah. When we're in our 20s and we're in relationships, sometimes five to 10 years long, you're so distracted and you haven't quite fully developed. If you're lucky enough to have new relationships

in your 30s and 40s, you can learn about that person in that relationship in and 40s, you can learn about that person in that relationship in half a quarter, sometimes a 10th of the time, because you're more focused, you're more present, you're more attentive, you're more inquisitive. And so here's how I've begun thinking about bending time. The relationships and then the actual tactics. We were hosting a company offsite this past winter

and we bring in an amazing sort of relationship and psychotherapist, religious studies expert, Savant, his name's Dave Acker. And we broke out into groups of four and there were four minutes on the clock for each shift. And each of our executives, the rules were you had to tell people about yourself for four straight minutes and no one can ask a question,

can add to it, they just sit there and listen. And four minutes feels like four hours under that. And then you also learn so much about this executive. You know, you know about, you know, their father was an alcoholic and they were cut from the team their sophomore year in college and their first company they worked at went belly up and you're just like, none of this stuff I would have even unlocked

in a one-on-one. Yeah, yeah. You'd have to ask so many questions to get to this stuff. And so there are tactics that we can use to get more out of life. And I think it's like bending time. Yeah, well, that's the, it's not true exactly that athletes decline

as they get older. Right. You do, but you also get better and smarter and you understand more. And so that's what keeps you going is that you're going this way in one area and then you're going this way in the other. And so, yeah, when I talk about being more balanced

as a writer that I wanna keep doing this but I wanted to not blow up my life as much. Part of how I'm able to do that is just I'm so much better at the thing, having now done it dozens of times, that I realized that a lot of, first off, I was just inefficient, period. I wasn't disciplined enough about how I did stuff,

but then also, so much of the torturing myself, so much of the doubt, so much of the stress was totally self-inflicted and not at all moving the needle. It had nothing to, it felt like you have this sense that like, you're like, this is my toolkit that allows me to do what I do. But it's not till you start messing with it that you, and isolating the different pieces

that you start to realize, oh, this thing over here, you know, like how nervous I was beforehand or how mad at myself I was after, or how much I, you know I stressed about hitting very specific goals. I thought that was contributing to the success or failure, but in fact, when I stopped doing it, not only did the outcomes not change, in some cases the outcomes got better.

And so you realize, oh, a lot of what I was doing was just like ritual or habit or bad habit. And then, so when you take that stuff away, you can still do it and you do it better and it's less harmful. Nailed it. It's experience.

You know, they say pro athletes can see the next play before it happens. Wayne Gretzky could see three plays in advance. Yeah. Lionel Messi and his amazing career he's had. The contrarians come in and say, well, look how much he walks. He walks the whole game.

And then, you know, his runs are acute and they lead in goals or assists. But what they don't say is while he's walking, he's doing something called scanning. So he's walking the field. And that's statistic. That is stated by head turns and they use augmented reality to sort of define it.

But he has some like four times the scan rate of every other player on the pitch. If you walked him walking, he's constantly doing this. So he's seeing the play unfold and he's able to use his energy more acutely to your point, even if that energy is slowly becoming less as he gets older. And then there are other things that I look at LeBron,

I don't know this to be true, but I watch him in his last three seasons as he's approaching 40. He started doing something that I've picked up on more, which he basically sprints, call it 80% of max speed from the offensive end back on defense. And some would say it's unnecessary, you don't need to use that much energy.

But I think for him as a 38 year old, might be 39 now, it is a pace that he knows is manageable. We can all get to 80%. But more so it is, it's an energy that he's bringing to the floor. It's full of guys in their early 20s. It's saying like, I'm gonna work harder than you this entire game.

And I'm gonna do the little things that people don't like to do. He spends so much time doing ab work, works on his core. People fucking hate abs. It's the hardest exercise, the most painful. It's reserved for the end of your workout often. And it's the easiest to skip. And so therein lies the gold.

I was talking to Chris Bosh about this. He was saying that, you know, they were all on Miami together and they're on the team playing and they get on there and, you know, the Bron starts doing yoga. Yeah. Yeah. And they're all like, what the fuck are you doing?

Yeah. You know? And then he's still playing. Every single one of them is not playing anymore. Yeah, and they're all like, what the fuck are you doing? You know? And he's still playing. Every single one of them is not playing anymore. And he figured out the things that move the needle. And Tom Brady figured this out too. He's like, wait, I'm spending all this time in the weight room. What's actually preventing me from getting hurt

is not strength, it's pliability. And so yeah, you figure out the things that actually move the needle and you do that thing, and then you don't do the other things. And people are gonna laugh at you and they're gonna think it's weird. And yeah, they were making fun of them on the team plane, because it was weird.

What are you doing yoga for? But you figure out what works for you. When Kobe Bryant had successive high ankle sprains, he started taking ballet lessons. And tap dancing to work on his ankle strength. It all goes back to the art of curiosity. Peyton Manning says that his best attribute is his curiosity.

And he talks about a time where he was sitting as a freshman quarterback for the Tennessee Volunteers in a quarterbacks film room. And they kept running this playback. He goes, coach, pause it here. What happens if this guy over here blitzes? And the coach goes, well, he's not gonna blitz. What happens if he does?

You never blitz in this cover three from that space. He goes, but if let's just say he did, what are we gonna do, right? And he says, there's just something that felt, was maybe innate that he's nourished over time. But when he looks at, you know, the general was his nickname and all the audibles he'd call from Linus Scrimmage stemmed from his curiosity.

That's really interesting. There's a Napoleon thing he said, three times a day, a general should ask himself, what would I do if the enemy appeared over here? What would I do if the enemy appeared over here? And so it's curiosity mixed with a sense of preparation, and it's wondering, what am I gonna do if this happens? What am I gonna do if this happens? What am I gonna do if this happens?

It's not anxiety because it's more like awareness and it's not impotent. Anxiety has an impotence, right? You're like, I'm gonna be screwed if that happens, right? Awareness is like, this could happen and so here are my options. And instead of having to think about that in the moment, the first time it's happening, I'm gonna think about it now.

The stoic phrase for this is pre-meditatio bellorum, pre-meditation of evils. You're not supposed to just like feel shitty in advance of the thing happening. You're supposed to plan for it. First off, so when it's happening, you're not saying to yourself, what the fuck is happening, right?

Which is what you do. Like if that guy blitzed on Peyton Manning, he'd be like, what the fuck, where, right? Which is what you do. Like if that guy blitzed on Peyton Manning, he'd be like, what the fuck, where was that? But he's thought about this. So, and because he thought about it, he has option A, he has option B, he has option C. There's a handful of things, because things that like the coach is saying,

oh, he'll never do that, you never do this. At some point, the thing that people have never done, they do, and you gotta be ready for that. And so it's this kind of awareness, this understanding, this just kind of constant riffing curiosity, exploring, well, let's play it out. How would that go? Okay, I see why it will actually almost certainly

never happen, but maybe what you actually discover there is a reason the one out of a thousand plays that does happen I mean the Super Bowl we just had the Chiefs had gamed through What they would do in overtime in a way that the 49ers had and you saw Patrick Mahomes when they they said do you guys want to receive? Sorry, when the 49ers are asked and they choose, Patrick Mahomes knew that they had made the wrong choice

because they had planned through that in a way that the other team, they were just focused on, let's just get through the game. They hadn't planned through what you would do in a, I mean, only two Super Bowls have ever gone into overtime. So the idea that leading up to the Super Bowl, when you'd have so much to do,

that you would sit there and think about how you would play the coin toss in this hypothetical, extremely unlikely scenario, but that's where that curiosity and that planning that pretty much, Natasha Malone comes in. Exactly, and there's an attention to detail. Yes. So I liked your note on preparation

that's paired with curiosity. Attention to detail allows you to be this problem solver. You're right around the chiefs. And then I would say, you know, Belichick, he would do things like he'd understand the rules better than the rule makers. And he would do things like, okay, if the opposing team's offense is on the one yard line,

first and goal, I'm going to tell our linemen to try to jump the snap because what's the downside? They can't get any closer. Half the distance to the goal. Right. Repeat first down. Yeah. So we're gonna jump this fucking thing.

And like try to time it, right? And there are- Because if you don't get the call, you, so you could get a jump on the play and the downside of getting the penalty is nil. Yeah, and it's not cheating, it's being thoughtful, right? It's just like, okay, these are the rules. I mean, we build rules at the PLL,

and I know that, and the NCAA actually, when they change rules for any discipline, they have a mandate that they have to observe it for two years, because. They wanna see what loophole they didn't think about. It's fucking tax code in America, rulemaking in sports, and if you have the best coaches and players in your league, which we do, they're gonna find loopholes.

They're gonna find ways to play rules that the rule makers, and we have a pretty large internal external committee, hadn't thought through. And then we evolved. And the NFL's overtime rule was new because the prior year, the Chiefs played the Bills in this amazing game, and the coin toss went to the Chiefs and they won the game. Bills never had a chance.

So like, okay, enough of this rule. Yeah. You know, if I would have applied myself, I could have gone to the NBA. You think so? Yeah, I think so. But it's just like, it's been done. You know, I didn't want to, I was like,

I don't want to be a follower. Hi, I'm Jason Concepcion. And I'm Shea Serrano. And we are back. We have a new podcast from Wondering. It's called Six Trophies. And this is the best. Each week, Shea Serrano and I are combing through all the NBA storylines, finding the best, most interesting, most compelling stories,

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When you had Marty Bennett on the podcast, did he talk to you about the halftime of that 28 to three Superbowl? Oh yeah. Like he was like, we'd practiced, he told me when I interviewed, he was like, we practiced having a longer half time. And I was like, oh, that's attention to detail, right?

You would think like the players be like, oh, extra time. No, Belchek's thinking, shit, if these guys have an extra 15 minutes, are they gonna get cramps? Are they gonna get, do they need extra warmups? Are people gonna get into it with each other, are they gonna get distracted? So they practiced leading up to the Super Bowl,

just having 15 minutes to kill. And so everyone knew their places when they went into it. And you can imagine how, you could imagine you going to halftime, it wasn't 28 to three at halftime, was it? It was 28 to three. I thought the third quarter also went bad, but I'm forgetting.

But the point is, any energy that you would need to marshal to come back in that game could have dissipated with that extra 15 minutes. Totally. People could have been planning how they're gonna get out of the stadium with traffic. Yeah, and we've all heard this,

is like fighting for every inch and getting 1% better. Well, that gets harder and harder as you level up. And so you've gotta find the little details inside of the cracks and crevices and take it as far as possible. It's almost like a comedian dragging a joke three, four, five times further, which makes comedians so funny

as they go to the level of absurd. Bill Belichick was absurd in their practice of going half times, normally 15 minutes, it's 30 minutes for the Superbowl. We're not just going to put 30 minute blocks into our practice, no. We're going to march back into our locker room in Gillette, we're gonna sit around, we're gonna have our PB&Js set up and our Gatorades,

and we're gonna do our stretching, and then we're gonna walk back out. I mean, who fucking simulates halftime? Right, no, it's crazy. That is taking it to the nth degree. Yeah, and what are your stations? What should you be doing in this scenario? And so when Marty was like, look, we were down 28 to three,

none of us expected that, because we had practiced halftime, it didn't feel like we were down 28 to three. It felt like we were at halftime. And that was a big difference for them. And what we're talking about here is elite. And as I was like preparing to sit down and talk with you, I was like, yeah, we're gonna take this conversation

in so many different directions, I'm sure. And it's gonna be hardcore at times, depending on who's listening. And so elite isn't for everyone. And that's okay. Yeah, yeah. And elite, I think about it's the highest level citing Nick Saban and that famous press conference

when he was like, you have five choices to make. Oh, that's so good. Five choices, you're gonna be bad, you're gonna be average, you're gonna be good, you're gonna be excellent, you can be elite. Yeah. And I love that there are four stages from average and only one below.

And some of them are pretty good. And some of them are pretty good. And some of them are pretty good. Excellent is excellent. You can make a lot of money being excellent. You can have a lot of fun being excellent. Elite is going into halftime in the middle of practice, taking it off the field and having halftime set up in a practice, that's elite.

Elite is rare. Well, Saban's book has a good title. It's not the greatest book, but the title's good. It's called, How Good Do You Want To Be? Yeah. And like sometimes those questions are just so powerful. How good do you want to be? I tell this story in discipline and I think a lot about it.

The Jimmy Carter thing, he's being interviewed for this job, he wants being interviewed for this job. He wants to be on nuclear submarines. And the Admiral says to him, how'd you do at the Naval Academy? He's telling him his rank and stuff. And he goes, but did you always do your best? And Carter says, no, probably not always.

And then he goes, why not? It's like, why not do your best? Why, like what, like not like, did you always do your best, but why didn't you always do your best? And those kinds of questions that kind of hang over you. And then they kind of, they can guide you in these moments. I mean, that's to me the question that Bill Belichick asked you, which is like, okay,

so you can be pretty good at football, but why not be the best at lacrosse? Why not, like, he's like, okay, so you can be pretty good at football, but why not be the best at lacrosse? Why not? Like, he's like, why would someone not try to be the greatest in the world if they had the chance to be the greatest in the world at something? And you felt like you couldn't answer that question. You know what I mean?

Right. You had no, like to say, well, I could make a lot more money doing this other thing. It's insufficient as an answer. It doesn't fully address the weight of the implication. It's hard to comprehend it. It's just something in the air. Yeah.

And then you make a choice around whether to breathe in that oxygen or not. Yeah. Yeah, that is the problem with the, like it's rarefied air air and so it's tough. And every athlete, like the tabloids they say, like celebrities are just like us. Yeah.

You know, every athlete struggles and oftentimes, authors, entertainers, entrepreneurs. Here's the thing, when you have an elite mentality and you're going to the nth degree and you're accomplishing things that others haven't before, on the other side of that is like deep sense of pain and loss when it doesn't work out. Sure.

You're sort of widening your aperture and you have to be okay with that pain when you miss. And I think it's, I think a lot of athletes that have had extended careers, not only know how to manage both, but they appreciate both. Because you can't have the highs of accomplishment and success without the lows of challenges and failure. Just can't.

You had a high school coach, I think, say to you, like, the key is you gotta take 100 shots a day. Yeah. That's how, if you wanna make it into a good school, like, start now, you gotta take 100 shots a day. So you did that, you made it to college, you took 100 shots a day, you made it pro, you took 100 shots a day. I like that idea. you made it to college, you took 100 shots a day, you made it pro, you took 100 shots a day.

I like that idea, it's like, what are the reps in your thing? What are the reps that you do that's totally in your control, and if you commit to it and you do it, chances are you're gonna end up where you wanna go. But how do you think about 100 shots a day when you're not playing anymore?

What's, what, how do you do that? Well, sometimes I take 100 shots because I've found that it, that it's, it fills me up with good energy. And my girlfriend tells me now, like when my eyes wander, something happens behind her when I'm talking to her. She realizes that it's because I'm an athlete. Yeah.

And she says, her words, not mine, but it resonated with me. I'm very balletic. It's what I've committed my whole life to. And so when like someone's passing or like, I'll notice it in my apartment, in New York, there's a soccer pitch like right outside and I'm having a coffee and I'm just,

like I'm like a fucking cat looking at a ball of yarn rolling and it's like, you know, so that like getting out there and taking 100 shots is nourishing for my soul. It's an outlet for that energy. Yeah, man, it's chicken noodle soup for my soul. But I don't do it every day anymore because it's not part of my career.

So then what are the 100 shots that are the equivalent of that in what I do now? Yeah. And let's just face it, it is very different. It is reading. And you can look at Warren Buffett, he said the difference between what he thinks is his success and what society believes

is that he reads 500 pages a day. What? 500, you know, I'm sure it's like device to books to yeah. Articles. 500 pages. He blocks his calendar. Those are the scales. He's just practicing the scales like a musician.

He's throwing his hundred shots in. Yeah, it's simple. He's like, I'm going to be a better investor the more I know. Yeah. So I read about the business of sports. I read about the business, the movie business. I read about the publishing business now

because our league is about attention and revenue. Sure. And the revenue is oftentimes tied to advertising and then ticket sales and then merchandise and then youth sports. So those are four entirely different businesses that I gotta get smart on. So my 100 shots is consuming information every morning

before I go into my emails, before I go into my deeper work tasks. Because I know for me to be an effective leader at the PLL, I have got to be well informed and predictive. Yeah. And so those are my 100 shots. Yeah, it's interesting, I was, because I love that chapter so much,

I was thinking like, what are my 100 shots? And you'd think as a writer, the 100 shots would be writing for me. Like, did I sit down and write today? And I realized it's actually not. Like, if I write, great, that moves the ball forward in some way. If I, I don't know, do stuff for Daily Stoker,

make videos, this is all great, this is all important for my business. But like, it's actually, did I sit down and do my note cards? My note cards are the hundred shots. Because everything descends from there. That's the raw material, the building blocks of what I write. And so if I'm not reading and then processing

that information on a consistent basis, months later, when I sit down to do the book, I'm just starting the wisdom book in the virtue series, if I don't have what I need on Monday to write, it's because I didn't do 10 note cards in December of 2019. Do you know what I mean? And then they didn't sit there for five years until that moment.

And so yeah, figuring out what your 100 shots are, what's the building blocks, What's the repetitive practice? What's the scales you have to practice as a musician? You gotta figure out what that thing is. And you gotta say, like, come hell or high water, don't care what the weather is, don't care if I'm feeling it, I do that thing every day. And that was the caveat in what this prolific coach told me.

Say, okay, 100 shots, doable, 30 minutes. And I'm gonna get a division one scholarship to the college of my choice. Okay, done. He was like, hold on, holidays, bad weather, sickness. You've gotta do it. And I took that as literally as I possibly could. And that was, as I reflect on it,

part of it was because he hung the carrot and he was a prolific coach, so he had seen it. So I believed him and he was right. So I think, you know, someone like you as a prolific writer, understanding the carrot of note cards and how important it is to writing your next books is critical. And then what I learned is that

when you develop a skill like that or a practice that is a habit, it quickly ties to your... quickly ties to your, the way that you, the standard that you hold yourself to. Yeah. And the reason why I like pausing to think about that is the standard has to be so important to you that it will cause you strain

when you're not meeting it every day. If I had looked down at my watch and it was five o'clock in the afternoon and I hadn't taken a hundred shots, I wasn't surprised. I had thought about it at four o'clock, three o'clock, two o'clock, one o'clock. It was so layered into what I demanded of myself that as the day went on, I would feel more and more guilt.

Yeah. And if I ever missed a day, I would shoot 500 shots the next. You gotta pay interest on your day. Yeah, so it has this physiological. Which just becomes, it goes from a practice to a routine, to a ritual. There's something sacred about the ritual of it.

So yeah, ultimately the note cards are work product that I rely on. So it's money. But really it's the process of doing it that you come to find therapeutic and sacred and comfortable. Yeah. And that's why you do it every single day.

Yeah. Dude, this was awesome. You wanna go check out some books? I would love to. All right, let's do it. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes,

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