The Daily Stoic - How to Bounce Back - Coach Eric Musselman (University of Arkansas)

Episode Date: October 24, 2020

Ryan speaks with Eric Musselman, head coach of the University of Arkansas men’s basketball team, about building on your mistakes to get better, why you need to use every tool at hand to succeed, how Musselman built his career as a coach, and more.Coach Eric Musselman has coached basketball for over 30 years. His tenure spans multiple leagues and levels, from minor league basketball to college and the NBA. Musselman was head coach for the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings, and since 2019 has been the head coach for Arkansas.This episode is also brought to you by Fast Growing Trees, the online nursery that delivers beautiful plants to your doorstep quickly and easily. Whether it’s magnificent shade trees, fruit trees with delicious apples and pears, privacy hedges, or beautiful flowers, Fast Growing Trees is the best place to buy your plants. And their 30-day Alive and Thrive guarantee means that you’ll be happy with whatever you buy. Visit FastGrowingTrees.com/stoic now and get ten percent off your entire order.This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. Visit http://linkedin.com/stoic to get fifty dollars off your first job post.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Eric Musselman:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/EricPMusselmanInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericpmusselman/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more

possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. You may be able to hear my screaming children

in the background such as life during the pandemic. Someone was telling me the other day and I hadn't really thought about it this way, but we are well into our third season now of this new reality. First, it was spring and and summer and now here we are into fall and It goes on. I mean look this is nothing compared to the the Antonin plague Marcus really is you know that plague comes to Rome

And maybe they were telling themselves the same thing. It'll be over by summer This will just disappear like a miracle as one head of state has said, but certainly no one was expecting it would last for 15 years. I'm definitely not saying that the coronavirus is here for 15 years. But the point is, I think it's a good reminder of this idea of like, oh, when things go back to normal, oh, when things go back to normal, or oh, this will be over soon. It ties us into this stockpill idea that it's the optimist that get wrecked. The people who think, oh, we'll be home by Christmas.

And Christmas comes, satire, control, and you're wrecked by it. So it's not to say I don't have expectations, I don't have hopes, but I do try to manage those things. I try to be present. Look, it has been three seasons, but they've also flown by. But as much as they've flown by, I have the receipts for what I've managed to do in that period. And I'm proud of that.

Not just the time I've spent with my family, not just the time I've spent getting a nice bit of stillness here and there, but also, I've got the pages got the, I've got the pages to prove it. I finished a book project, Lives of the Stokes, we were doing the last bits of editing on when this started. That's now out. I started the next project. That's winding up and it goes writing project and something else. I'm not ready to talk about, but I'm excited about a whole bunch of other stuff, right? Including really investing in and spending a lot of time on this podcast, which I'm excited about. The Stokes would say that it's not just about productivity, of course, but look, those three seasons are not just arbitrary days or moments on a calendar.

They're your life. You're watching them flip by. Every day I rip off the page in the Daily Stoke calendar. You can check out in the Daily Stoke store, but I try to tell myself as I'm pulling off this tarot way page of the calendar, that's a day of my life gone. And Sena would say, you know, those days now belong to death. We've died three seasons, we've died six, seven months here.

We never get that time back. And so if you did waste that time, look, it's not the worst thing in the world, but you wasted it. That doesn't mean you have to waste today. It doesn't mean you have to waste tomorrow. You can start over right now. You can push yourself forward.

You can decide to live. The rest of the time you have however long that is. That's of course what we talked about here at Daily Stoke. And I'm really excited about today's guest. I got a surprise text from Eric Musselman. I had no idea who it was or how we got my number. The former head coach of the Sacramento Kings, that's how I'd heard of him.

He also coached the Golden State Warriors. He was an assistant for the Grizzlies, Timberwolves, the Magic and the Hawks, spend all over professional basketball and then sort of struggle a little bit towards the end of his time there with the Kings. It was not a perfect fit. And he has reinvented himself as a college coach.

As he talks about in the thing, he had the sort of humility and the hunger to go from head NBA coach, which is like as good as the job gets to being a daily coach, which is what it was called then, to being an assistant college coach. But he wanted to reinvent himself as a coach. He wanted to learn. And now he is the head coach at the University of Arkansas. You know, coaching a team through one of the most unpredictable crises in the history of sports.

But here he is, right? And it's a great interview. He's a fananestosism. We talk about a bunch of stoic ideas. It was excitingly here from him. I'm always interested in hearing from folks and gonna be a good interview. I hope you guys like it.

And of course, remember, I think where we open this, this life is your life. Today is today. Today could be your whole life. Don't waste it. Don't fritter it away. Use it. Carpe Diem, as't fritter it away. Use it. Carpe Diem, as they say.

And talk to you next week. Well, hey, man, it's great to chat with you. I'm really excited to do this. Yeah, no, so am I. I can't look forward to it. So obviously, I first heard of you when you became the coach of the Sacramento Kings. And when we connected you, you texted me that you said you sucked when you were with the kings.

I was curious about that because what it's a self-aware statement, but I'm curious actually less about what happened with the kings, but if that's your judgment, how did you become better for that experience? Like how if you felt you suck then, how do you feel about where you've gotten since then and how did that happen? Well it's interesting Ryan because you know when I got fired from the Golden State Warriors it was after two years and I felt really good about that experience. I still would go to warrior home games. My two sons had lived, you know,

they lived with their mother in East Bay in Danville, which is about 30 minutes away from where the warriors play. And it was, you know, you never wanna get let go, but I walked away knowing that they had new management with Chris Mullin taking over. And I knew that anytime in New GM comes in the sports world, there could be change with the coaching. But my King's experience was just much different.

Going into the job, I knew it was really, really going to be difficult because Rick Atelman was a coach. And he had been very, very successful. And it's a great learning lesson that it's really, really hard to replace a really good coach who's laid a foundation and coach Adamin was a player's coach like the guys Mike Bibby and Brad Miller and those guys really, really liked playing in his system. They ran a form of what I would call kind of like the triangle offense that Phil Jackson ran where it was a corner series And so I came in and tried to do my own

Blueprint from an offensive Philosophical standpoint and some guys loved it like Kevin Martin and and it changed his game Philosophically get into the file line and some areas that he needed to improve at But I look at that experience and we did suck, you know, and I look at that as the one failure in my coaching journey so far. But what it did allow me to do it, it allowed me to go be a father to my two young sons. I didn't coach for three years. It allowed me to kind of reflect and then it was kind

of the turning point in a career reinventment, so to speak. I mean, I went from being in the pro game my whole life to doing college TV games as a commentator to also doing NBA stuff for Fox radio. And so there was this transition where I was doing media with college, media with with the pros and met my wife Danielle and she and I and my two sons kind of came to an agreement that we were going to try to go the college route after I had done two G League stints and had great success and set a ton of records in the G League that maybe the NBA thing.

For me to get another head job, it was going to take maybe four to five years as being an assistant. I wanted to run my own program and really, really humbling experience, Ryan, to, you know, to one take three years off, then do two years as a G league head coach and mix in a stint coaching Venezuela and Dominican Republic national teams and then go be an assistant coach at Arizona State and LSU before I got my first opportunity as a college head coach at Nevada. Is you were an NBA head coach relatively young, right? Was there sort of an ego hit

in having to like step back strategically and go, okay, I'm gonna learn more, I'm going to figure out more of my system, I'm gonna practice on, you know, I'm gonna experiment with the G-League, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna do college programs, was there sort of, was that hard to do? It was you know my career was you know kind of an up and coming quick

riser you know I had worked for such great coaches like Chuck daily and Doc Rivers and got I was a youngest coach at the time in the NBA when I got the Warriors job and even a few years later getting the Kings job, I think I was the youngest coach at the time then as well and my father and I are the first father-son head coaches in the history of the NBA so you know had this really quick rise through the ranks and then all of a sudden you know you get fired for a second time. And what I did, Ryan, is I did a lot of research and there's not a lot of people that get three opportunities to become a head coach in any major sport, whether it's Major League Baseball,

NFL, NHL, or NBA. And so I kind of had to really figure out what I wanted to do. Sometimes I think the world's kind of flipped around. When you're in your 40s and you're raising young children, you kind of need to be there for them and you're still learning your craft and we get all wrapped up in our careers. And then as you get older, you become wiser and then the jobs become harder a lot of times. People don't want to hire, you know, coaches when they get into their 50s because they're worried about age and they're always looking for, you know, the young superstar coach.

And I know that I'm a way better coach today than I ever was when I was coaching the kings or the warriors. And then you look at some of the great, all-time great coaches. Chuck Daley didn't get his first head job in the NBA until he was over 50. Tom Tibito and I both worked together as assistants for my for my father with the Timber Wolves and coach Tibito didn't get his first opportunity until he was in his 50s and sometimes I think those coaches are really fortunate because they've they've had the chance to sit back, learn, understand exactly what they liked, what they didn't like, and then I think sometimes you get an opportunity at a

younger age and maybe you're not ready and then are you going to get another chance? And fortunately for me, you know, I was willing to go the assistant route in college, which again, to my knowledge there has not been a former NBA head coach that's been a college assistant. And I wanted to try to learn the game. I knew what I didn't know from the college ranks, meaning scheduling and recruiting and so on and so forth. And probably the most humbling experience Ryan was coaching in Dominican Republic and Venezuela where we would practice outside, open air, practice sites with birds flying

and no air conditioning and half the team didn't speak English. And so I learned to become a better demonstrator. I learned to slow down my delivery in timeouts. I learned to diagram plays better in the heat of the moment because half the team didn't understand my language. I learned that you have to be in great physical condition as a coach because of a demonstration, even as you get older, you've got to be able to go out on the floor and demonstrate for your player.

So I think that all those experiences really helped and shaped me to become a much better coach. Yeah, I think you're in good company on the Dominican Republic thing, right? Didn't Phil Jackson sort of cut his teeth as a coach, like in environments like that. I think we tend to think that these coaches are kind of dropped fully formed as geniuses or as NBA champions, but in fact, the journeys are really long, arduous one. Yeah, there's no question. A lot of coaches, many years ago,

would coach in the summer in the Puerto Rican league, and that was a pro league that was really, really good and there's a lot of great coaches. If you look into the history of the Puerto Rican pro basketball league, Phil Jackson did coach in Puerto Rico where he was able to experiment and do different things. And then he also coached in the old CBA, which is equivalent to the NBA development league now. Coach Jackson coached the Albany Petrunes and there's no question like to be a coach. I think the more experiences you have, the better you can become. And then even in the Dominican Republic, Coach Calapari actually replaced me with the Dominican Republic.

And I think that helped Coach Cal experiment with different things. And oh, by the way, it also helped him get a guy named Carl Anthony Town to Kentucky. So there's a lot of ways to shape your career. And again, I think the more experiences, the different leagues you can coach in, really, really helps you as you get older and grow in the business. It's kind of this tension. I experienced it in my career. It's like, obviously you want to get your shot early. And I think my first book came out when I was 24, which authors would kill to have their first book deal by then. And yet, like, you're also not as good as you could be

when you get the shot. So it's like, you kind of want, it's like, you want to be as successful as early as possible. That's like what your dream is. That's what your drive wants you to get. And yet, as you're sort of saying, you tend to hit your peak in your 50s or, you know, for writers, you can write up until the day you die.

It's this weird thing where your ego wants you to get the opportunity now, now, now, but objectively, like the more experience you have, the better you're going to be at it. And, and, and the other thing is when you get the shot early, there's a lot of sort of fear and anxiety and that sort of imposter syndrome because you know maybe you're not fully ready for the opportunity. Yeah, I think like, if you're an NFL coach at a young age or in the NBA, the players are so smart.

So my second year with Golden State, you know, I had at the end of their career, Nick Van Exel and Avery Johnson. And that's not easy being in your 30s, coaching players in their 30s, who had played for great coaches like Avery Johnson had come from playing for Greg Popovitz. So we would be in shoot around and be talking about how we're gonna defend a Steve Nash pick and roll. And Avery or Nick Van Exo might have a different way that was successful in San Antonio under Coach Pop.

So it's really, really challenging. And along the way you learn lessons, like Coach Daley always would say, don't ever put in a play to your team unless you know it's going to work and be successful because you will lose power in your beef. And so it's, there's no question like, Coach, you're at a young age or I'm sure writing at a young age is really, really challenging. I had a question, one last question about Sacramento and it's not probably the most pleasant topic, but I thought it'd be a good thing to talk about.

I remember you got a DUI when you were there and it was sort of a surprise. I was curious, like as far as mistakes go, as far as messing up, how has that incident affected you now as a college coach? And I guess as an NBA coach too, but athletes are always messing up. They're always making mistakes because they're people. How did that incident for you shape? How you talk to a guy who maybe, you know, got arrested or, you know, got in trouble or how is that experience affected, you know, your coaching style? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's a good lesson to be able to talk to your players.

I mean, you know, most of my players don't know that unless I talk to them about it. And, you know, a huge part of college coaching is developing them, you know, to be men, developing them to go out in the real world. Everybody wants to play in the NBA, but the fact of the matter is, you know, most guys are lucky to play two and a half to three years at that level, and then you have a whole lifetime that you have to you know navigate. And so certainly that experience affected everyone. It affected my sons. It affected me. It affected my career. It affected my and now it affects my current team because I am able to discuss and be very, very open about that particular time in my life and and how I went from coaching an NBA team to, you know, coaching and Dominican Republic

in Venezuela and trying to reinvent my own career. So I do think that, and that definitely, you know, led to, you know, once the season ended being released. So, you know, I think oftentimes things happen in our life that can make us better in our profession and then just better personally as well. Yeah, it's, it feels like that sort of apropos of this moment where, you know, you're watching these videos of like college kids partying in the middle of a pandemic or you're watching, you know, the, you know, the kids are, you know, the athletes are being sent to a hotel and then because they're in a hotel, they're having a party. How do you, how do you talk to them? Because I feel

like, unfortunately, it's a lesson everyone is struggling with. How do you talk to them now about sort of responsibility, whereas like before an athlete provided that their conduct off the field didn't affect the product on the field or on the court, they could sort of do whatever they wanted. How do you think about that now? It almost feels like college sports is sort of a microcosm of what society is struggling with this pandemic where you have a baseball player who breaks quarantine and lies about it. He is endangering not just his team, but potentially the entire major league baseball experiment. How are you talking to them about that thing?

Because it feels like a lot for an 18-year-old, or even for a 50-year-old to wrap their head around. Yeah, Ryan, it's really hard. I think one, like we talked about during the beginning of this before we got back together. And it's a phrase stolen from Coach Doc Rivers is, when the weight meaning, you know, while you're waiting to get back into practice mode and get back on campus, how are you going to win that weight against your opponents, meaning,

you know, maybe what are you doing in your garage? Are you working on your ball handling or you're doing push-ups? What's your physical condition going to be like once we get back? And then once we get back, which we bend back, is like the responsibility that you have to your team and to your coaches. So when you leave our building, whatever you do, while we have this pandemic going on, is going to affect all of us when we get back together the next day and then the day after that and then the day after that. So we've just really talked about discipline and a change of lifestyle because once the student body came back and there was fraternities and sororities and other student athletes on

campus because we were one of the first group of student athletes to come back. Sure You have to have more discipline right now in your lifestyle than you've ever had And that kind of means create your own Environment or your own bubble so to speak where you're kind of going to practice You're doing all your classes online right now. When you go out to eat, you know, how many people are going to sit at your table, how many of your teammates. You know, things that we've never really talked about, like, you know, we've always wanted our teams to be together. Like, when you're playing NBA 2K, get as many guys in the room as possible to partake.

Now we're saying, you know, can you play video games remotely in your own rooms and isolation? So it's really weird. I'm not sure it's healthy mentally, but it's where we have to be right now until we get through this thing. Yeah. And I think, you know, obviously obviously, they'll talk about this. It's like a player gets upset, and they throw a punch, or they cost your team

a technical foul, or you can get ejected, or there's all these things that the athlete vaguely understands, hey, if I do this thing, it negatively impacts the team. But it feels like such a good metaphor to me now that obviously there's this sort of contagious virus going around that people are having to realize it's like, oh, hey, if I go do X selfishly,

or because I didn't plan well, I have to do X, Y, or Z. And then that exposes me. Then it's not just me that's affected. It's the downstream consequences of all these decisions. It does feel like Americans uniquely in the world are struggling with that the most, but I think in the modern world, we've kind of been taught, like you can do whatever you want, as long as you're not actively hurting people. But I think now we're seeing how some of these selfish decisions we make

really does ripple through the rest of society. There's no question, like I have a 10-year-old daughter like to try to explain all that to her because she's going into school every day, Monday through Friday, and so I have to explain that to a 10-year-old, and sometimes, you know, I'm not sure that you really want her to have a burden of, you know, hey, if you go to school and you catch something that you could bring in home

to mom and dad, that's not really fair. But again, it's kind of where we are from a educational standpoint with everybody, you know, it's not being, you know, people in their 50s cannot really go see their their parents even and you can't hug people anymore and in practice, I'm told not to high five my players and like how do you coach with the mask on when they can't see you smile? All right, that's I mean, that's really really hard you're coaching them hard, but yet they

can't see you smile or laugh. And that, that, that, that might be the most challenging thing right now, Ryan, is, you know, the emotional aspect of joy in practice, even though you're grinding and going hard, that's probably been the most challenging thing for our staff right now. I know, I bet. And I think that's another sort of great metaphor of sports, right? Which is that it is hard, it is unfair.

It's the right thing isn't always rewarded. And I think you're seeing people who haven't trained that in regular people I'm saying, who haven't trained the way that athletes are forced to train or elite performers in any field are forced to train. And so there's this assumption that your frustration or I feel like I'm hearing people say stuff, I'm just done with this, right?

And it's like just because you're done with COVID-19 doesn't mean COVID-19 is done with you, right? And I think you're I think one of the things sports does is it trains us to realize that hey when our My when our body wants to quit we have to understand or sorry when our mind wants to quit to realize that there's actually sort of fuel left in the tank and that ability to sort of push past what feels hard or unfair or difficult. And I think a lot of people are who have been used to getting everything they want, everything being the way they want it to be. I think that's been sort of an extra blow of the pandemic.

It's like they just weren't prepared to have seven months of hardship. They weren't prepared for this to go on longer than they could afford for it to go on, and the reality is life doesn't really care what you want. No, there's no question, because we talk all the time about, you know, the mental toughness aspect of it. And for instance, for us last year, Ryan, we had one of our best players go down and we went one in five during that stretch.

And I kept trying to tell the team like you cannot feel sorry for yourself. The opposition, the other SEC schools, they do not care that we have an injury. And it's the same thing with the pandemic. Like, yes, our season ended abruptly. We had just beaten Vanderbilt, so we were still alive in the SEC tournament. And that ended abruptly. And so we can't feel sorry for ourselves because now there's a new season ahead of us. And we can't feel sorry for us if we don't know what our schedule is gonna be right now because we really don't. We just know the date when we're gonna schedule.

And so we're trying to figure that out on the flies. But what you can control is your effort, your energy, and your enthusiasm that you bring to practice every day. And that's one of the things that we just continue to talk about is what are you bringing to today? Don't worry about yesterday. Don't worry about tomorrow.

How can you affect our team off the floor and on the floor today? Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me,

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What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because baby this is Kiki Palmer.

No topic is off limits. Follow baby this is Kiki Palmer. Whatever you get your podcast. Hey prime members, you can listen early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. And yeah people say that thing like, oh I can't wait for things to go back to normal. One of the things I think the study of stillicism has helped sort of define for me is that that doesn't exist, right? Marcus Aurelius is writing and living, you know, he takes over as

as Emperor and shortly thereafter, what's now known as the Antonine plague begins. And, you know, there was no hope of a vaccine. There was no hope of it going away. It lasts for like 15 years. So it became normal. And I think a lot of the changes that we've made as a result of this pandemic are gonna take a long, even if there is a vaccine tomorrow,

as a friend was telling me, it's like, even if they were able to do a million doses of the vaccine a day, that means it takes almost a year for every American to get it, right? And so even if this goes away tomorrow, the virus that is, the actual, or if there's a breakthrough tomorrow, the actual, as it was a slow acceleration of the problem, it will be a slow implementation of the solution. And so I think when people sort of go around and they go, oh, I'm just waiting,

like, imagine if your team was like, well, we'll just wait for so and so to come back from the injury. It's like, you can't afford to do that. You have to make whatever now is the new normal because it could be like this forever. Like, you know, they might not come back or another injury might follow this one. You really can't wait around for what you want.

You have to adjust and accept what's in front of you as reality. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think that's one of the things like that you've got to talk to your team about and your family and your kids is like, you're going to have to be flexible for the foreseeable future. Like don't think that this is going to end. Don't even worry about that. That's out of our control. We have no control over anything other than living under the current circumstances. And we tell our team like, we have no idea what the NCAA tournament's gonna look like.

They can tell us something today in September, but it means nothing once we get to March because as we all know, this stuff has changed for the last six, it changes daily. So you just gotta be flexible and go with whatever it is, medically that they're telling you, but you got to live your life as well. Yeah, that's right.

And as you were sort of saying about winning the weight, I think the other thing that maybe we struggle with is going, hey, this is affecting everyone equally. So if I can find some way to be improved by this or like like what I always say with with with writing for instance like if everyone could do it if every good book magically found its audience right if every talent did writer automatically got a book deal well then every every writer would have a book deal and every book there'd be an unlimited amount of books to read. In fact, it's that, it's hard, and that some people are getting their ass kicked because they weren't prepared,

because they don't want it bad enough, whatever it is, that creates the opportunity for a competitive advantage, creates an opportunity to make up gains. And I got to imagine, especially, you know, when you're coaching at a school that isn't Kentucky or Duke, you're looking for, hey, how can we actually find a way to be improved by this so we can compete

in what is essentially an unfair fight? No question. I think that that word, Ryan, opportunity has become part of our daily, you know, discussions, pre-practice or post-practice because like you kind of see it in the real world right now like so things are semi-starting to get back to normal at least people are starting to go to work in certain spots. Well, some people don't want to go back to work. It's like they they became accustomed to waking up late and not having to go to the office, not having to get in their car. And it's the same thing with the basketball team. Like some guys struggle with getting back

into the routine and how bad you really want it. And it's the same thing's gonna happen in the season. Like somebody or some team is gonna get hit with two or three players and be unavailable. And how does that affect you mentally? And we're even kind of practicing that way. Like we're going with weird combinations in practice. In other words, like let's take all three point guards off the floor. Today, we're going to go with five players, no true point guard or quarterback, whatever you want to call it,

and see how our team functions as if this is a plan for what could potentially happen during the year. And I think you really got to plan that way, not just your basketball team, but any business has to plan for the abnormal right now. I think you got to plan for the abnormal. And then the other thing I've taken from it, and I've done this on some of the talks I've done with sports teams and stuff in the pandemic, too. It's like also the abnormal has been an experiment in it sort of blew up the old routine. So like one of the things I'm trying to take out of this is like, oh, hey, I write better.

I'm happier at home. You know, I'm more creative. I have better business ideas. My team works better when I travel less. And so I was under the impression that hey, I had to travel to be good at my job to do speaking to, like I had sort of taken, or I told myself, hey, when I travel,

it's only a minor inconvenience, right, to, or the cost on my productivity is relatively low, because I can write on airplanes and write in the hotel room. But it turns out, actually actually the normalcy of traveling around doing multiple talks a week or a month and and you know having meetings and you know just my old schedule was actually you know more costly than I thought. And so one of the things I'm curious what lessons you've taken out of this is I sort of re-imagined what my life is gonna look like day to day. Even if I can do anything that I want going forward,

I'm gonna try to preserve parts of the bubble or the quarantine life because it turns out it's actually much more conducive to being good at what I want to be good at. Yeah, I think the one thing, especially in the athletic world, is because we've all been under a dead period, quote unquote, where recruits can't come onto campus and you can't leave campus to do in-home visits or to do evaluations during the AAU summer session. So we've had to recruit in a completely different way. In other words, we've had to do in-home visits now virtually where maybe the whole staff

tries to bring the recruit into my home where my wife is available and they get to say hello to my daughter through a virtual home visit or we're able to see the recruits, parents, and family members virtually, which we've never done. I think it's actually forced us to get to know recruits and their family and their inner circle better than just going to a player's high school, seeing him at practice for an hour, meeting him then in a classroom for 15 minutes, and then jumping on a plane and going seeing another player. So, I mean, it's also forced us from a creativity standpoint to have, you know, like, what is our virtual campus tour going to look like?

And how do we get better at that like we've created probably four different virtual campus tours because we want to continually and constantly evolve and get better. So I think from a recruit standpoint it's really taught us a lot Ryan on how we can still recruit players and then kids are still making decisions and they're committing places in all sports without actually going on campus. And I think from a health standpoint, college coaching and the recruiting

it kind of seems to never end. And what we found, although we do need to do live evaluations, we do need to do in-home visits. I do hope that there'll be a new set of rules so that we have more life balance. And this recruiting doesn't take over our lives like it did, you know, pre seven months ago.

The other thing I was curious about with you because it's something that I think about writing about philosophy, which is potentially not something a lot of people are interested. It seems like you, particularly, but I know all coaches have had to figure this out. It feels like you've really figured out social media and all these sort of media strategies as far as recruitment goes. I know you are really early to blogging. You're really great on Twitter. Like how have you thought about using these tools, which I imagine at some,

at certain points in your life, you must have been like, I did not become a head basketball coach so I could spend all my time on Twitter, but kind of part of your job and it makes you better at your job. Yeah, I think well the interesting thing Ryan is is when I grew up, my dad was coach in the University of Minnesota and when we would like go to a fast food restaurant and we'd go into order, he would bring like 25 University of Minnesota golden Golden Gofer basketball t-shirts, and he would pass them out. And when he was a coach, now you gotta think this was like in the 70s,

he's at the University of Minnesota, they had a pre-game warm-up. They had like over 40 cheerleader slash dance team. Music would blare, they had a unicycle guy that was part of the team that would ride a unicycle and juggle three basketballs during their pregame warm-up. It's on YouTube. He was way ahead of his time as far as thinking outside the box and understanding that you're gonna get a certain portion of your fan base that's gonna come because they like basketball. You're gonna get a certain group of people that's going to come when you win big.

But then how do you get the extra people that want to come for entertainment? So from a very, very young age, I was taught that. My dad actually got an opportunity. He didn't take it, but Charlie O'Finley, the old Oakland A's owner owned an AB18 called the Memphis Tams. And Charlie O'Finley wanted to hire my dad just based on his marketing and promotion ideas. And so that's been ingrained in me. And then you add in the fact that my wife Danielle worked for ESPN, worked for NFL Network, was an on-air person. So I have that media aspect as well. And so I kind of put those two things together. And then I have two

young sons, one a sophomore in college and one who's a part of our recruiting staff on campus. You know, they're obviously both in their 20s. And so they have a whole different aspect. So we actually have this little think tank group. And we meet almost every day, my son, sometimes my wife joins us. And we just talk about, you know, ways to impact recruiting, ways to impact our fan base. And we try to be as creative as possible.

And then I think when you hit a certain age or a point in your career, Ryan, like there's vulnerability in some of the stuff we do, whether it's, you know, me coaching at the beginning of the pandemic in an empty gym or me making fun of myself kind of in interviews or acting like a fan in an empty arena about what they're saying about our coaching style. With all that stuff comes vulnerability. But you also reach a point in your career where you really don't care and you want to have fun and you're not worried about what other coaches are going to say about you or what you're doing. And right now, we want to bring joy

to the job and we want to try to impact recruiting and we want our fan base to look behind the curtain. And that's the thought process behind our social media plan. Yeah, sometimes people turn up their noses that sort of meeting the audience or the people where they are, but it's like if the athletes you're trying to recruit are on this platform or that platform, you've got to figure out a way to get there. And that's what I've always thought as an author too. It's like, look, would I rather only be able, only write long-form, you know, deeply nerdy books about

ancient philosophy. Yeah, that's what would get me out of bed. But you've got to find the overlap of what gets you excited and what helps you accomplish what you want to accomplish with and for other people. Yeah, and like, and we still need to get better at, you know, I mean, there's been some really high-level coaches, both in basketball and other sports

that have reached out about our social media and kind of how we go about it. But I still want to get better. Like, yes, we're really active on Twitter. But what about some of the other things? Like, Instagram, I feel like I'm way behind. And that's one of the things that like Instagram, I feel like I'm way behind and that's one of the things that I want to get better at and learn that a little bit better.

Now my daughter is so into TikTok. How do we create a platform on TikTok for Arkansas basketball? I think there's the biggest thing in this world that just moved so fast now because of social media is How can you you know stay a little bit ahead of the curve? How can you be as creative as possible? Basketball such a small part of what you do as a college coach the ex-in-os is is really really a small small fraction of what we really do No, and I think that's a that's a great attitude that I think people should pick up on, which is, and again, people sort of turn up their nose.

They're like, I didn't become this, so I could have to do that. And you really have to see it all as just equal, all as sort of equally interesting challenges. So in the same, I think about it, it's the same way I try to crack the puzzle on a book. I have to also think about how am I going to crack the puzzle on, yeah, growing my Instagram following or growing my following here because being successful over there then allows me to be successful in the other thing. So you can't just look at a job which includes all these different parts and say, well, I'm only going to get great at one part of it because that's the only part that matters to

me. That's just not life. No, I mean, it's so interesting because I think the perception of me at a young age was old school, ex-in-os, doesn't have enough fun. Now there's all these younger coaches that are breaking in the business and I think that I don't do exos that I'm just messing around on social media. And so the perception, it's interesting, because a lot of my friends, and even my college roommates,

because we're in a group text, will bring that to my attention. But the social media, like, it's not just about, you know, our bad guys, but it's not just about, it's not just about, it's about, it's about, it's about, it's about, it's about, college roommates because we're in a group text, we'll bring that to my

attention. But the social media, like it's not just about, you know, our basketball program or our coaching staff, but but more importantly, with where we are going as far as college athletics, name, image, and likeness is about to hit. And so the social media platform for your players is gonna become really, really valuables. So, you know, that's gonna be part of this whole process as we move forward as well. No, and I think that's where that sort of

peak Carol philosophy of just like compete everywhere is the way to go through life, which is something you have to be the best at everything, right? Because that's everywhere is the way to go through life, which is something you have to be the best at everything, right? Because that's not a fun way to live that you have to win every single thing. But you do have to try to be great and compete. You have to try to be in the in the next of it on every, every facet of who you are and what you do.

Yeah, I mean competition is, you know, I think that's what drives players, it drives coaches. And, you know, I think it drives even like athletic directors and general managers of pro teams. And I think the owners that have that competitive mindset with pro sports, those are the teams that are usually winning the most and having the most fun are the people that compete the most in their business for like a pro owner

and with their sports team. No, I love it. I mean, obviously, look, that's what the capitalist system is built around and it's why it's lifted more people out of poverty and created a higher standard of living than any other system. It's not without, it's flaws and certainly people take advantage of it. But if people are not competing, what are they doing? They're stagnating.

Yeah, I think that's what drives the great players that I've been around or competed against. Is there a will to win and their drive? And the Alan Iversons competing at his size and his weight and the way that Kobe Bryant would compete from quarter to quarter. And he would compete the same way on game 81 as he would game three and you know the competitors don't care how many people are in the crowd they it doesn't matter them whether it's a seventh game of a of a world championship or whether it's the first game of an exhibition season true competitors compete nightly. I love it, coach. Thanks so much. Ryan, thanks so much for having me on.

It's been awesome. Love reading your stuff. You've been your Cleveland Browns talk on your podcast was a listen the other day for our entire team. And so thanks for giving back to the leadership world as well. I love it, thanks man. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcasts, listening apps. It really helps and tell a friend.

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