Start With A Win - A Slam Dunk from the Court to the Boardroom: Dre Baldwin's Playbook for Consistent Success

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's it take to see continuous improvement in your day and the outcomes in your business? Today, we find out when we work on your game. Welcome to Start With A Win, where we unpack franchising, leadership, and business growth. Let's go. And coming to you from Start With A Win headquarters at Area 15 Ventures, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. Today, we have an amazing human being on the show. We have Dre Baldwin. He's the CEO and founder of Work On Your Game, Inc. He's given four TED Talks and

Starting point is 00:00:33 has authored dozens of books. Dre's content has been viewed over 100 million times, and his daily Work On Your Game podcast has over 2,600 episodes and over 7 million listeners. Dre has a nine-year professional basketball career playing in eight countries. His framework is the roadmap in reverse for professional mindset, strategy, systems, and execution. Dre, welcome to Start With A Win. Thank you for having me on, Adam. I'm excited to be here. How are you? I'm doing great. You have a really interesting background. You're obviously a professional athlete,

Starting point is 00:01:15 super high performance as far as everything you do and how you do it. So I want to dig into that today. But I want to start with Dre. I mean, you've done so much. You've been on TED Talks. You've written, I mean, how many books are you at now? Like, 33. Dang, you wrote, you and I got to talk offline. I got to figure out how you got the time to do that. But I mean, that's just amazing, the focus that you have. But it all started in your athletic career, I'm sure, of how do you get things done and how do you perform at a high level? Take us through this transition from professional athlete to business and what you learned as a professional athlete that translates to everybody that's listening today. Sure.

Starting point is 00:01:50 So, I mean, several pieces to it. I'll try to be concise here. So the first thing is, went to a Division III college, got out of college, nobody was checking me to play pro. So my first year, I worked a couple of regular jobs, went to this event called an exposure camp.

Starting point is 00:02:02 You familiar with those, Adam? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you have to pay to go to these events, basically like a casting call. Went there, played pretty well. I parlayed that, long story short, into getting my first job overseas. But it's not like it was a perfect path from there because there were times I was unemployed, just like an actor or actress might be unemployed in between shows. I was unemployed sometimes in between jobs. And there was a point around 2009, I was unemployed. I actually looked back on the experience I had in going to a network marketing

Starting point is 00:02:31 hotel meeting, believe it or not, in college. And that's where I got introduced to the concept of personal development. Also got introduced to several authors who I still read to this day, Napoleon Hills, Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn, Robert Kiyosaki. I remember reading Ristad Pordat and knowing, I said, when I get done with basketball, whatever he's talking about, I'm going to do that. Couldn't explain it back then, but I knew that's where I wanted to go. And then around 2009, when I found myself unemployed, I just finished reading 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, which was similar parallel principles to Kiyosaki, but just for the digital age. He had this experiment on his blog where you think you might want to sell something online.

Starting point is 00:03:07 Here's how you do the test. I did it. Started making $4.99 training programs for basketball players. That's how I got into entrepreneurship. Nice. Technically, officially. And at the same time, the players who were following me on YouTube at the time, because I was on YouTube before it was YouTube, they started asking me questions about mindset

Starting point is 00:03:24 at them because they saw that I was coming to the gym every day, working out every day. I told them I was a pro basketball player, but they would see me in an empty gym in Miami. Like, Dre, I thought you were a pro basketball player. Why are you in Miami? And you're supposed to be overseas somewhere? But I didn't have a job, right? But then they saw that I kept showing up anyway, so they just wanted to know what's the mindset behind somebody who does that. So that's when I started talking about mindset. I started making these videos called The Weekly Motivation every Monday. Did that 400 Mondays in a row. That became the foundation of what I do now.

Starting point is 00:03:51 Because what happened, Adam, is people who didn't play ball, at that time my audience was 100% basketball players, 13 to 24-year-old young males. But when I started doing the mindset videos, people who didn't play ball started finding me online. And they would say, Jerry, I don't even play ball. But that mindset stuff you're talking about, anybody can use that. So that planted the seed in my mind. Okay. When I get done with basketball, this piece right here will be my transition from just talking to athletes to talking to non-athletes. Because I understood that when I stopped playing, I'm not going to be hot to the ballplayers. They're not going to remember me because I'm not out there on the

Starting point is 00:04:22 court every day. I'm in a suit. So I knew I needed a transition. I needed something to help me transition. I already knew what that would be five years before I stopped playing. So that's how we got here. And since 2015, that's what I've been doing. Wow. So what is the crossover of mindset that people were looking for? I mean, how are they, what are they lacking and what are they seeking by reaching out to you and your deliverables there? It's a great question. So the crossover is that a lot of the things that I was telling the athletes, I was making these messages for the athletes. Right.

Starting point is 00:04:55 And I was just talking about things that, again, I've always been in a personal development before I even knew what it was called. I just found out I had a title when I went to the hotel meeting. And I've always been a big reader. My mother's an educator. I've always been into reading books is what led to writing. And when I started talking about the mindset stuff, it was just things that I already thought, I already knew, I already believed. It was just pouring out of me when I started making a little two to three minute selfie videos. I thought everybody felt like that. And honestly, I didn't think what I was saying was groundbreaking. I thought I was just show up every day and be ready to work. All right. How do you earn your confidence? How do you get yourself ready for the future opportunity? My son just broke into my room while I'm recording. That's all right. He's 14 months old.

Starting point is 00:05:36 Oh, that's awesome. All right. So how do you get yourself ready for your future opportunities? How do you have a mental toughness to deal with setbacks? These are things, again, that I naturally thought this way because I needed it to get to where I had gotten to by that point. And what I found, it was groundbreaking for a lot of people because they never considered this stuff. And it's hard for a lot of people to kind of grasp a mindset because you can't see mindset. You can see your muscles when you lift weights. You can see your stomach when you try to lose weight, but you can't see your mind. So I think that was the biggest thing. And then just my delivery. People say they like that I'm

Starting point is 00:06:10 kind of straight to the point, no fluff, no BS style. People like that directness that I have. And even people who didn't play sports, they liked it too. They said, okay, I know you're a basketball guy, but the stuff you're talking about, this applies to everyone. So they told me that was what they liked about it. So I just, over time, just morphed the message. Then when I got out of sports, I started talking more about how does this apply to business instead of talking about how it applies on the court. But the same principles are still the same principles. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 00:06:40 So I know one of the principles that you talk about is the power of consistency. Tell me about consistency. How do people, and that's what I've always thought really was the dividing factor between an amateur and a professional, is your tolerance for that boredom of consistency. How did you take that from your professional life and convince people in the private sector that that's an important factor? That's a great question. And I think a lot of people understand it.

Starting point is 00:07:07 I don't think the athletes quite got it because they're at age. They were youths. These are 13- and 24-year-old kids who hadn't really worked in a professional world. But professionals understand that. Even if they are not good at it, they get it. They know that they're not good at it. So these days when I talk to professionals, I say, what's your biggest challenge? Because of who I am and what I talk about,

Starting point is 00:07:26 usually I hear consistency, follow through, being disciplined, doing all the stuff I'm supposed to do. So most adults know that consistency and being disciplined is important. They're just not good at doing it. Whereas the youth, the athletes, they didn't quite understand the concept because they hadn't lived enough life to get it.

Starting point is 00:07:43 Does that answer your question? Yeah. So is that something, cause I was talking to like a youth football coach, inner city football coach in Atlanta the other day. And he was talking about, you know, kind of getting the head straight on his kids on his football team.

Starting point is 00:07:59 And it seems like that is really one of the factors that we're missing in society today because we're so distracted by everything else, we lose consistency because we're just chasing the shiny thing. And then you never accomplish anything. The dog that chases two rabbits catches none. So how do you work that as far as building? Because, I mean, what we're lacking in consistency is personal accountability, I would assume, a lot of times.

Starting point is 00:08:25 Because nobody's there to hold us to it. How did you build that into your world and know there's nobody that's going to poke you in the side and say, Dre, get up. It's time to train every single day. You've got to be the one going, Dre, get up. It's time to train. Look at yourself in the mirror. How did you do that? So several things there. Hopefully I can remember all of them. So number one is what you just said

Starting point is 00:08:50 with the personal accountability. The same thing I say about time management. People talk about time management. I got to get better at time management. And I tell people time management, there's no managing time. It's the same amount every day. It's 24 hours. What you need to manage is yourself. Time management is really self-accountability and personal management and holding yourself to some personal standards. That's really what people need to do. But you can sell a course on self-accountability. You can sell a course on time management because it seems like it's that thing you got to manage, not this thing right here. That self-accountability, people really don't want to hear that. They want it, but they don't really want it. That's one thing. Number two, when it comes to me personally, I have to give credit to

Starting point is 00:09:27 my parents. My parents are not athletes. My mom is like five feet, seven inches tall. My dad's like five, eight. I'm six feet, four inches tall. All right. So I kind of genetically hit the lottery, at least on a low level. I hit like the, as LeBron hit the power ball, I hit the pick six. Right. So I was able to become an athlete because of my genetics on top of my performance. But if I had been 5'8", like my dad, I probably wouldn't have played basketball, right? Let's just be honest. But my parents were, you know, get up, go to work every day. Even when they didn't have a car, they would have to take public transportation. And I know they didn't always feel like going to work, but they went to work every day. Never preached about it at them,

Starting point is 00:10:03 but I noticed that they did it. So when I went to the basketball court, I took what I saw modeled for me at home and I applied that to basketball. It worked in basketball and I applied it to business. So anytime somebody asked me, where's the discipline come from? I had to give credit to the, you have mentors. They were the mentors, right? And not trying to be mentors, but this is what you see, you're going to do what you see, right? So I have to give credit to them for that. Then when it comes to the sports, nobody really taught me basketball because again, I told you my dad's not a basketball player and nobody in the neighborhood kind of took me under their wing or anything. And this is in the nineties. So there's no YouTube. I'm not pulling up Instagram and looking at somebody's drills.

Starting point is 00:10:39 I just went to the court and just did stuff. And hopefully, hopefully I'll figure it out. Right. And I came up with my own process. So that's why I was on YouTube before it was YouTube. I took the stuff that I had taught myself and I just started putting on YouTube from 05 to 09. There was no benefit. I mean, you had an audience on the internet, but so what? Who cares? If you were a YouTuber or a blogger in 2007, you're some bum living in a basement who needs to shave and get a real job. Who cares that you have a YouTube gym? It didn't matter. But then around 2009, Google buys YouTube. Now they start monetizing the videos. Now we're calling people creators and influencers. And now you can do a brand deal and now you can make money off this. And now, now it's a thing. So now people were coming to me like, man, Dre, congrats on your success because I had a YouTube

Starting point is 00:11:34 channel with a bunch of followers. And again, more people know me when I'm in the streets here, Adam, nine people walk up, 10 people walk up to me, nine of them know me from YouTube, not from being a professional athlete. You do all that work to be a pro athlete, everybody knows you from YouTube, right? So it's just funny that it works out that way. That's funny. Yeah. So hopefully that answers your question. I forget what you even asked me. Yeah, it does. I mean, we got into some consistency, things like that there. Let's talk about personal branding then, because so many people on this are entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, a lot of people in

Starting point is 00:12:05 the real estate space, mortgage, franchising, things like that. What tips do you have for our listeners, for these people that are looking to build a personal brand? Because you've kind of mastered the whole thing. Well, great question. Thank you. And let's be clear what a brand is. A brand is the concept of branding goes back to the farmer days. Well, farms still exist, but the farm days when the farmer, Farmer Jones would take a branding iron and put his logo on the hide

Starting point is 00:12:33 of one of his cows, his cattle, so that that cattle wandered off the farm. The farm next door would say, oh, this is Mr. Jones' cattle and they would bring it back because he burned the idea of him onto the hide of that cow. So branding is simply the idea that you burn onto the minds of the consumers of who you are

Starting point is 00:12:50 and what you're about. So the way that you put yourself out there, the things that you say, the things that you do, the way that you look, your presentation, your message, all of those things are all part of your brand. And people pick up different pieces of your brand. It's an interesting thing when you're on the internet. I was just actually telling my audience this, I was just recording something today talking about this, that when you're on the internet, you have no idea who's picking up your message and what part's registering with them. But all of it becomes part of your brand because people are noticing stuff that you don't even know that they're noticing. I get people reaching out to me, they get on a call with me and I say, how'd you find out about me? They say,

Starting point is 00:13:23 well, I've been on your email list for 10 years. This is my first time ever reaching out to me, they get on a call with me and I say, how'd you find out about me? They say, well, I've been on your email list for 10 years. This is my first time ever reaching out to you. So you had no idea who's picking up on your message because most of the people who respond to your message, people who reply to your emails or comment on your posts, they're a very small percentage of the bigger audience. There's a lot of people who listen to every episode of your podcast, Adam, who you'll never hear from. They'll never tell you that they're listening, but they're there. They're paying attention to every single thing that you said. So the brand is just about what are people picking up about you? And we have control over that as brand creators, the consistency of your message, the things that you say over and

Starting point is 00:13:57 over and over and over again, those are the things that are going to burn into people's minds. So anybody who's played a sport, if you had a coach who was influential, usually it's because they had certain things that they said all the time that you still remember 20 years later. Your parents, same thing. If you had a parent who had certain things they always did or said, it's still stuck in your head to this day. Your parents might not even be alive to this day, but you still remember those things. So what are the consistent things about you that you want people to know and you want people about you that you want people to know and you want people to register

Starting point is 00:14:26 and you want people to think about when your name comes up? Those are the things you need to be emphasizing and emphasize them over and over and over again, even till you get tired of it and then keep doing it because understand other people, they're not getting tired of it the way you are. So that's part of the discipline. Wow.

Starting point is 00:14:41 And you said something important here, consistency of your message yes and like i screwed up but we eventually got right here eight years of delivering that motivational monday you have um you also have a roadmap in reverse uh strategy that you talk on your work on your game podcast i think um tell us about your podcast work on your game podcast, I think. Tell us about your podcast, work on your game. It's a daily podcast, I think. 2,600 episodes, 7 million listeners. What do you put out on that every day? How do you come up with content and value for people every single day? And I know what we're talking about here is not

Starting point is 00:15:24 new. It's not been reinvented. This is the same thing that Aristotle I know, you know, what we're talking about here is not new. It's not been reinvented. This is the same thing that Aristotle used to say. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. But how do you not bore your audience with talking about something every day where they keep coming back? I mean, it's, you know, you're very inspirational. Help me understand how you create the value in your head. Well, thank you. So a couple of things when it comes to the message, because none of us is saying anything that's completely brand new,

Starting point is 00:15:52 but it's just brand new to our audience, right? And it's brand new the way that, like when I say what I say, if I go talk about discipline for an hour, it's gonna sound different than if you talked about discipline for an hour, even though we're both using the same principles. And there's somebody out there who needs to hear me say it. And there's somebody out there who needs to hear me say it. And there's

Starting point is 00:16:07 somebody out there who needs to hear you say it. So we can both talk about the same thing, but we can both get a big audience. We can both sell a bunch of books and get on stages because your delivery is different from my delivery. And there's a person out there who needs to hear it from me and they'll get it when they hear me say it. And then there's a person out there who needs to hear you say it. So that So that's what that's part of the brand as well. Your style in delivering the thing is I wasn't the first basketball player to play basketball. But when certain people heard saw me do it, they needed it for me rather than LeBron or Kobe. You know what I'm saying?

Starting point is 00:16:36 So that's that's one part of the brand. The other thing is, as far as my material, my show is a solo show. So it's just me recording. OK, me every day. So it's basically like the radio. So 30 years ago, I would have had my own radio show, but now I got a podcast, right? So it's just me talking every day and it's most of my content is evergreen. So I'm just talking about not discipline, confidence, mental toughness, personal initiative. Every once in a while, I'll talk about a current event, but I always bring it back to one of my evergreen

Starting point is 00:17:02 principles. And I'm relating that to, sometimes I use sports as an analogy, but mostly I'm talking about business and I'm talking about entrepreneurship. I'm talking about being a professional, most importantly, being a professional, no matter what you do for a living. Because a professional is someone who shows up in the rivers every time, regardless of how they're feeling. And I always bring it back to that because it connects to my core principles, which is mindset is the foundation of all success, is the foundation of all failure. So a lot of people think they don't need mindset because their goal is, I was talking to this guy last week, Dre, I want to make $10,000 a month. No, he didn't say $10,000,

Starting point is 00:17:32 he said $100,000. I want to make $100,000 a month in this business that he's just starting. He's at zero right now. He wants to make $100,000 a month. And he's like, well, I know your focus is mindset, Dre, your foundational piece is mindset, but I'm trying to make money. So how is your thing going to help me? And I told him, well, the mindset that you have right now at zero is going to be a lot different than the mindset you have at a hundred thousand. So yes, I will help you with the strategy of making the money, but until you change your mindset, you're not going to make anything. And I explained that to him. And the mindset piece is the biggest piece because how to make the money. Okay. We can just do the math on that. Then he already had the math laid out. Okay. Well, you got all the math laid out. Why aren't you

Starting point is 00:18:07 making any money? I said, you already got the math. We got to change the mindset. All right. So, and this is what I try to help people understand because you can count money. You can't count mindset. And this is why I try to help people understand this, that the mindset triggers the actions. And until you change the mindset, you can know all the actions. How many books are there out there? How many podcasts are there? How many YouTube channels? All the information is there. So why isn't everybody successful? Because they don't have the mentality to actually turn the information into action. And that's where people like us come into the game. Okay. So let me great follow or, I mean, great statement here. Let me give you

Starting point is 00:18:43 a follow-up question to that because I'd love to get your take on this. Obviously the bridge from mindset to action is wrought with fear, doubt, and overwhelm. That's right. So how do you approach that when you've got this guy, he's like, hey, I want to make $100,000 a month. Awesome. We all do. So how do you turn that want into the do? Great question. So there's a very important distinction that most of the time, people don't move forward because they don't have confidence to move forward, especially when it comes time to doing something they've never done before. So they say, I've had this whole conversation with people like, Dre, I like what you're doing. I like what you're offering. I want to move forward, but I don't really feel

Starting point is 00:19:32 confident in moving forward. And that causes them to hesitate. And I had to explain to them, this is something that I actually was just recording an episode on this for my show, talking about this, is that when you are looking to do something that you have done before, you call on confidence. Confidence is defined as a belief in your ability to do something. This is why discipline creates confidence. If I'm disciplined in practicing every day, then I have confidence when I get in the game because I've practiced. I know that I know how to do this. But when you are moving forward to do something that you've never done before, you're stepping outside of your comfort zone and you're doing something brand new, like launching a business, like quitting your job and

Starting point is 00:20:08 doing something different, like cutting off all your 80-20 rule, your 80% customers and focusing on your 20% customer clients. Now you are doing something new. You can't call it your confidence because you have no confidence. You never did it before. So you're not supposed to be confident. What you need is courage. And courage and confidence are not the same thing. Courage is your ability to do something even when you're afraid of doing it. It's doing something that frightens you. And the only way to get out of your comfort zone is you need courage, not confidence. So anytime somebody says, I don't want to do this new thing or execute on this new idea because I'm not confident. The answer is you're not supposed to be.

Starting point is 00:20:46 What you need is courage. You're not confident and you're not going to be confident until you actually do it because confidence is a belief in what you've done in the past. Courage is about your unknown future. So when it comes to going and doing something new, you need courage. And the reason why many people have a bunch of information and goals, yet they don't actually do the thing is because they have no courage. It goals, yet they don't actually do the thing is because they have no courage. It's not because they don't have confidence.

Starting point is 00:21:09 Wow. That's deep. I encourage everybody to go back and listen to that. Break down the difference between confidence and courage and where do you sit on those things and understand that if you're not getting something done, you got to get the courage to do it. I want to dig deeper into ambition, personal well-being, mindset, and let's get into that roadmap in reverse concept. We'll talk about that on part two of this two-part episode of Start With A Win. We'll see you in one week on part two. you

Start With A Win - A Slam Dunk from the Court to the Boardroom: Dre Baldwin's Playbook for Consistent Success

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