The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Play Sheet: A Simple Resource for Overloaded Professionals by Brian Hurtak

Episode Date: March 8, 2025

The Play Sheet: A Simple Resource for Overloaded Professionals by Brian Hurtak Amazon.com Myplaysheet.com Are you overwhelmed with advice on career development? There's always another book, conference, podcast, or program that claims it will help you level up your professional life. How do you consolidate all that content and apply it effectively in your day, week, or career? On almost every sideline, you will see football coaches holding giant laminated sheets of paper. Coaches use these "play sheets" to organize, recall, and execute the right play based on the situation at hand. In The Play Sheet: A Simple Resource for Overloaded Professionals, Brian Hurtak draws from coaching methodologies to help you create a repeatable framework and develop your own personalized Play Sheet. Your Play Sheet will enable you to consolidate large amounts of information, quickly recall it in moments that matter, and execute more effectively in high-pressure professional situations. Stop feeling overwhelmed and excel through the chaos like a coach.

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Now here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from the ChrisVossShow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, the earliest things that makes a fish welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys being here because we didn't do it. What would we be doing the last 16 years? We'd be just talking to a Mike and hanging out with some really cool people and no one would know it'd be a secret, but no one wants a secret. Plus, you know,

everyone wants to get involved in all that good stuff for over 16 years, 23, inter-episodes of bringing the Chris Foss show and we're just going to keep making more because we got nothing better to do. And we have such amazing guests on that you can learn so much from. I learn from our guests every day. If you don't, well, that's your problem. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss one, the Tik Tok, Chris Foss, Facebook.inions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily

reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests to the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today we have an amazing young man on the show. Brian Hurtak joins us. His newest book came out January 7th, 2025. It is called The Play Sheet, a simple resource for overloaded professionals. I think I'm overloaded, but it's from the Taco Bell last night. Anyway, Brian is a Fortune 100...

That's the Taco Bell segue we call that, Brian, on the show. That's how we get our advertisers in. Brian is a Fortune 100 business executive with more than 15 years of experience and an MBA from the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has ties to football institutions like St. Thomas's Aquintas High School. Aquinas. Aquinas. Maybe. All right.

I'll just take your word for it. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Valdosta State University Could you just pick some universities that are easy to pronounce anyway? I did flunk second grade He currently lives with his wife Erica and their two children in South, Texas Where he also has ties to several schools under the Friday night lights He was named 40 under 40 by the San Antonio Business Journal Friday Night Lights. He was named 40 Under 40 by the San Antonio Business Journal, co-chaired the 45th class of leadership San Antonio and serves on numerous nonprofit boards, including

San Antonio Sport. Welcome to the show. How are you, Brian? I'm doing great, Chris. Thanks for having me this evening. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate it. I'm doing good, Chris. How are you doing this evening? I am doing excellent. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find out more about you on the interwebs? Yeah, myplaysheet.com and you can find me at the play sheet on basically all your social channels. So, give us your 30,000 overview.

What's in your new book? Yeah, look, I was sitting on my couch one Sunday afternoon like most business or any professional and I had paper scattered preparing for my week ahead and the week had not even started Chris and I was already overloaded and overwhelmed and really just stressed. And I was sitting on the couch and in the corner of my eye I saw a football game on, seated hundreds of times and I realized every football coach across the country has a laminated sheet of paper that helps them recall, organize, and call the right play based on the situation they're facing.

So I thought to myself, if every coach at every level has one of these things to be more effective in the moment, why don't I use one of them in my personal and professional life? So I created one, started using it, it worked. Others started using it, it worked. Somebody said, you should write a book.

And I didn't know the first thing about writing a book, especially on this topic, so I went to the experts and I went and studied football coaches across the country, over 50 of them on their process for distilling lots of information and creating their own play sheet. Do you have one that's on the arm like the quarterbacks or is yours like the one that looks like the Denny's menu that the Andy Reid uses?

You know, Andy Reid has over 500 plays, Lincoln Raleigh has 28 plays. You'll see them, they're coming in all different shapes, sizes, colors. I think the answer is it's whatever works for you is what I tell people these days. You sure could help the Chiefs this Super Bowl 2025. Evidently, they had the Waffle House menu they were looking at instead of the thing there, but Guy Carre is a Raider fan. Anyway, you wrote the book, the play sheet. And so is it a book where people can build out their own play sheet? Do they use yours? How does it work? Yeah. So at the end of the game or at the end of the book really you should

create your own personalized play sheet which helps you whatever it is that you're facing in your situation of life whether it's maybe you're a new leader maybe it's a new job maybe you're a new parent whatever the situation is it teaches you how to distill the right plays on your play sheet so that you can use them and secure more personal or professional wins in your day-to-day. But when I interviewed a lot of the coaches, they taught me a few other things, and the book is really broken up into four chapters.

It's ethos, playbook, play sheet, and how to make adjustments. So we walk people through the four-step framework of how they can be more effective holistically, but ultimately the end goal is to create a good play sheet. I've been a Raiders fan all my life. Did you interview anybody with the Raiders? I did not. They've had a couple years and I'm a dolphin stance,

I feel your misery as well, but coaches that were a lot more successful. Yeah, there's the animal. I remember those days. Yeah, I was going to say you probably don't want to take any advice from the Raiders. I think we're paying for four coaches right now at this point at the same days. Yeah, I was going to say, you probably don't want to take any advice from the, you know, but on the Raiders. I think we're paying for four coaches right now at this point at the same time. Yeah. They may need a play sheet for the front office. Excuse me.

I just had to clear my throat there. Just get rid of the owners, baby. So anyway, I'm, it's tough being a Raiders fan since childhood. So talk to us about your upbringing. How did you grow up? What influenced you? How did you get to this place in time and write the book? Yeah, I wasn us about your upbringing. How did you grow up? What influenced you? How did you get to this place and time and write the book? Yeah, I wasn't a football player.

I'm five foot eight, about 150 nothing. So I wasn't really a good enough football player. And I actually went to probably the strongest high school football program in the United States. Wow. St. Thomas Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I played collegiate golf, but I kept ties and I was just a sports junkie. I lived around sports my whole life. I worked in sports for a couple years before I

kind of sold out and went the corporate route and started working for big large financial institutions and Falausa State too when I went there. They've always been one of the top high school programs and top division two football programs and then I moved here to South Texas where high school football is a religion basically. And so throughout all of that, I've always been around football. And then like anybody, you know, I was up and coming to my career, trying to make it to the next level. But no matter how much I tried, I just couldn't actually apply everything I was learning in all the books, all the podcasts, all the seminars, webinars, you know, you name it.

I could read your book, all three of your books, but me, my ability to apply it wasn't working and it just naturally hit me. You know, when I was watching that football game, all those years of being a sports fan, that this process is something I've seen for 25, 30 years and it never hit me on how I could use it my day to day. Yeah, a playbook is good to have. I mean, knowing what the game is, knowing what the calls are, you know, why is sports analogy such, why is sports such a good analogy for business and entrepreneurism, I guess?

You know, I think it could be a good analogy or a bad analogy. I tell people when I'm doing webinars or I'm speaking on this book recently on my tour here that you don't have to be a sports fan but I think the reason to answer your question is that sports are everywhere. There's a lot of money, a lot of media behind it. A lot of people are watching it and so there's a lot of relatable concepts in sport that are just applicable. But there's a lot of people in business and in just personal development that don't really care. And I tell those people, it doesn't matter if you like football or not. The book is it's super football heavy. It's really the process, a simple process that every single coach is using. I mean, think about it. If you just watch a football game today,

every sideline, every level, high school, college, pro, you're going to see one of these laminated sheets of paper. And that really just struck my interest about this is something that anybody can use no matter their IQ on football. Yeah. And, you know, having a plan, I mean, it kind of comes down to part of a game plan is having a plan. If you, you if you what's the old adage If you don't if you failed the plan you plan to fail Yeah, that's from Ben Franklin. You've got it. Yeah. Yeah, he was he did something failing failing to failing to plan is preparing to fail Yep, yeah, most definitely, you know having having, having, you know, knowing what to do and,

and imagine having contingency plans. Is that part of it? You know, if, if something's not working or failing, having a fallback or something, is that part of the, is that part of the thing too? Yeah. Four quarters and that's adjustments. Coaches make in game adjustments between game adjustments, in season adjustments, and post season or in between season adjustments. I mean you just said that you and I were talking a minute ago, the Eagles, if you think about the Eagles and how they ran certain plays on week one versus week 20 or in the Super Bowl, you know, they were getting better and better and better.

And then in the book I talk about some coaches give analogies, especially for high school students or younger audiences, maybe not as masterclass in the football IQ, sometimes they get overwhelmed. And so keeping it simple or adjusting the plays in the moment help those players get better in the game as well. Most definitely. Yeah. It's something you can do to make sure that you have all your contingency plans. You know, if you know what you're up to, you know how to play the game. And when things come at you, you know, I used to call it a toolbox with business where I would pull from my toolbox of, you know, different things, but gameplay, a game plan is still the same thing.

Especially when you're starting a company or when you're working for other people. Give us some examples of some of the things you talk about in helping same thing, especially when you're starting a company or when you're working for other people. Give us some examples of some of the things you talk about in helping develop your own game plan and stuff. Yeah. So I'll just give a high level of the four. So everybody wants to jump to the play sheet, but what I learned from every single coach is that they have an ethos.

They use the rhetoric, ethos, pathos, logos from Aristotle and if you think about it every coach has what defines their character. I studied a coach who talked about 212 degrees at one extra degree that really powers a locomotive from water going from water to steam and his whole team bought into that concept and it really defined their character. It really set the type of players he would recruit, the staff he would recruit. So what I learned in the beginning is before you jump to building your toolbox or building your playbook, your play sheet, you got to define who you're going to be and where you want to go. So that's step one. Step two, everybody's got to, I think a lot of people have a playbook, a lot of businesses have a playbook, but most people don't have

it organized in one central place. So we just teach people, look, this isn't, this isn't rocket science. I got all these books that probably got highlights behind me. They got podcasts, bookmark. They probably got Post-it notes, their favorite quote, whatever it may be. You got to get them in one central place like coaches do with their playbook. But the difference between the playbook and the play sheet, Chris, is that the play sheet is based on what you're facing now. The playbook is everything. You can't bring all 500 plays to your job or to your job as a parent or as a husband

or as a spouse or whatever the situation is that you're facing. And what these coaches do is they distill it in week in and week out to this quick at a glance sheet. They see the formation, they look at the play based on how they categorize it. It quickly recalls what they already know and they practice all week and then they execute it. And then to your point, the last chapter is adjustments. What I learned is that coaches spend time

with their coaches, with their players, they watch the tape and they get better and better week in and week out. Same things for you. As you run that play, whatever that skill is, over time it'll go from basically a skill that's mediocre to almost autonomous. It'll be a habit. And you have different templates and examples also, not only in the book, but on your website as well.

Yeah, a ton of templates out there. And what I learned is that there's no single template for these coaches. I thought there'd be a lot of money making this space when I was doing it, but they all keep it pretty simple. And so we just gave a flavor of different coaching templates, but you know, it's applicable to anything that you're learning. If I wanted to learn the art of negotiation, I'm going to go read your, your, your couple books, go listen to your masterclass.

I'm gonna take those really salient points, pull down my template, and I'm gonna put it on a sheet of paper and I'm gonna start practicing it. Hopefully get a little better at negotiating. That'll make a difference. That'll make a difference if you read the Christopher Ross's books. So I can see Coach Dominic Anderson's playbook here. I can reach a coach Chris Castillo's thing from San Antonio here. I'm trying to blow them up. I guess it's in the book. You can get a bigger example. Oh, you can download them here off your website. See how they work and all that stuff. So I might play with that. What was the other question I had for you, Geardup? What was the biggest thing you learned from all the coaches that you interviewed?

You know, it's in their community. They're really bright at developing. They're not just two athletes they have in their school. But the biggest thing is that they follow the same framework. And so learned it, every single one of those coaches knew exactly who they were going to be at a certain time of the week, at certain time of the Year, so they all followed the same process now. They may have different styles of coaching They may have different types of all offenses or defenses What they ultimately did is they actually they all had the same process of framework Which was that ethos playbook play sheet and adjustments? So what I learned from them basically was they kept it simple and they were creatures

of habits. Simple, repeatable processes is what they all followed. Mad Fientist Yeah. I mean, it's funny in business, the first time you learn a lot of stuff, especially setting up your own business or being an entrepreneur, it almost seems like you're trying to make stuff up from whole cloth and you don't really know what to do. Sometimes that can be a good thing actually, you're not limited by your knowledge. You have to do it this way.

And it's a lot of people succeed by accident, but then over time, you know, like I can build companies in my sleep. Like, okay, what are you doing? And so you just know the playbook and stuff. What's the difference between a playbook and a play sheet? Yeah. I mean, the playbook, like I said, is just one central repository. So football coaches, they have it all in one place.

If you join that football team, they're going to hand you one document. Some of them are three, four or 500 pages, but it's just one basic onboarding packet where their policy, their procedures, the workout schedule, the personnel, the list of people's contact information, the plays themselves are all in one place. So if you join that team and I ended you that football team, you probably could be a pretty effective team member within a short period of time. Now in our own personal or professional lives, as I said earlier, that stuff is scattered. So in the book,

what we do is we set the teach people want to inventory, all that stuff, consolidate it, and then basically create a taxonomy and organize. It's kind of like organizing your closet, right? Put all the time management plays here, how to effectively run your business here, a different types of categories or skills that you're trying to improve. That gives you your playbook. The difference then between that and play sheet is the play sheet is like what's happening now.

So think about a football game. I have a different opponent week in and week out based on the film study, based on the situation or formations they may have against me and my opponent. I'm going to pull certain books from my toolkit or from my playbook. I'm going to put certain books from my toolkit or from my playbook. I'm going to put them on my play sheet. So when I'm in that moment and the clock is ticking down, maybe there's a nuanced play that they're calling. The game is tight, the crowd is loud. I can quickly glance at this thing and make a call. And I say that's the same thing in your professional life. One of the things I do is I look at my calendar for the day.

I look at the plays I'm trying to run. I'm like, that play will work in that calendar meeting or that certain situation. And it's a quick, simple reminder for me to run that play in that basic situation. Know your plays. Know your calls. Know what you're doing. And you've got to fall back on. And that way you're just not kind of wandering through life. Like I said if you fail the plan you you plan

to fail. So what are some other tips maybe that you give people advice on creating or using a personalized play sheet? Does it have to be books? Does it can it be like quotes or maybe you know inspiring quotes or stoic, like I didn't get a lot of stoic quotes that I use throughout the day. But yeah, I'll give you a real example that I've seen people use this for. Parenting has become a really good, a really popular use of this concept, not what I intended.

Yeah, there's a few people doing parenting these days. Yeah, just a few. But you know what, I think when you're parenting, I have a six and a seven year old, right? And so every couple of years they need different things. You know, I may not read a book, I may just listen to a webinar. Maybe there's a ton of books I could read out there, or I just talked to a friend that's gone through it three or four times before me and they may offer good advice. And so what I've seen is a lot of people are

creating parenting play sheets. They'll say, hey, you know, these are some great concepts that I don't naturally think about. I'm going to put them down. I'm going to laminate my play sheet, put it around my house. And then when I see my child in that certain situation, I'll look at it. I'll remember, man, that's a really good piece of advice. And I'll try to apply it. It may not work.

And that goes back to the adjustments. I then will spend some time and I coach parents or coach other people trying to do these types of concepts is that you got to have that retrospective. You got to have a little bit of the time that you carve out to say, hey, how did I run that play? It's the equivalent to somebody or a coach watching the film tape after the after the game's over and saying, you know what, I could have went left versus went right or you know, how do I apply that a little bit differently. So parenting play sheets become really effective ways for people to actually become better parents, based on the lessons they're learning from other people or the resources they're learning it from and apply it

in their day. Yeah, feed the kids, discipline them and put them to bed on time. Yeah, I remember in the most parents we react, right? Yeah.. I remember when I was a kid, they had to have commercials that would remind parents that they should probably check where their kids are at 10 o'clock at night. They had TV. Joe Amec That's hard. There's a lot of concepts these days. Pete Slauson Oh, yeah. Joe Amec You know, kids are picky eaters. I mean, you've got screen time.

You know, we talked about, you know, and Joan Amoth, I think the different generations are different things. So if you try to parent or try to apply something that you've done for years, and this is the same in the workforce with different generations coming in, you try to apply the same concepts that you knew for years, it's not going to necessarily work. So this is a way to continuously improve. So talk to us about some of the other things you do on your website. Do you do coaching, consulting, advising? Can people hire you

to come speak, etc., etc.? Chris Yeah, we're just starting that. I wasn't really in the market to write a book. I did it. It's been working. We became an Amazon bestseller within the first few days. And I started doing this concept of 30, 30, 30. So we do a 30 minute presentation or coaching for large companies, small companies, one-on-one, 30 minute Q&A, 30 minute book signings. Those have been really, really effective. We do that in person. We do it in webinars. So you can reach out to me on the website and offer those services as well. And hopefully I grab a copy of the book.

Now is that on my place sheet.com or one of the other websites? Right now if you just reach out to me via the contact information we can set that up for you from there. So give us your final pitch Brian to get people to pick up the book and reach out to you utilize your services as we go out. We're all overloaded. We're all overwhelmed. There are so many sources of information overload these days.

And what I learned is these coaches have a simple, repeatable framework that has been working for decades at every level of football. And I learned from these coaches on a simple way that you can apply it in your personal or professional life, and hopefully you can steer more personal or professional lens. And so, reach out, buy the book on any of the digital platforms out there. The audiobooks coming out later in March. And then if you want to hire my services, well, check out at MikeLashieb.com. Thank you very much for coming on the show. It's been wonderful to get to know you better and look at life through a different resource

or a different way of doing it. And you know, life is a game when it really comes down to it. Business is a game, you know. You've got to, you're on the clock, you know, you don't have time to waste. You've got to make the best play as you can and you can win or lose on any given Sunday. So thank you very much, Brian, for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you and thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Order the book where refined books are sold. It's called The Play Sheet, a simple resource for overloaded professionals out January 7th, 2025. Thanks to

Brian for coming by. Thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress of Crisphos, LinkedIn.com, Fortress of Crisphos, Crisphos 1, the TikTok, any of those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out.