The Daily Stoic - Grow A Coaching Tree

Episode Date: February 2, 2025

By supporting, encouraging, and influencing others, our efforts can live on. What matters is that we are the candle that lights another, which in turn lights another.🎥 Watch Rupi Kaur's interview on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SkjF4ZWoCA📕 Grab a signed copy of Right Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday | https://store.dailystoic.com/📚 You can get signed copies of Rupi’s 10th Anniversary Edition of milk and honey, the original milk and honey, the sun and her flowers, and homebody at https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. When I travel with my family, I almost always stay in an Airbnb. I want my kids to have their own room. I want my wife and I to have a little privacy. You know, maybe we'll cook or at the very least we'll use a refrigerator. Sometimes I'm bringing my in-laws around with me or I need an extra room just to write in. Airbnbs give you the flavor of actually being in the place you are. I feel like I've lived in all these places that I've stayed for a week or two or even a night or two. There's flexibility in size and location. When you're searching you can

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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audio books that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy. And most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of the things I've been thinking about and writing about is this idea of coaching trees. That your success isn't measured just by what you accomplish, but what you help other people accomplish. Like I hope I am a positive reflection on Robert Greene. Obviously he's done so much, but one of the things he's also done is help me go on to do what I have done, right?

And when you look at great sports teams, it's where the assistance to that coach, what they have gone on to do. And I wrote about this in Right Thing Right Now, but I was thinking of that because when I had Rupi Kaur on the podcast, she's the bestselling author of Milk and Honey, I sat down to read her book, which my wife had read and it sold a bazillion copies.

It's very popular in the painted porch. And actually she has a poem about exactly this. The title of the book illustrates this idea. This is the poem, I'll read it to you. Of course I want to be successful, but I don't crave success for me. I need to be successful to gain enough milk and honey to help those around me succeed.

Anyways, I thought that was beautiful. She has a new cool 10 year anniversary edition of the book, which we're selling at the bookstore. You can follow her on Instagram at Rupi Carr and check out her website. But that made me think of the coaching tree chapter in right thing right now. And I thought I'd set that up as today's episode.

So let's do a deep dive into that idea. Like how do we not just become successful at what we do, but how do we help others be successful at what they do? How do we, who have we opened doors for, right? Who have we given a push in the right direction? Who have we encouraged? Who success have we fostered? And that's what this chapter is about.

And to me, that's a really important idea when we think about justice. Justice isn't just, again, what goes on in a law court. It's not just about what's legally allowed. It's not just about not being an asshole, but it's about being a good person who does these kinds of things, not for the credit,

not because the benefits were downed onto us, but because it's the right thing to do. So here we are digging in to how to grow a coaching tree from right thing right now. And if you want a signed copy of the book, you can go to store.dailystoic.com. Grow a coaching tree. By all time wins,

Greg Popovich is perhaps the greatest coach in the history of the NBA. When one adds to that, his number of championships, five, his number of winning seasons, 22, his unbroken streak of playoff appearances, five, his number of winning seasons, 22, his unbroken streak of playoff appearances, 22, his winning percentage, 0.657, his Olympic gold medals, two, and the fact that he did it all with one team, he may well be the greatest coach in the history of the game of basketball.

But there is another metric besides wins and rings less considered but more important that should make the case for him as the greatest coach in sports, his coaching tree. In sports, a coaching tree is defined by the coaches and players and executives that a coach has discovered, hired and mentored and what they go on to do in their own careers. Greg Popovich's coaching tree is so extensive,

as one sports writer put it, that it's actually more like a coaching forest. In the course of becoming the longest tenured coach in all of the major professional sports leagues, Greg Popovich would take under his wing multiple Hall of Fame players like Tim Duncan and Tony Parker and Manu Gnobli, who not only made up one of the greatest dynasties in the modern NBA, but stayed in San Antonio and became leaders in their community. At one point, nearly 30% of all the coaches in the NBA

had worked for or played under Popovich, and his proteges have independently won 11 championships as head coaches and one G League championship. Five times someone from his force has been named the NBA coach of the year. Of the current 23 black head coaches and GMs in the NBA, seven spent time under Popovich at the Spurs. Becky Hammond, the 2022 WNBA head coach of the year,

spent eight years with the Spurs, where she was the first female assistant coach in the NBA and the first to serve as an acting head coach after an ejected Popovich designated her his replacement. And she won two straight WNBA titles as a coach too. And if one were to begin to trace out the coaching trees from the coaches in Popovich's coaching tree, you would touch nearly everyone in the NBA and NCAA basketball. It was this thought that struck Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA during the 2022 finals, which pitted two coaches whom Popovich had

coached, hired and mentored against each other. The Spurs were more than just a basketball team, Silver said. They were practically an academy for future coaches and team executives. If Popovich was running an academy, a nonprofit mission-based educational organization, these accomplishments would be quite impressive. The fact that he managed to do this while operating at the highest level of a cutthroat game where he's actually helping, if not producing, the competition, this is something he has done outside of his commitment to winning,

both as an ideal and as an expectation of his employment. This is not the old boys club either, with a bunch of people scratching each other's backs or one leader making identical replicas of themselves. No, it's the act of opening a door, extending a ladder to a diverse group of unique leaders, different types of athletes, coaches, and executives as they each reach to fulfill their own potential. So as you look at your career, it bears asking, who have you given a shot? Who have you

helped get ahead? More revealing how similar to you or unlike you were these people. Yet far too often we are more interested in how to get someone to give us a shot or how to get another one or a bigger one or a better one. We think that by thinking about others we jeopardize ourselves as if life or work was zero sum. Highlander syndrome says there can only be one. No, there is room for all of us to succeed, far more to succeed than currently are. UFO lands in Suffolk, and that's official, said the News of the World. But what really happened across two nights in December 1980, when US servicemen saw mysterious

lights in the forest near RAF Woodbridge, and claimed to have had a close encounter with an actual craft. Encounters, a new podcast available exclusively on Wondery+, takes a deep dive into one of the most famous and still unresolved UFO encounters to ever take place in the UK.

Featuring shocking testimony from first-hand witnesses, hosts, journalist, podcaster and UFO researcher Andy McGillan, that's me, and producer Elle Scott take us back to the nights in question and examine all of the evidence and conflicting theories about what was encountered in the middle of a snowy Suffolk forest 40 years ago. Are we alone? Encounters is a podcast which is going to find out. Listen to Encounters exclusively in ad free on Wondry Plus. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or in Apple podcasts. George Marshall advanced in his career was able to get to the top of his

profession and do well there, precisely because he understood that his job was to help other people, to build an army full of talented officers. While other generals fought tooth and nail for their own advancement, wrote letters to their superiors, lobbying for promotions or choice assignments, Marshall was advocating for promising young men like Omar Bradley and George Patton, Walter Kruger, and most of all, Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he nurtured into history-defining talents. His coaching tree, you might say, was the oak upon which the Allied victory depended. In this life, of course, we are measured by our accomplishments as individuals.

We strive to realize our potential and do our best. But after a certain point, this means only so much. What matters more, what matters over a longer horizon, is who we have helped to succeed along the way. To be clear, it's not just sports where a coaching tree counts. Socrates brought us Alciabites and Xenophon and Plato. Plato, in turn, brought us Aristotle and Aristotle Alexander. Emerson not only generously supported the literary scene

in New England, but actively encouraged talent wherever he encountered it. "'I greet you at the beginning of a great career,' Emerson gushed in a letter to a struggling Walt Whitman in 1855, which Whitman promptly added as a blurb in front of his then undiscovered self-published masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. Without Emerson, the careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne,

William Ellery Channing, Amos Bronson Alcott, and later William James, Emerson's grandson, and Alcott's daughter, Louisa May Alcott, would have gone very differently. Generosity is the seed of a great coaching tree. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in addition to his work as an abolitionistist helped mentor and publish the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Frederick Douglass encouraged and mentored Ida B. Wells, whose anti-lynching work as well as her work for women's suffrage and in helping to found the NAACP in 1909 were brilliant extensions of the legacy of Douglass, a man born into slavery in 1818 Martin Luther King jr. His legacy is also burnished by the fact that John Lewis went on to become a congressman Andrew Young became ambassador to the UN Diane Nash won the presidential medal of freedom Denzel Washington paid for Chadwick Boseman to go to college

Walker Percy was adopted by his uncle Will and then he in turn was a quiet mentor and teacher to the biographer Walter Isaacson. Percy also discovered and helped publish posthumously John Kennedy Tewles Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. George Carlin met a young Gary Shandlin in a comedy club in Arizona in 1968 and after he read Shandlin's jokes notebook said, I think you're funny if you're thinking of pursuing it. Shandling in turn would mentor the director, Judd Apatow, Kevin Neal and Adam Sandler

and Sarah Silverman alongside a generation of comedic talent in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. And what of the people these trailblazers never met but whom their work influenced, whom their example inspired? This is true multi-generational impact, an infinite web of butterfly wings flapped, of lives changed and better futures written. That's the thing.

Not all of us have the power to change or improve the world within our own lifetimes. By supporting, encouraging, and influencing others, including our own children, our efforts can live on. Mentor, patron, sponsor, ally, teacher, master, guru, inspiration. There are so many names for it because it's a role defined by so many different roles. But what matters is that we are the candle that lights another, which lights another, which lights another, because through this whole world are illuminated and delivered from darkness. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show.

We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. On January 5th, 2024, an Alaska Airlines door plug tore away mid flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of a plane that carried 171 passengers. This heart-stopping incident was just the latest in a string of crises surrounding the

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