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Motivation Is a Lie: Dre Baldwin on Real Discipline · Harder Than Life

• 0:00
  There's no such thing as faking it till you make it. Everybody wants to be a freaking gangster till it's time to do gangster things. I had to go and sell myself to others. The baseline level of talent that I had to put me in the room, the effort, the discipline, the selling, the marketing, all of that stuff is what actually got me the opportunity. Worked in basketball, I used it in everything else. I've often said second is the first loser, and I've learned way more from my losses than my wins.
• 0:24
  The first principle of sports is you play to win the game. And if you win, you get the trophy. The purpose of the trophy is it represents that not everybody won. The disappointment of losing is what actually makes you tougher, stronger, and it will drive you to get better so you win the next time. Or it'll drive you out of the game because you don't want to deal with that. That disappointment is what kids need to learn to deal with. You just gave life to Chico. You say discipline builds confidence. I say action builds confidence. If you had to give words to explain
• 0:51
  who, why, what in terms of your confidence or how you feel about yourself, how you want other people to feel your compensated because the energy itself should be doing all the work. I love what the post is saying, you feel my energy before I return a room. Like really big hat, no cattle, man. I got to tell people that you feel my energy. You're just going to feel my energy. My guest today went from the very end of his high school bench, a kid who barely made the team to a nine year professional basketball career across eight countries.
• 1:19
  Then he built a content empire, watched more than 100 million times, and wrote over 40 books. Let me bring in Dre Baldwin.
• 1:30
  Welcome to the show, my friend. You went from the very end of your high school bench to a nine-year pro career in five years. What changed first, your game or your mind? Probably my game, but my mind changed along with it, but not in the way that I could have articulated or explained while it was happening, but I can explain it really well now.
• 1:51
  Why do we get it wrong as men that we believe everything is physical when it's more mental? That's what I think the question really what I was asking, because I found myself work really hard on my mind and my body and my business. And I ignored the mental part of the game. Why do we do that as men?
• 2:13
  Well, usually by the time we as we get older, let's say not by a certain age, but as we get older, we start to pay more attention to the intangible things that we can't count, measure away or directly compare between ourselves and others, even ourselves to ourselves, such as mindset.
• 2:30
  But the physical stuff, the tangible things, we can see it. We can count it. You can look at yourself in the mirror and say, OK, my muscles are bigger now than they were six months ago. You can look at the revenue report and see we're making more money now than we did previous quarter. Those are easy to measure, easy to count and thus easy to pay attention to. And that's what we default to because it doesn't require as much mental work, whereas the mindset side requires a lot of mental work because we can't count or measure the changes over time.
• 3:00
  of our change in action as a result of the internal change but because it's so hard to quantify and it's hard to hold in a container so to speak that's the reason why it doesn't get as much attention it's also harder to get the idea across to other people as well for the same reason so you're saying my ego was in the way for everybody me too because everyone
• 3:20
  You look sharp, man. I'm very impressed by you. And the way you conduct your business is very, I think so I'm going to try to do the best to get this out and introduce you to our audience. You're the real deal. What was the moment you realized that talent was never going to be the thing that carried you?
• 3:36
  Well, hopefully I realized it from the beginning because I didn't have enough of it that that was going to help me get through. So when I first started playing again, I started playing basketball when I was 14. So that's pretty late if you want to play college ball, let alone play pro. So everybody was ahead of me on a talent curve. Now, I caught up because I was willing to show up consistently.
• 3:54
  discipline behavior and work on my game and eventually get better. Then in college, I was only playing Division III. So you know the sports world. Division III is like the third tier of athletes. It's not like you're expected to play pro if you're playing Division III any sport.
• 4:07
  So by the time I got out of college, I knew I was good enough that I could possibly compete, but it wasn't like a guaranteed slam dunk. And nobody was calling me saying, hey, here's an opportunity. Why don't you come play here? Nobody was calling my phone. So I knew I was good enough, but I wasn't going to get there just by sitting around waiting for somebody to find me. I had to go and sell myself to others. So the baseline level of talent that I had to put me in the room.
• 4:32
  But then the effort, the discipline, the selling, the marketing, all of that stuff is what actually got me the opportunity. And then when it worked in basketball, I used it in everything else. You just gave life's cheat code.
• 4:43
  Literally, you want to turn an ordinary life into an extraordinary life. Just got to do a little extra. That's the difference between ordinary and extraordinary. The baseline is ordinary. Do a little bit extra and you become extraordinary. And that you have become. How tall are you, bro? Six, four. Six, four. So you were just, you were a guard? That's right. Well, depending on where I was playing. When I was in Mexico, sometimes I'd be playing center. Guys weren't that tall. But depends on who else is on the team. Stand up comedian. Love that.
• 5:11
  we're going to talk a lot about your book the third day
• 5:15
  this Trelana, the client who quit on the third day, basically named your whole philosophy for you. What did she see that most people miss? I don't think she saw that much. I think she was just telling me the truth. So Trelana, that's her name. Still one of my friends to this day. And she was just saying like, hey, I like the working out part. It's just by the time we get to that third day, I am too tired. My body is tired. And she wasn't bought in for any other reason
• 5:42
  She wanted to get the result, but it wasn't a there wasn't a strong enough pull for her to want to get the result to keep showing up. So this is what happens with most people. So I remember her saying that and it just stuck in my head. And it wasn't until maybe 10 years later that I wrote that book, 15 years later that I wrote the book. But I always remember her saying that. And I realized even then.
• 6:02
  That applies to everybody and is not just in sports is not just with fitness is not just with things that we can count it applies in mindset as well. That we get to a point where this bright idea that we had is still a good idea, but is not as exciting and not as sexy once that new car smell so to speak wears off go it.
• 6:20
  And that's when you had to buckle down and do the actual work. And that's the reason why it's called work. It's the reason why a job is called a job, because there's a part of it that is not exciting, even though it may all look exciting from the outside looking in. I'm sure in your line of work, just having the show. I'm sure you talk to people who see you doing the show and they say, well, I want to do a show. And it's exciting at first, the first few episodes. But then when they realize, oh, wait a minute, there's some real work that I have to do to make this thing keep going. That's when you find out, is this person serious about it or were they just dabbling?
• 6:51
  The harder I work, the luckier I get. And work works. I laugh because everybody wants to look like me and act like me until I tell them what I do. Everybody wants to be a freaking gangster until it's time to do gangster things. That's right. But please tell me, when I was reading the show notes yesterday, I was thinking about this. Please tell me it really isn't the third day. Even quitting day on New Year's is, what, the ninth?
• 7:13
  Isn't it everybody gives up on their New Year's resolution on, isn't, I think it's the ninth or it's the second Monday. It can't be the third day. It doesn't have to be literally the third day. It can be literally the third day, depending on what it is. It depends on what it is that they're doing, but it could be the third time around. It could be six months later. It could be a year later. It's whenever the,
• 7:35
  the welcome party ends and you realize that, okay, this is not going to be one big, it's not going to be one big celebration. It's not what it looks like in the brochure. Okay. There's some grunt, there's some grunt work. There's some grind days. Like you said, people want to look like you, they want to have muscles like you. And the first couple of workouts, they show up enthusiastic and do everything you said. Then it comes that day where their back hurts, they're tired, their muscles are sore.
• 7:57
  They didn't get good sleep the previous night. It's raining outside. There's nobody else in the gym to excite them. And the music can't motivate them, but they still have to lift those weights. That's when you find out who's serious and who's not. That's the third day. It doesn't matter what day that is. Another thing is, Kelly, the third day can happen over and over again. It doesn't happen just one time. Oh, it will. It happens again and again. It will. And it's not about the willpower, but I don't want to steal your thunder. What is it really about? It's not willpower. I can tell you that. What is it?
• 8:26
  Absolutely not willpower. It is having a structure in place so that you can follow through even in the moments when the motivation doesn't show up or the motivation has left the building. And most people will call that discipline. The challenge is discipline is not a personality trait. Discipline is just a byproduct of structured execution. When you execute in a structured way consistently, people see your behavior and they say this guy is disciplined, but the person is not disciplined. The behavior is disciplined.
• 8:53
  And people say this guy is disciplined because they're what they're doing is personalizing discipline as if some people are it and some people are not it. But that's not true. Some people are disciplined at sleeping in every day. Some people are disciplined at eating ice cream. Other people are disciplined at going to the gym and doing their business where they're supposed to.
• 9:10
  So everyone has discipline. Is this a matter of doing the same things over and over and over again? It's a matter of what are those things? Are they constructive? Are they destructive? Are they good investments or bad investments? Are you later on going to get a return on investment? Are you going to get an invoice for the behavior that you took in the past? So discipline, again, is a description of behavior. It is not a personality trait, which means it is available to everybody. I like to say discipline is a choice because everything is a choice, really. That's what people don't realize. You made a choice.
• 9:40
  It just, what did it get you closer to what you're wanting to do or your goals or to get you farther? Right. What is the decision that then people are making when they do hit that snooze or eat that freaking ice cream or what are they making? What is that? I shed some light on this.
• 9:56
  Sure. So that moment when there's work to be done and you also have the option of not doing the work, that's when you get to make the choice. Do I step forward and do this even though I may not feel like it or do I allow how I feel to overpower what I've committed to? That's we also find out how clear your commitments are and how.
• 10:15
  negotiable your commitments are. A lot of people's biggest challenge, Kelly, is that they negotiate with their own commitments. And if you're negotiating with a commitment, then by definition, it's not a commitment because a commitment means you're doing it regardless of how you feel. Negotiation means you are opening the door for your feelings to have a say in the decision making process. Your feelings have a say, then you have not made a real commitment. Therefore, it's not a decision because a decision means to cut off. The word decision is derived from a Latin term that means literally to cut off. So you make a decision, you're cutting off every other option.
• 10:44
  So if you're negotiating, that means you have options. So again, it's oxymoronic to even be negotiating with a decision. So what the decision that people are making in that moment is, okay, I didn't really make one in the first place. Again, that's the reason why they have the ability to negotiate with themselves. And usually when human beings
• 11:02
  negotiate with themselves, what do they choose? They choose the path of least resistance, whatever requires the least amount of effort. That's what human beings will naturally choose because it is our biological wiring to conserve energy and conserve effort for
• 11:17
  the fight or flight or freeze situations, life or death situations. And since most people never make serious decisions about pretty much anything in their lives, usually they default to whatever takes the least amount of effort. And what takes the least amount of effort usually gets you to mediocrity or failure in the long run. Yeah, I don't negotiate with myself, but that's where the discipline does come in. It's never negotiate. That takes a little level. It takes a lot of self-love, a self-awareness,
• 11:45
  and trusting yourself. And, but I make it simple and easy. So like, if it's a hard decision, I make it as easy and as simple as it can be. And, you know, put, if you're, you know, sometimes I have to go to the gym earlier in the morning, 3.30 instead of four or four instead of five. And then I just put everything out
• 12:06
  Set the alarm. Don't even think about it. Just get up like a normal, like it's a normal day. So what is, I think you talk about this, but what's separation day and then what the skipping separation day actually costs somebody, even if nothing bad happens that day?
• 12:22
  The separation day is the first cousin of the third day. So the third day is that day when you don't really feel like showing up and doing a job, but you show up and do the job anyway, if you show up for the third day. So the separation, the third day is about you with yourself is about you looking in the mirror. OK, I showed up for myself because I was supposed to.
• 12:41
  Separation day is about how that third day relates to others outside of yourself, the externalities. So if someone is already ahead of you, they don't show up on that third day, but you do. Whatever separation existed, you close the gap just a little bit. If you two are equal, then you create a little bit of separation from them. And if you're already ahead, then you separate a little bit more. So the separation is about between you and everyone else out there.
• 13:05
  And over time, actually, here's the other thing about the separation day is that you can't see the difference. So if you and I were both supposed to go to the gym one day, you go and I don't go. The amount of difference that you create that day is not visible, is not measurable. Nobody knows. Even if you didn't know that I didn't go and I don't know that you did go. Neither of us can tell the difference that day. But over time, what happens is these behaviors compound.
• 13:28
  And that compounding over time creates such a big gap that over time you look at the two people, the one who kept showing up and the one who kept not showing up and the distance between them is so wide that you wouldn't even believe that they used to be on the same level. They used to be in the same position. So I'm sure you can think of in your days hitting the gym.
• 13:47
  When you first started, there were people who were about the same size as you. And now look at you and look at them. They didn't keep showing up. You can continually separate it over time because you don't get muscles like that in one day or even one month. It's continually showing up. That's the separation. What's your relationship with surrendering? Because what I've noticed is.
• 14:06
  The more that I let go these days, the more that I get. And I was one of the most disciplined. I wouldn't take a day off because I was fearing that somebody would catch me, whether it be in work. I worked Saturdays, I worked Sundays, I worked on vacation, I worked out. Last year I did 555 workouts.
• 14:28
  And I realized it was coming from scarcity and fear. And then I realized that if I can turn this around and do it, I've gotten bigger. My company's gotten bigger. The podcast has gotten bigger because I surrendered. What's your take on that? It's interesting. That's not even a word that I even consider often. I know what it means, but I don't even consider the word surrender. But I get what you're saying. It's...
• 14:49
  You don't have to try to. It sounds like what you're saying is you don't have to force it. Correct. It can still happen without forcing it. And I'll give you an analogy that I heard this guy named Derek Sivers talk about. You ever heard of Derek Sivers? He's not. OK, he was he was telling this story. So he used to ride his bicycle in L.A., like along the beach.
• 15:06
  And he would try to ride as hard as possible because he was trying to hit a certain time. He would push, push, push, and he would get it 43 minutes going a couple of miles down the boardwalk. Every day he would do it and then he started hating it because he hated having to push because he just didn't like the feeling of pushing himself on a bike. It took 43 minutes, no matter how hard he went, no matter what technique he tried, he couldn't break 43 minutes. So one day he decided, you know what, forget it. I'm just going to ride and have a good time. I'm not going to try to push. I'm not going to try to beat my time. I'm just going to enjoy the view.
• 15:36
  and just ride the damn bike. He just rode the bike. And when he got to the end of his trail, guess how much time it was? 40 minutes. 45 minutes. Oh. So he only lost two minutes, even though he stopped pushing and stopped trying. And the point he was making was that only two minutes was the difference between him hating riding a bike and actually loving and enjoying riding a bike. He didn't necessarily do better, but at the same time, he felt a whole lot better because he stopped pushing so hard to achieve something that was making him hate the thing. He enjoyed it, and it was only a two-minute difference.
• 16:06
  And I think it relates very well to what you're saying, even though he didn't get necessarily better, is that when you stop pushing so hard, your body, your subconscious and everything else that you've already done, the work, the compounding actually does the work for you. And the unconscious, the subconscious is more efficient and effective at getting things done than our conscious pushing is at getting things done.
• 16:28
  With a lot less effort, we get a lot more result. So it's kind of like that 80-20 principle that if you try 20% as much as you are now, you'll get 80% of the result. But if you try 100% as much, you're, again, the effort, the juice doesn't match the squeeze, if that makes sense. Trying too hard isn't worth the effort that you're putting out, the returns that you get back from it.
• 16:49
  Dre, how old are you? 44. Man, you were, first of all, you look very young. Second of all, you're very wise. I'm telling you the truth. I am 44. No, that was a good story. And it actually made perfect sense that it was exactly. And it really, when you get older, you talked about earlier, when you get older, perspective changes. I'd rather enjoy the ride and still complete it.
• 17:15
  and maybe come a little bit short of the goal, but enjoy it. We don't have, we're not, we're only here for a finite amount of time. We're not going to be here forever. So let's enjoy the ride while we're at it. Exactly.
• 17:27
  You've talked that it's a for motivations for amateurs. It sounds harsh. I tend to agree with it, but what do you actually mean by that? That is a literal saying that motivations for amateurs because motivation is something that comes and goes. It's fickle. You cannot depend on it and you don't know when or if or how or in what form it will show up. Motivation is a nice to have accessory.
• 17:53
  But you cannot build a career, a brand, a business, anything consistent or where consistency is relied upon based on motivation because of the nature of motivation.
• 18:03
  Instead, you can build on something that is reliable, something that's structural, something that is consistent, such as execution, such as what we call discipline or discipline behavior, because they do not depend on a feeling. Motivation is a feeling. It's an energy. It's an emotion. And all human beings have emotion. If we didn't have emotion, we'd be robots. However, emotions cannot be predicted and you cannot force an emotion onto yourself yourself.
• 18:28
  at all times in a consistent, predictable way. Because as professionals, that means we're doing something as a paid occupation. And if you want to get paid consistently, you must deliver consistently. You cannot deliver consistently building on or fueling your tank, so to speak, with inconsistent fuel. So the consistent fuel is the discipline. Motivation is inconsistent fuel. It does help. It does give a boost, but you use it when it shows up. But if it doesn't show up, you still have to do your job.
• 18:56
  Do you have a playbook or a structure that you follow for everything in life? You seem like you have a blueprint for things. Do you have a blueprint for...
• 19:07
  quote unquote, becoming discipline or getting the outcome that you want? I guess you can say I do. I have plenty of blueprints. I have a bunch of what we call frameworks around these things. So the questions that you're asking me are all based on frameworks that I've extracted, developed, refined, talked about a long time. But the third day is one of my frameworks, like what we were talking about. And that's
• 19:29
  dealing with or being more disciplined when most people are looking for motivation is also a framework. So everything is based on the blueprint because I just tend to think in structure. I tend to think in systems. You can probably hear that in my speech. Yeah. Systems, save yourself time, energy, money, and stress. I'm a big system. That's why we, we, we's like, we've got to have this guy on. He's, he's another, another one of us. We're the member of the tribe. One of the weird ones. I never heard that acronym. Yes. That's, that's good.
• 19:57
  What's something you believe in that almost nobody agrees with you on? Something I believe in that almost no one agrees with me on. There's no such thing as faking it till you make it. And confidence is not a personality trait either, just like discipline is. There's no such thing as a confident person, quote unquote. Confidence is a byproduct of certain behaviors. It's not something that you just as adults that we just have.
• 20:23
  Now, if you go back to childhood, I have a child who's three years old. You look at a two-year-old, four-year-old, five-year-old, they have a lot of confidence because they just go out, they ask for what they want. You say no, they cry, yell, stomp until they get what they want because they don't know any difference.
• 20:37
  is once we get socialized, we are taught that when someone tells you no, you have to accept the no. If you get rejected, you have to be okay with that. You have to sit down, shut up, and wait until the world approves of your request. And most human beings take that with them from age eight when they start school all the way up through adulthood until they die. And they never unlearn that. And that's a bad thing that kids are taught at a very young age.
• 21:01
  is to accept when life is saying no. And that's when people learn to start editing themselves, to not even ask the questions, to not even try to do something. And this is how people end up holding themselves back. So then in adulthood, when they see someone,
• 21:14
  who isn't holding themselves back, they look at that person and say, wow, look how confident that person is. All that person is just someone who unlearned the nonsense that they were taught when they were five years old when they started school. So we have to unlearn it once we become adults that no, you don't have to accept the no, you don't have to just wait for someone else to give you permission or approve of you or certify you or tell you what to do in order for you to take a step forward. So one thing that I believe that most people don't believe is that confidence again,
• 21:41
  It technically is inherent, but then it's drummed out of us. But then you had to get it back. Most people don't understand it. I think that we also need to get back our childlike play and not having that fear. So that's what else comes with the being told no. You get the filtered, you get pushed down. And the quicker you do the work on yourself and your mental fitness, you get back to being that childlike.
• 22:06
  and you start playing again and having fun and just doing things just to do them and have fun. And we get, I've forgotten, I say this because I've been going the last several years, grind, grind, grind, grind, and I've forgotten this is supposed to be fun. And recently I'm starting to have fun again and life is good. Excellent. You say discipline builds confidence, creates confidence. I say action builds confidence, probably because I like ABC. What's the difference?
• 22:35
  there's not much difference because discipline is a byproduct of structure and structure is telling you what to do so when you're doing things you're taking action so we're saying the same thing the actions that you're talking about to build confidence are usually things that are planned structured organized there's a a rhyme and a reason to the action that you're taking sometimes we can do random things to try to get started to create some momentum but once we figure out what works it's doing those actions consistently
• 23:01
  It builds a belief in our ability to do the thing. And that is literally the definition of confidence, belief in your ability to do something. You get that belief by doing the work consistently. So when it's time to do it and everybody's watching, they see your absence of anxiety, your absence of being self-conscious. And people look at that and say, wow, that guy or that girl is very confident.
• 23:24
  They're describing you, the person, as confident when really it's the absence of social anxiety that people read and call confidence. And that anxiety is removed because you've already what we call over here doing your homework. You did your homework already. So by the time you show up, you're very confident that you can pass the test.
• 23:42
  Well, and it's also stack in the third days. You build more confidence on the third days, the going and doing the thing when you absolutely don't want to. You do that over and over and over again. And it just it builds a level of resilience that you cannot take away. And it travels that equates to other things in your life.
• 24:05
  You could do it in the gym and then you'll be at work and you'll be like, I don't feel like doing this today. And you'll pick up the phone and make the call. And it just it builds a toughness in you that that I wish everybody would do. Yes, exactly. And showing up consistently on those third days, eventually it becomes gets to the point that you're not even thinking about it, that even though you may not feel great, it never crosses your mind that you're not going to do it.
• 24:27
  Yeah, I always say this too lately. This is me backing off just a little bit of being my intense, crazy, harder-than-lifeness. If you got 60% one day and you gave all 60%, you gave 100%. There are certain days where I used to show up, I had 60, I'd push to 80, 100, and then I would just get sick. And it's like, come on.
• 24:49
  Come on, let's dial it down. We're not winning a marathon. We're not trying to take over the world. Let's be realistic. Let's flip to the other side of that, Dre, and talk about this, because this is what drives me nuts. And this is what I want to get through to people. And I think this is your audience. Why do smart, capable people keep choosing the thing that feels good over the thing that works and moves them forward?
• 25:12
  Because smart, capable people are still people and human beings are going to again, left to our own devices. We tend to default to the path of least resistance. And that's the lowest common denominator is the thing that might not be the thing that moves us forward, but it helps us feel the best. And emotions overpower logic seven days a week, twice on Sunday.
• 25:33
  And the way that you defeat this, as I think would be your follow up question here, is you have to remove the options. You have to create constraints. And a lot of human beings, you probably have heard people say that they want to be more free. They want more freedom, more space, less people telling them what to do. They want more options. They don't want to be constrained because then it feels like they're being forced into certain behaviors. And I say that's exactly the point.
• 25:56
  You want constraints because constraints force your hand. They remove your hedges. They remove your options. And when a human being has no options but to do one thing, they tend to do that one thing. And they tend to do it pretty well relative to their potential. Why? Because they don't have anything else to be doing. So the constraints actually help us and smart people.
• 26:17
  by design because they're so smart. They have a lot of options because they're so smart. They know everything that they could possibly do. They know all the possible different ways that they could take things. And that is why sometimes a person who is less intelligent gets more done than the smart person because the less intelligent person does not see as many options as a smart person sees. Well, I didn't think of that. That's good. If the listeners think back into their life,
• 26:40
  Every single thing that is good for them started off hard and then ended easy. It's the things that are bad for you start off easy and end up hard. It's just that simple. If it feels easy, I don't want to do it. That's why we called it harder than life. That's the mind trick I played on myself to become disciplined.
• 27:02
  That's right. It connects to Brian Tracy has a principal, or I heard him say it, I don't know if he created it, but he calls it time perspective. That the more successful a person, the further into the future they consider the ramifications of their present behaviors. So that's the instant gratification versus the way gratification. Oh, yeah, I'm learning something new every day. Let's think of a, I hate to say hack, but I'm gonna say this. What is an advanced technique that someone could put in place this week to build a discipline system
• 27:31
  in lieu of a motivational habit.
• 27:34
  Oh, yeah, we don't need motivation at all. It's plug into structure. So plugging into structure means either create if you're a type of person who can do it or you can tap into some AI can help you or go find someone who already has created a structure that you can follow consistently to produce a consistent desired behavior. And a structure does not have to be some 300 page pamphlet or manual.
• 28:01
  Structure can be a simple three step process. It can be a two step process. It can be a one step process. But the structure is what am I going to commit to doing on a consistent basis that based on my reasonable expectations and knowledge will produce a desired outcome over and over and over and over again? That's all a structure is. So if you plug into get a structure, plug into the structure and actually follow the instructions of the structure, that's the key point.
• 28:26
  Follow the instructions of the structure. So it has to be you're going to do what the structure says to do. In order for you to do that, you need leverage over yourself and leverage is what is the thing that can move you to a certain behavior, even when there is resistance. And one of the things that helps create leverage in a human being is the removal of options. When you have no other option but to do one thing, you have leverage over yourself because there's no other thing you can do.
• 28:49
  or you really, really need to achieve this outcome because you really want the desired thing, or you really want to avoid the pain if you don't do it, those things all create leverage. So the biggest thing is plug into a structure that produces or leverages leverage against yourself.
• 29:05
  when you say structure for the average user, what I'm thinking of and tell me if I'm wrong is the most basic structure is just structure your day and then follow it. So like if you come into my life every single day, so a lot of people always go to, I want to work out with you. And I always tease, I laugh. I,
• 29:23
  I'm there every day at 5 a.m. Meet me. I'm at Lifetime Fitness, 5 a.m. Bloomfield Hills. Go. Meet me there. I got her boyfriend. I want to work out with you. We're there at 5 a.m. Every day, rain or shine. Go. And nobody shows up. At 6 a.m., I'm leaving the gym. Or 6.15, I'm leaving the gym. Every day, it's the same. You want to kill me? You can follow me when I'm driving. What I eat for breakfast, what I wear.
• 29:50
  Everything is structured. Is that what you're talking about? Structured? Is that what you do, too? Yes. So that would somebody said to me years ago, he said, Dre, you're easy to assassinate because people know exactly where you're going to be at what times, how you operate. Yes, that's exactly what I mean. And I've had similar situations when I was playing ball. Kid comes in there. He says, I want to train with you. I said, all right, I'm here every day. Same court, same place. And he showed up for about a week and then he stopped showing up. And I haven't seen him since. Yeah.
• 30:17
  And people say that they want to do the work. But when it comes time to doing the work, they hit that third day when it's not sexy and fun anymore. That's when most people fall off. So that's why discipline is the main thing for professionals because it's a secret hiding in plain sight. Yeah, I love that, man. It's the great separator. And I don't apologize for it anymore. Everyone's like, oh, what steroids do you take? What peptides do you take? I'm like 30 years of consistent training.
• 30:44
  30 years. I've looked like this for 30 years. Do you think I took a freaking peptide? It weren't even existed 30 years ago. It's like, it just work, man. Good old fashioned, go in the gym, lift heavy and do the dang thing that you don't want to do for 30 years.
• 31:01
  And you look like this. People nowadays have access to so many ways to access the shortcuts. Oh, yeah. Person who doesn't take a shortcut. Now you're the anomaly because you didn't take the shortcut. I'll take the stairs every time. What's the difference between the confidence people post online and the confidence that radiates without a single word?
• 31:23
  Excellent question. So confidence that people post online is edited confidence. That doesn't count. I don't even count that this that's edited curated confidence. And I and Kelly, you can probably say this is true with you. You can tell me I've met enough people who I've seen online and in person to know. You're in Miami, so you see it everywhere.
• 31:43
  Oh, yeah. Yeah. The influencers, the the streamers, I see them everywhere. They're some of my neighbors and is two different people. It's not the exact it's not the same thing, but they're posting online. If I meet them online first and then I meet them in person or meet them in person first, then I see them online. I'm like, who is this? Not the same. It's like two different individuals. Confidence that radiates in person is unspoken. There's no caption. There's you don't have to tell people what they're seeing. They can feel it.
• 32:08
  And they respond to it in unconscious ways, often nonverbal ways. Because 85% of communication is nonverbal. So how people respond to your very presence, your physical presence in a space, tells you what they're reading coming off of you, even if no words are exchanged. If you had to give words to explain who, why, what, in terms of your confidence or how you feel about yourself or how you want other people to feel, you're compensating. Because the energy itself should be doing all the work.
• 32:36
  I love what the posts say, you feel my energy before I enter a room. Like, really? Big hat, no cattle, man. I got to tell people that you feel my energy. You're just going to feel my energy. Exactly. I love that. You youngsters. I have a good following youngsters. I'm going to tell you something. When you meet someone in real life and they see that.
• 32:59
  that gap that you portray versus who you are, I'm gonna use an easy one, a filter. I see this with women all the time. They'll filter themselves and you meet them in real life. That's the first lie, and I know that I can't take you seriously. It happens just like that. Like, I cannot take you seriously and I will not take you seriously because you're not taking you seriously. So don't mess around trying to be somebody you're not. That's the first advice. Those are probably for my daughter's
• 33:29
  friends for the hear that what is your take on that brother we seem to be very similar do you do that do you take the same exact um conclusion
• 33:37
  Well, what I what I do is when I notice that difference, I'm just trying to I get curious. I try to figure out why is there a difference between the way a person is presenting themselves, let's say, online when they can curate and edit and how they present themselves in, quote unquote, real life. And what I found, I talked about this years ago. I think for a lot of people being online is their real life. That's the real life. And then offline is like the alternative universe, if you really think about it.
• 34:04
  Oh, my God. Especially people under the age of 30, 35. They've grown up with this stuff. This is what they know. Their first form of their first wave of communication is through a phone. And the second wave is when you had to put the phone down. Whereas you and I, we come from the era where you had to if you want to talk to a girl, you had to literally talk to a girl.
• 34:22
  Right. If you want to have something to say to another male, you have to wait till you saw him and you have to say it directly to him and deal with his response. Whereas in this era, now you can do it all through your phone with your thumbs and you may never even have to have a real life communication with the people that you're talking to. So they've grown up in a completely different world. That's the reason why I say I get curious, because they are not operating by the same principles that we grew up on.
• 34:45
  Oh, man, you just made me, like, sad for these kids. You're right. I agree. Interpersonal skills, the communication skills that we had to learn in the navigating. I don't know about you. You grew up in Philadelphia. I grew up in Detroit. You said something to somebody, you were getting slapped or punched.
• 35:03
  That's what we did. So I'm sure Philadelphia ain't any different Detroit. And that's some of these people obviously have never been punched in the face before. Yes, that's very true. And it's a whole different set of rules that we're dealing with. How old is your, you said you had a daughter. How old is she? 17. Oh yeah. So she's right. So she was born in what, 2009? Yeah. Yeah. So she was born right into the internet. That's a whole different world than where we had to actually, again, you had to see somebody in person to talk to them.
• 35:32
  Dude, I remember what, so I'm old enough to remember you had to call and there's busy signal. Right. Or somebody was using the internet, you couldn't get through because they were using the phone line. Oh, man, I was young. We didn't have the internet. So in my IT business, we sold companies our first ever internet connection. So I remember selling it, people going, what is this internet thing? And I'm like, there's going to be a day that this is going to be more important than electricity and air. And we are there now. So you've ever been on a plane and the internet goes out, people just freak out.
• 36:02
  Like I tell everybody and your listeners love this is take a phone vacation, man. Take a week off from your phone. When you go on vacation with your family, put your phone away and just enjoy your family. You, I did it a couple of times and each time I don't ever want to go back to my phone. It's hard because you don't realize how many things are attached to your phone. Your, your Netflix logging, your gym membership, your, your credit cards. It's like, Oh, but yeah,
• 36:30
  it after day three, it starts feeling amazing. Third day. Third day. What is one promise to yourself that if you kept it for 30 days would change everything? For the listeners, if they kept one promise to themselves for 30 days, that's an interesting question.
• 36:49
  It's when there is something that you know you need to do and you are consciously thinking about it. Don't negotiate. Just do it. No matter how big or small, which is really what I want to talk about next, which is breaking small promises, the small ones. And that's what we've a bunch of small promises kept equal a big, big promise. So how does breaking small promises yourself quietly damage your ability to trust yourself later?
• 37:14
  Great question. So let's go back. Go back to confidence. So if you break down that word confidence in the word inside of it, the root is confide. And what does confide mean? It means to tell something to yourself or to someone else and you trust that they're going to keep that to themselves. They're going to hold that in. So confidence is about your ability to confide in yourself and trust that whatever you tell yourself is going to be respected. Every time you break a small promise to yourself.
• 37:42
  you are telling yourself that your word isn't that valuable. You can't trust yourself. You're not, you don't value your own word enough to even keep it to yourself. So that lowers the trust you have in you, that lowers the confidence you have in yourself. And again, I told you 85% of communication is non-verbal. So other people unconsciously can read that lack of trust that you have in yourself coming off of you. That's the reason they're reading you as less confident, even though you haven't said a single word.
• 38:11
  But a person who they fulfill their own promises, they do what they tell themselves they're going to do, even a little stuff. They have a high level of trust in themselves. And again, people can read this energy, even though most people cannot explain this energy. This is how you can sit at the airport or at the mall and people watch.
• 38:28
  And you can tell the confident people from those who aren't just by the way they carry themselves. There's a there's an energetic shift that you can feel in a person who trusts themselves because they confide and they hold that secret, so to speak. And they follow through on everything they tell themselves they're going to do. And you can tell who does and you can tell who doesn't in a very short period of time.
• 38:47
  You say that 85% is nonverbal. I, I, I, I'm going to commend you for wearing a suit. You look good, professional, the way every interaction with your team and you has been very professional. So you are literally walking the talk and it shows in this business we meet.
• 39:02
  people out of alignment. So it's refreshing to meet somebody that that isn't, especially here in South Florida. So I wish we would have done this in person, but Cool. Let's talk about being a pro over doing pro things, because you talk about this a lot. What's the difference? And why does that even matter?
• 39:23
  A professional is a person who does something as their main paid occupation. Doing pro things means you can dabble, but you're not held to any real commitments because you can decide when to show up and when not to show up. So when you're a pro, that means, again, by definition, you're getting paid to do what you're doing. If somebody's paying you money, they're expecting a consistent delivery of something.
• 39:43
  Whatever the agreement was, you have to deliver it because if you don't deliver it, they're not going to pay or they don't want their money back. Whereas you're doing pro things, you can pick and choose things that you see the pros doing and you can do similar. But again, you're not held to any commitment. So if you don't do it or you don't do it well, nobody can really hold you accountable or hold you to consequence for not following through. So there's a difference between visiting and moving in. So the pro is moved in. The person who does pro things is just visiting.
• 40:11
  Who is the most professional person you have ever met who had no fancy job? Use this time to give somebody a shout out. Well, I have to shout out my parents. I mean, that's an easy question. So I grew up in a two parent household. My parents did not have sexy jobs like us, Kelly. They, their job, they didn't have fans. Nobody saw them in the mall and knew who they were. They didn't have followers on the internet, but they went to work every day and they did their jobs. And I'm six, four. My dad's like five, nine. My mom's like five, seven.
• 40:40
  And they're biological. We did the tests and everything. And they were not athletes. They were not trying to raise athletes. I have one sister. She's a college professor to this day. And they never bragged about going to work every day. And they never preached about going to work every day. They just went to work every day. And what I tell anytime I'm talking to parents is that your kids don't do what you say. They do what you do. They follow your behaviors, not your words. They hear your words, but they follow your behaviors. So when I went out into sports,
• 41:08
  I just took what I saw modeled at home and applied it on a basketball court. It worked in basketball. Then I applied it in business. So the answer to your question is definitely my mother and father. That might be the best answer I've ever heard. You know, why I say that is I can't, I grew up in the worst family environment known to me. I mean, I'm sure there were worse, but it's bad. I would have loved to grow on this. I didn't hear you gush about that. I,
• 41:33
  I'm just really proud of your parents. Are they still alive? Yes. And they're in Philly? Yes. Congratulations. You raised a very outstanding young man. And that was a great answer, bro. I love that. For a business owner whose company has outgrown their old habits, boy, do I know this. What breaks first when standards start to slip? And what can they do to bring them back?
• 41:56
  The first thing that breaks when standards start to slip is the execution slips. And the challenge with this is, and this is what makes it so pernicious, is that when execution slips, the results may still look good. So if no one is checking on the execution, but the results are still looking good, then the execution lag or that execution drift may be ignored.
• 42:18
  And then it's only when the results begin to slip that you say, hey, what's the problem here? But the problem started six months ago and you didn't catch it. So when Sanders start to slip, the execution drifts. So the fix for this is you had to be checking on the execution, not just the outcomes.
• 42:35
  A lot of people focus on outcomes and I understand I come from the sports world. I tell people all the time we're in an outcome based business. Ultimately, you are judged by your outcomes and by your results and business sports everywhere else. But you can't control the outcomes and the results all the time. You don't know what a.
• 42:50
  customer or prospect is going to do. You can't control what the other team does in the game. All you can control is following your own process. That part you can hold yourself 100% accountable to because you control the execution. So that's the part that people need to be watching is the execution of the standard, not necessarily the result of the execution. Because again, you don't always control the result.
• 43:11
  Where did we slip in life where we started measuring the inputs? What I mean specifically is you talked about outcomes and results, which is all that matters. But how many often do we get these participation trophies that I tried really hard, but I didn't win? When did that change? Because I've seen that a lot in business. We're like, well, I worked really hard. I'm like,
• 43:36
  congratulations. You know, what do you want me to say? Is that go back to us giving participation trophies to children? It goes back to several things. So first of all, there's no saying that strong people make for good times. Good times make for weak people. We people make for hard times. So I think right now we have a society of weakness because we had,
• 43:58
  A very strong society created very easy times. And now we people are a result of that. It's just a natural flow. There's a book out there called The Coddling of the American Mind. You ever heard of it? No, but I'm going to go get it. Yeah, there's a guy, Jonathan Heighton. It was a co-author. They wrote it together. But the book talks about this and how this era has become what it is. And it starts in...
• 44:17
  It starts with the parents. Then they send their kids to schools and then it goes to the teachers, teach them. Then they go to university and those people become the decision makers. Those people who graduate with the degrees, they become the decision makers and they are weak. So then they teach and they create legislation and systems and rules of weakness. So then it just becomes a normal thing.
• 44:36
  And when it comes to the measuring the inputs instead of measuring the results, it's a matter of people saying, well, we don't want people to come in, try not win and then feel as if they are. Because these people, we're talking about the people come out of universities. These are not dumb people. They're smart people. And they're smart enough that they can explain their nonsense in a way that sounds good, logically.
• 44:57
  It sounds good in words verbally. So they'll say, hey, we don't want all the kids who played soccer but didn't win to go home feeling like they're less than because they didn't get a trophy. So let's give them a trophy. So it'll help their self-esteem. It'll help their confidence. They'll have something to show for the fact that they play soccer in a vacuum. That's a good argument.
• 45:16
  But when you zoom out and think about what's the purpose of playing a sport, first principle of sports is you play to win the game. And if you win, you get the trophy. The purpose of the trophy is it represents that not everybody won. That's the very point of it. And the disappointment of losing is what actually makes you tougher, stronger, and it will drive you to get better. So you win the next time or to drive you out of the game because you don't want to deal with that. But that disappointment is what kids need to learn to deal with.
• 45:42
  The coddling of the American mind, the book they talk about this, but you see this in society, is that people decided we don't want to put people into that position of having to deal with that interior struggle, that internal struggle. We want to make it so they don't have to deal. We want to remove the pain from them. We remove any possibilities of pain and make everything as easy as possible. And this is what creates a weak generation because everything is being made to be easy.
• 46:06
  They don't have to do hard things. This goes right back to what we talked about earlier. When I said these days you hear people talking about with males, they say men are incels. That's the term men who want to have sex, but they can't. And why is this is because many men, it's been removed from them. The difficulty of having to literally approach in real life, a female, get her attention, talk to her and make a proposition. Nowadays, you can do it through a phone, which is much more passive. Yeah.
• 46:31
  And when it's more passive, there's less likelihood that you get what you want because there's no real commitment from her or from you. And if men grow up doing just that, they have no social skills. They don't know how to talk to a person in real life, a male or a female at work or in social situations. They just become weaker. And now you multiply that by a million men. Well, this is what we get. So that's what ends up happening.
• 46:53
  I've often said second is the first loser, and I've learned way more from my losses than my wins. Way more. Because I don't like losing. Literally, winning is more fun than fun is fun to me, literally. And I will work harder than everybody else. You should see how much we plan for these shows and what we're doing behind the scenes and what we're doing in the next six months. I literally looked at the team. I'm like, you guys are going to think I'm crazy, but we're coming...
• 47:20
  for Joe Rogan spot. And it's, you know, we got to start somewhere. That's the kind of confidence that I walk around with. What is it? What's the one meme I saw? Like confidence is going after Moby Dick with the tartar sauce and a rowboat. Right. Exactly. If someone watching has done all the personal development, read all the books and is still stuck, what is the one thing they haven't actually done yet?
• 47:49
  They've done all the motivation, read all the books, and they're still stuck. Or have they not done yet? They probably haven't asked themselves the right question. The reason that they're stuck is because they're trying to achieve one thing, and maybe they should be asking themselves a different question to achieve a different thing or go about it a different way or use a different tool or turn around and look in the other direction. So they're probably right now dealing with an orientation issue, not an information issue. Most people these days, especially you asked me earlier about smart people,
• 48:19
  Smart people tend to triple down on intelligence when they feel stuck. Let me get more information, get more, get another course, gain more knowledge that will solve my problem because that's worked for them throughout their lives. When ultimately, once you get about you can tell me what you think about this, Kelly, once you get about 10 years into doing something, you know, you know, pretty much everything you need to know. Now is a matter of how do you apply it, where, when and for whom do you apply it and in what direction do you apply it? That's what it becomes at that point. I'm not saying after 10 years you stop learning.
• 48:48
  But it's not an information race after about 10 years. You know what needs to be known. It's where, how, and when you apply it that makes all the difference. So when someone's stuck, it's just a matter of your orientation is off. It's not the information.
• 49:02
  What question should they be asking themselves? What vehicle am I in? Am I in the wrong vehicle based on my skills? For example, I used to play baseball before I started playing basketball. When I got out the wrong vehicle of baseball and got into the right vehicle of basketball, things started working. Sometimes people are just trying to do the right thing the wrong way.
• 49:19
  Speaking of social media, Instagram used to be an app called Bourbon. A lot of people don't notice. It was similar to Yelp, where you could check in at different places, post pictures, give reviews. They said this app is working, but not really. We're about to tear down the whole app. And then they said, wait a minute, there's one piece of it that everybody likes. It's the posting the pictures with the filters. Why don't we just re-launch the app with just that? And they named it Insta for immediate and Graham for photos. Instagram, and now look at it. So sometimes it's a matter of
• 49:45
  We have the information is just a matter of where are we applying the information? Another example. Are you an iPhone user? Kelly? Yeah. Okay. So everybody has an iPhone. Steve Jobs started Apple, got kicked out of his own company, went and did some other things, came back. Apple was about to go out of business.
• 50:00
  And what did he do? First thing he did was cut the product line. Apple had too many products, too many different computers. It was confusing the customer. He didn't get new information. All he said was, how about we stop confusing them and give them fewer options? This is the constraints. We're going to have one desktop for business, one for personal, one desktop, one laptop for business, one for personal. That's all we're going to sell. Four computers. And in the space, the vacuum he created,
• 50:23
  We got the iPod, we got the iPhone, we got the iPad. And now Apple makes the majority of his money just off of that phone because he created constraints. He didn't get new information. He created constraints that created a vacuum. And in that space, he was able to come up with better ideas.
• 50:39
  Ooh, we're in trouble then because with AI, people are just inundated with information. I agree with you 100% because I'll find myself doing it. I need to be comfortable with this. I need to figure this out. And really, all you got to do is just take action and go measure the results. Am I moving closer to my solution, to my goal, or am I not? And then adjust, pivot.
• 51:02
  So, yeah, that just made me think like I do. I tend to do that a little more now than I used to when I was younger. I just used that freaking ready, fire, aim. Exactly. And it still works because most people are hesitant to take action until they know, quote unquote, all the information, which is logically impossible to have all the information. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you feel compelled to share?
• 51:27
  You asked me a lot of things. Anything you didn't ask that I would be compelled to share is that everybody has a game. I mean, my brand is called work on your game and everybody has a game. And your job in working on your game is to, first of all, create the opportunity for yourself. Secondly, have the game. So when your number is called, you're ready to go out there and do something with it. Third is produce the results. When you produce a result, you get any reward you want. And that's the thing most people are working for money, attention, fame, likes, happiness, friends, success.
• 51:55
  whatever you want. Those are the rewards. And if you write those awards, then you keep working on your games. This creates an ongoing perpetual cycle. I love it. We end every show with a quick rapid fire, one word or one sentence. This one, I already know the answer to the first one, but I'm just going to ask it anyways, just so we, we beat a dead horse, motivation or discipline, discipline, the hardest third day you've ever pushed through.
• 52:18
  After my first playing job overseas, I was in Lithuania. I came back and hadn't made enough money yet to retire. So I'm back in my parents' house and I was working overnight at a grocery store, restocking the shelves. That if I had ever been depressed, it was then. There's a story there. One book that changed your game.
• 52:36
  Rich dad, poor dad, Robert Kiyosaki. Bench or starting five, which one taught you more? The bleachers. Neither one. Good answer. Cold shower, coffee, or neither? I would pick cold shower, but I don't do either one.
• 52:54
  The most overrated advice in personal development right now. Follow your passion. Terrible advice. Finish this sentence. A pro is someone who. Shows up every day and does their job regardless of how they feel.
• 53:06
  This has been harder than life. You're a freaking gem. And I have enjoyed every minute of this. Thank you so much. Please rate and share this podcast. I'm active on all social platforms and love to hear from my Segal supporters. Each and every episode is sponsored by my company, National Technology Management, the easiest and best IT company to do business with. Delivering peace of mind with technology every day, even simplifying cybersecurity. Visit TrustNTM.com for more info. Until next week, be harder than life.