How Structure Builds Discipline & Beats Willpower

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity. The show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week, we decode the tools, tactics, and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body, and performance span things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel, and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Dre, welcome to the podcast.

Dre Baldwin [00:00:52]:
I’m excited to be here. Nick, how are you?

Nick Urban [00:00:54]:
I’m doing pretty well, thanks. Let’s start off in a different note than I usually do. I’m. I’m curious about your background, and you got cut from varsity three years in a row. Most people focus on the comeback. I want to know about what that was like in the car ride going home for you. What was going through your head the third time that you got a rejection?

Dre Baldwin [00:01:20]:
Well, first of all, there was no car ride. What car? That was going home on the train and the bus. I’m from Philadelphia, so I went to public school in North Philadelphia, and I had to take the train and the bus home after I. Well, it was actually, you don’t find out. You get cut to the next day because you do the tryout, and then the next day the coach says, tomorrow I’m going to put up a list of the people who made it. So you sit in anticipation that day, and then the next day, everybody runs to go see who made it. And then I saw I wasn’t on the list. So then that’s at the beginning of the school day.

Dre Baldwin [00:01:48]:
So you go through the whole school day, and then you go home on the train, in the bus. So how I was feeling, let’s say the third time that I got cut, I knew that I probably had gotten cut because I didn’t play well the day before. So. So it was really just trying to reconcile in my mind, who am I now? This is at 16 years of age. Who am I now? Because it’s clear that basketball is not working.

Nick Urban [00:02:09]:
And so then where did you go after that?

Dre Baldwin [00:02:11]:
Well, I went home and kept going to school every day. And really, I was just in my mind trying to figure out, what can I be? Because at this point, I was a good enough student, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t have the desire to really apply myself as a student because what would that get me? Maybe into a better college, good grades, but then where is that leading? So I’m trying to think, I’m trying to project into the future. Who am I, let’s say, finish high school, go to college, then what? What’s going to be. My focus is I’m thinking maybe I can be an athlete. And basketball was the sport that I thought I had the best chance in, but I wasn’t getting the result. So then I maybe had a passing thought, maybe I could be in music in some way because my dad is a musician and maybe I could be a rapper. And I wasn’t really.

Dre Baldwin [00:02:52]:
Didn’t really have talent for rapping. Maybe I can produce music. No, not. Don’t really want to do that. So I was kind of just in limbo for probably about a week or two.

Nick Urban [00:03:01]:
And then you transitioned out of that limbo somehow. How’d that go?

Dre Baldwin [00:03:06]:
Well, there was a local team, since I didn’t make my high school team at the local recreation center in my neighborhood, they were having a team and they announced the tryouts for that team. So I figured, let me just try out for that team. I made that team and I played pretty well there. So that restored my confidence in my ability to play basketball. And it gave me a. A spark of an idea that maybe this basketball thing might still work out now that I had this low level success at the rec team in my neighborhood. And then the next year I tried out for the team and I actually made it so that even though I didn’t do anything, the one year I was on the team, I didn’t put up any stats and nothing impressive, it still gave me confidence because at least seeing it through led to some type of result. Being on the roster was something.

Nick Urban [00:03:50]:
What level of importance would you say that your internal state as a result of the volatility of the external has had on your career, your progress and like for other people who are in perhaps non athletic situations, since it can be hard to control the external, how’d you go about controlling the internal?

Dre Baldwin [00:04:10]:
Well, at that time I wasn’t thinking about it at all, Nick. It wasn’t something that I considered. Hey, I got to control my mindset because I didn’t make the team. I was really just for about that week, like I said, spiraling, trying to figure out what is going to be my identity because it’s not going to be sports now. If it was that it happened now, then I could go to the Internet and listen to somebody like Me or somebody like you talk about it. But back then, there was no Internet to go to to get this kind of information. So for me, it was really just trying to figure out what is the next thing. And once I found it, I just jumped into it, and the results led to the outcome.

Dre Baldwin [00:04:44]:
Now, looking back on it, I can see that mindset played a huge role in it, because if I was just going off of what happened externally, then I should have just given up on basketball maybe years before that even happened, because I didn’t have any tangible results. I didn’t have anything that said, this guy’s going somewhere in basketball. I was foolish enough to keep trying even though I had no tangible results, because I could feel like I was getting better, even though nothing in the outside world showed that I was indeed improving or that all the effort that I was putting into sports was going to lead anywhere. So it was actually the absence of information, but the overabundance of blind belief or foolish belief or foolish pride, if you want to call it that, kept me going and kept me trying, even though, again, logically, rationally, I should have stopped.

Nick Urban [00:05:32]:
What does mindset mean to you? That’s one of those terms that everyone’s heard of. They probably know that it’s an important thing to focus on. But then what that actually looks like what that. What even constitutes mindset?

Dre Baldwin [00:05:42]:
Well, it’s a combination of two words, mindset. So it’s how your mind is set, and that’s a literal interpretation of what it means. So what most people don’t understand about the mental side of things is that your subconscious mind controls most of your thinking. It controls most of your. Excuse me, your behaviors and your actions. And most of your thinking is subconscious, not controlling it. It actually is. So 85% of your thoughts are things that are.

Dre Baldwin [00:06:08]:
It’s like a train of a stream of consciousness going on in your mind at all times. Our conscious thoughts are, for example. People listening to this are the things that you’re processing in the moment when you hear it. So the questions you’re asking, Nick, you’re consciously processing. I’m consciously processing about half of what I’m saying here, but the other half. I’ve fought out these things before, so I’m talking about it. And mindset is about how you have programmed the subconscious mind. So when people understand this concept, the 85%, this reality.

Dre Baldwin [00:06:38]:
Excuse me, the 85% of your thoughts are subconscious, then when they really get it, their next question should be, okay, how do I get control of that 85% because clearly that’s playing a bigger role than what you’re consciously thinking. And most people think most of the stuff they do is based on their conscious thoughts. So they’re consciously deciding what to do, and they consciously think about their actions every single day. But you really don’t, because most of what we do is habitual, and it’s completely unconscious. Like tying your shoes, walking up steps, driving to work. If you drive the same route every day, or driving to the gym or wherever you go, it’s unconscious. The subconscious mind takes over because it realizes that this is going to be a task that happens all the time, which is automated, so you don’t have to use conscious thought processing to do it. So the subconscious mind, since it controls everything, we need to get control of it.

Dre Baldwin [00:07:23]:
Once we realize that, or if we realize is a better way of saying it, that there are certain aspects of our lives that are not the way we want them to be. So most people listening to this, if you’ve never considered what I just explained, I guarantee you it’s a high likelihood that there are some aspects of your life that are not the way you want them to be. Which means something going on in your subconscious mind that was planted there, not intentionally by you, clearly, because you didn’t even know about this. It’s there, and it’s leading to actions that lead to outcomes. So the first step in changing the mindset. And when we say mindset here, I’m talking about the subconscious mind. That’s literally what your mindset is, whatever’s in the subconscious. So the first step in changing that is getting conscious about the unconscious.

Dre Baldwin [00:08:07]:
So since we already know 85% of it, you don’t think about now, you can think about it. Now you know about it now you can think about it. When you think about it, you can do something about it. And there’s only three ways the subconscious mind’s programming is altered. Number one is repetition. Anything that you hear, say, or do over and over and over again, it takes hold in the subconscious. The subconscious mind is like a big locked door at the front of a castle. And anytime you give yourself the same thoughts or experiences over and over again, it’s like knocking on the door of the subconscious mind.

Dre Baldwin [00:08:37]:
And it does not answer on the first knot. But if you keep knocking over and over again, eventually it answers the door and it lets something in. That’s repetition. That’s. So if any of you think of all of us, said the ABCs a million times in kindergarten. Now we know words, we know sentences, we can understand language in English language or any other language. So that’s repetition. The second way is through immersion.

Dre Baldwin [00:08:59]:
Immersion is when you put yourself in an environment where there is no other option but to conduct yourself in a certain way. So anyone who’s been in the military, or if you know anything about the military, the military is an immersive environment. You don’t have options as to what you want to do, when you want to wake up, what you’re going to eat, when you’re going to eat, how you do things. It is dictated to you. And because you’re in that immersive environment, they get everyone on the same page operating in the same way and able to react to the same commands. Why? Because you’re immersed and you have no other choice. Sometimes people, coaches, they do things like retreats or events where it’s an immersive environment. You walk into certain events and the lights are out, the music is on, people are on stage dancing.

Dre Baldwin [00:09:40]:
That’s an immersive environment. They’re trying to immerse you in a certain energetic state. And in that energetic state, now your mind is open. Now they can insert what they want you to know. That leads right to the third one. The third way to program the subconscious is through emotionalization. So emotionalization is exactly as it sounds. When you are emotionally charged in any way, for any reason, anything that is inserted into you in that moment can permanently alter your mindset, even with only one exposure.

Dre Baldwin [00:10:08]:
So these three repetition, immersion, and emotionalization, they go from how much exposure you need to make a change to how little you need. So you need a lot. With repetition, you may have to say the same thing over and over again for a year before your subconscious mind accepts it. With immersion, a little bit less exposure, and with emotionalization, it can change your life in one exposure, depending on what it is. Ideally, if you want to program your subconscious, you want to use a combination of all three. So that’s a long answer to what mindset actually is, not really what it

Nick Urban [00:10:39]:
means, what it is in your experience. I know that you weren’t as aware of these concepts back then as you are now. Clearly. Were there any of those three that were more dominant, or were there some even weighting of each of them? How did that look in your experience?

Dre Baldwin [00:10:54]:
Great question. So the repetition was probably the first one, because as humans, we live. You’re human beings. So every day we’re doing something over and over and over again, so it becomes part of you. So I. I was playing basketball, going to the parks, going to the court, practicing, I was doing it so much that it became my identity that, hey, I’m going to go do something in basketball. Even though I hadn’t done anything yet, I was trying. So it was part of my identity because of the effort that I was putting in.

Dre Baldwin [00:11:21]:
So the effort became the identity. As far as the immersion, I couldn’t quite immerse myself in it because you still got to go to school every day, you got to go home, you got to do chores, you have all the other things going on. So I wasn’t able to immerse myself, even though I would have if I could. And then the emotionalization, well, there was the disappointment, the disappointment of not making that team. And then when I got the opportunity for the recreational team in my neighborhood, that was an opportunity for redemption. Now, I didn’t feel emotional about the possible redemption at the time because I was just trying to put the pieces back together mentally from failing to make the team again as a junior. But as I got some success over the course of that year playing on the local team, it slowly, it was a slow burn, redemption that I started to feel better about myself as a basketball player. Start to feel like, hey, well, if I can do this in this game with these guys, I can do this in the game on my school team.

Dre Baldwin [00:12:14]:
So it slowly started to build up the emotional confidence that I actually can perform with whoever out there. And I believed that before when I got cut from the team, I believed it. I believed it when I made the team. The difference is my senior year, when I tried out, I had some tangible proof that I could do it that nobody at my school knew about. Because mind you, this is at my local neighborhood team. I was playing well. Nobody at school saw these games. But the confidence that I got from playing at that local team, that energy came with me when I went to the high school tryout.

Dre Baldwin [00:12:49]:
And we should all remember, most communication is non verbal. So people pick up on your energy, not your words. So that energy, I think did play a role in how I performed and also how I was perceived.

Nick Urban [00:13:00]:
I can see two different approaches here where you want to put yourself in situations where you get easy, quick wins. And that boosts your confidence and makes for the repetitions easier. At the same time, I can see where you want to put yourself in uncomfortable situations where it stretches you and pushes you harder than you would be if you were just cruising on by, say, playing against like opponents with less experience or something. How do you reconcile those and is there a time and place for each of them?

Dre Baldwin [00:13:25]:
That’s a great question. And we’re talking about, let’s say using a sporting experience is a good one because in sports that’s, it’s literally what you do in that you do want to get some easy wins so you can build up momentum, you build up your reputation with yourself and with others and so that you can kind of try things out and you can make mistakes on low, in low stakes situations so that when you get to the higher stakes situations, those mistakes are eradicated so because they’ll cost you at the higher stakes level. For example, I was watching, I’ve been watching, I’ve already watched many times, but I’m watching again the career of Floyd Mayweather, the boxer. I don’t know if you follow boxing, anybody here who’s listening. And early in the boxer’s career, especially one who looks like they’re going to be promising, they start off their career fighting small fights in small venues. There’s only maybe four rounds or six round fights and they build up momentum by beating all these guys. Their first maybe 15, 20 fights are against guys who are journeymen and fighters who are not really that good. And the idea is beat all these guys up, you know, show off that you’re good and you start to build momentum and a reputation like this guy’s very good.

Dre Baldwin [00:14:29]:
And eventually somewhere around that 15 to 25th fight, you fight against somebody who’s actually formidable, somebody who’s actually pretty good, may not maybe a champion yet, but they’re pretty good and you are seasoned to the point that you’re ready to beat them. And that’s when we find out though, how far are you actually going to go? So your question was, what’s the balance between these? And it’s a, it’s a really a touch thing, it’s a feel thing. You have to feel or whoever is setting up the opportunities for you. Let’s say if my son decides he wants to play basketball, I may start him off planning his kids his age. But if I see he has some promise, I’ll take him when he’s no 5 years old, let’s go play with the 7 year olds and see how he does. And if he’s doing pretty well, then I’ll just keep him playing above his level so that as he gets older he’s already used to playing with people above his level and he’ll be looked at as higher level because he’s younger, but he’s playing well against these bigger guys. So it’s a matter of touch and deciding. When are you ready for that challenge? When are you ready to go up against something that is supposed to be based on objective measurement, supposed to be above your station, and are you willing to take on that challenge? And I think the person who has the confidence to take on that challenge, you will find a way to if your skills allow you to perform at that level.

Dre Baldwin [00:15:48]:
But there’s no black and white answer to that question. That always works.

Nick Urban [00:15:52]:
Yeah. If you were to go into a slump of some kind, again, this is easiest in the athletic arena. Would you then put yourself against opponents that are perhaps if you’re playing at 7 year olds, back down to 6 year olds instead of 5 year olds? How would you handle a slump?

Dre Baldwin [00:16:08]:
The way you handle a slump is not by plan, is by your training, by your structure, your organization. So as an athlete, if I’m having a slump and I’m missing a bunch of shots, even at the college or pro level, the most important thing I need to do is not go playing the game against a bummy player so I can feel good. It’s I need to get into the gym by myself and work on the skills that are failing me in the games. Because everything’s going to come back to the structure and the preparation, not the performance.

Nick Urban [00:16:33]:
That’s one of those things that the performance like under stakes, high pressure, it can be very different than when you’re training. Are there any tools or techniques you like to add into the training to try and simulate or perhaps exceed what the stakes will be when you’re actually performing and you need to perform so that it feels like second nature at that point?

Dre Baldwin [00:16:55]:
Absolutely. In the physical competition world, like sports is easy to do because you can literally do it. So when I was playing Nick, one of the things I would do is like this overspeed training or just over exertion training. So basketball, you know, is played on it. It’s played indoors in a gym with a flat surface. You’re running up and down a flat surface basketball court. So I would train, I live in Miami, so I would train in the oppressive heat and humidity of Miami summers, which I, I love it. Even now to this day, even walking around the suit, I still love when it’s hot like that, I just like heat.

Dre Baldwin [00:17:30]:
So I would train in that. So if I can run a couple miles in that and do sprints in that, then I go into an indoor air conditioned gym. Sprinting is easy or I would. Another thing I would do is always run up hills. Now in South Florida, anybody who doesn’t know the geography, there are no hills in south Florida. It’s all flat land. So the best you can do is get on like a Stairmaster or an incline treadmill. Anywhere where you’re kind of going uphill.

Dre Baldwin [00:17:55]:
I would get. They had these things called speed parachutes. I don’t know if you know what they are. Seen them before. So you strap it to your waist and then when you start running, the air resistance picks up the parachute and now it’s kind of fighting against you. And then you sprint. And if you can sprint with that on, then you take the parachute off. You feel like you’re running on air.

Dre Baldwin [00:18:11]:
It’s like it’s not even. You’re not even trying Or a weighted vest. Do your whole workout with a weighted vest. Sort of vest you put around your chest and it weighs like 40 pounds or 50 pounds. And you go do jumps and running and all your normal stuff with that vest on. Then you take it off, it’s like you just lost 50 pounds. So it’s like everything you’re doing is way easier. In basketball there was this thing called the heavy ball.

Dre Baldwin [00:18:34]:
Anybody who knows basketball, this was relatively new back in the maybe 20 years ago, but it’s common now. Heavy ball is like a. If you look at it, it’s just a normal basketball. But if you pick it up, you realize it weighs three times as much as a normal basketball. So when you bounce it, it’s harder to bounce the ball. It still bounces back up, but it’s harder. It takes more energy to bounce it. If you try to shoot it first time you shoot it, you’re probably going to come up short of the rim because it’s so heavy, you’re not used to it.

Dre Baldwin [00:18:58]:
You got to calibrate your energy, your strength. But if you play with that ball a lot, especially dribbling the ball and then you pick up a normal ball, the normal ball feels like a tennis ball in your hand because you have over trained for what you need. So what I always did as an athlete was prepare in environments that were. That exceeded what I was what was going to be asked to meet in the game. So then the game became easy.

Nick Urban [00:19:21]:
Yeah. So if we take those same concepts and I don’t know if they apply quite as cleanly to other settings. If you say go into the boardroom businesses, how do you apply these concepts?

Dre Baldwin [00:19:35]:
Easy. So let’s say somebody is going to give a sales presentation or they’re going into a sales meeting or they’re going to go make a presentation for some consulting deal they want to do And I have coaching clients who have been in these situations. They’re getting ready to go make an offer, and they want to offer make an offer that’s way bigger than what the current deal they have. I will role play. And we role play exactly what’s going to happen. I’ll be the prospect, and you be you. And we’re going to go through the script like we get. We already know what you need to say.

Dre Baldwin [00:20:03]:
And when you start talking, I’m going to say things. I’m going to interrupt, I’m going to interject. I’m going to give you answers you didn’t expect, and we’re going to see how you handle it. Do you fumble? Most of the time they do. All right. Okay. So now when that happens, then this. If they say this, then okay, this is how you handle this.

Dre Baldwin [00:20:18]:
If they interrupt in this way, you do this. You want to preempt them asking questions while you’re in the middle of your presentation. Then at the beginning, you say this so that they don’t ask any questions. So we get them ready ahead of time by role playing. In the sales world, a good amount of the job, most of the preparation and sales is role play is. What do you do when the customer says, I had to talk to my spouse? What do you do when they say, I got to talk to the accounting department? What do you do? Say, I got to send it to my cfo. What do you do when they say, send me some information, I’ll get back in touch with you. What do you do when they don’t answer the phone? What do you do when they don’t follow? They don’t show up for the appointment.

Dre Baldwin [00:20:51]:
So you had to be ready for all of these things. And in the professional world, I call this doing your homework. And I always tell professionals, you all thought that homework was over when you got out of school. No, it wasn’t. It just started. Because a professional is always prepared before the situation occurs. They do not wait till the situation occurs and figure it out. They’re prepared before it happens.

Dre Baldwin [00:21:11]:
That preparation is the homework.

Nick Urban [00:21:13]:
In those situations, you’re checking the box for repetition. It seems like emotionality, too, because if you’re going through something and an objection comes up and you don’t know how to handle it, you’re gonna have a rise of certain emotions that are more likely to cause you to change that behavior in a more effective way. Is that right?

Dre Baldwin [00:21:32]:
Yeah. So you get ready for that before it happens. So during the presentation, there should not be any emotional volatility for the, the expert, the professional, there could be emotional volatility for the prospect because you can’t control them. But for me, myself, when I’m in a sales presentation, there’s never any emotional volatility because there is nothing a prospect can say to me that I did not anticipate and I’m not prepared for. And as you get experience, of course you can’t prepare for every single thing they might say, but every time you experience one thing, you can say, okay, that one I didn’t think of. But now that I saw it, now I’m ready for it. And if anything that sounds like that ever happens again, now I’m ready to deal with that because now I saw it. So getting that experience matters as well.

Dre Baldwin [00:22:11]:
Those getting your reps in. As we said, you’ve built your more

Nick Urban [00:22:14]:
recent career on discipline as a system. And in my world, the health optimization world, we measure things like heart rate variability, nervous system state and recovery score to stuff like this. The data shows that people who are more regulated make better decisions and stick to their health goals longer. Do you think there’s a physical component to discipline that most people miss?

Dre Baldwin [00:22:39]:
Absolutely. I don’t think people miss it. I think people are just too lazy to apply it. And you probably know that in your own line of work. I don’t think most people, when you say physical component to discipline that, I mean, that could be a whole hour conversation in and of itself. I mean, you know, working in the health space, that any human being over the age of 18, they understand what’s better for them between a bag of potato chips and an apple. No one’s unclear on it. It’s just that some people just don’t have the discipline to put down the chips and pick up the apple.

Dre Baldwin [00:23:08]:
They don’t have a discipline to put down a beer and pick up a glass of water. Everyone understands it. What you do and what someone like myself does is not explain the concept of discipline to people. They all understand it. It’s helping them to be disciplined. The challenge for people is not the question of discipline itself, Nick. The challenge is how do we actually get to discipline? And what most people get wrong about discipline is that they think discipline is a personal attribute. They think discipline is a behavior.

Dre Baldwin [00:23:35]:
It is not. Discipline is a byproduct of structure. When you fit into a system, I’m sure you have a system, you have some type of structure that you help plug your. The people you help, you plug them into it. The same thing over here. We have a system, we have Structures. We plug people into the structure. When you follow the structure, I.

Dre Baldwin [00:23:52]:
E. Follow directions, because the structure is just a set of directions and instructions. You follow the instructions. The byproduct of you following instructions over and over and over again, the same things, the same way every time. It looks like discipline to the outside eye. They see you doing the same stuff over and over and over again and it’s producing a positive result. People look at you and say, that’s a disciplined person, but that’s not really what it is. All it is a person who is following instructions.

Dre Baldwin [00:24:19]:
And when you follow instructions, it looks like discipline. The challenge for many people is that they think the reason why I’m out of shape or the reason why I’m not saving money the way I want to, the reason I’m not spending time with my spouse or my kids, the reason I don’t go to the gym as much as I want, reason I haven’t launched my podcast or finished writing my book or finished my course, is because I’m not disciplined enough. That’s not true. The reason you haven’t done it is because you don’t have a structure that forces you to do it and removes any other options other than doing it. Remember what I talked about earlier? Immersion. When you’re in the military, you don’t have an option of what you’re going to do. At 7 o’, clock, they tell you what to do and you don’t have a choice. You either do it or you get kicked out.

Dre Baldwin [00:24:56]:
And you don’t want to get kicked out because it looks bad on your resume. So you have no options. The options are removed. The best structures remove options. And when people don’t have an option but to do thing A, guess what they do? They do thing A. And as long as thing A makes sense and it produces the right outcome, you have no choice but to be successful.

Nick Urban [00:25:16]:
I already know there’ll be certain people tuning into this and they’ll be thinking or perhaps even saying, that sounds interesting. I’m aware that there’s benefits to structure, but I’m a spontaneous person. I don’t like being constrained by all that structure. What would you say to them?

Dre Baldwin [00:25:31]:
Well, do you like having the outcome that you want? Because this is not about being constrained. It actually it is about being constrained. And at the same time it’s not. Because first of all, let’s be clear that human beings respond to incentives. And when you remove options for a person, they have no choice but to do something. Then they do that thing. Now, if you Believe, talking to the person who’s listening to this, if you believe that doing this thing is going to get you the outcome that you want to, would you like or not like if we created an environment where you had no choice but to do that thing? I think most people would say, okay, I’m with it. The challenge for many people is they want that, as you said, that spontaneity.

Dre Baldwin [00:26:10]:
They want that freedom to do whatever they want. Here’s the way they should look at that and flip it around is that when you follow a structure and you’re. That produces disciplined behavior, and it produces the outcomes that you want. From achieving those outcomes that you want, you now have the freedom to do other things with that, from that position of success. But you got to get to the position of success first. Then you can do the things that you want to do. So in sports, for example, my sport was basketball. I would get a lot of athletes coming to me.

Dre Baldwin [00:26:41]:
Back in, back in days, I used to put all these videos on YouTube, like training videos. So I would get a lot of players coming to me saying, dre, can you show me how to do moves? Like, at the time, it was Derrick Rose or Kyrie Irving or Kobe Bryant. Can you show me how to do the moves that these guys do? Because they would have these highlight videos doing these nice moves. And I would explain to the players, like, while, yes, I can show you how to do the move, I can break it down and show you all the components. What you all need to understand is that those players that you’re referring to, they mastered the fundamentals first and the highlights came second. The fundamentals are the cake. The highlights are the icing on the cake. And a lot of people look at a cake and all they see is the icing.

Dre Baldwin [00:27:19]:
Okay, that’s, that’s the, that’s the blue donut. That’s the chocolate covered donut. That’s the strawberry donut. They’re looking at the icing, but they don’t see the donut. The donut is what makes the business run. Not the icing. You get the icing from anywhere. You get the icing from the grocery store.

Dre Baldwin [00:27:31]:
But that donut formula, that’s what makes the business run. So you need to get the foundation, the footwork, the movements, the conditioning. The boring stuff is what you need to master. Once you master the fundamentals, then you can do the other stuff on top of it. So when you think about the top performers out there, you think about Tiger woods in golf, Serena Williams in tennis, Roger Federer, Djokovic Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan. These guys mastered the fundamentals of what they did. And because they mastered the fundamentals so well, on top of the fact that they had talent, of course, then they could do all the extra stuff, this highlight stuff that goes on top of the fundamentals. But if you only have the highlights without the fundamentals, then what you get.

Dre Baldwin [00:28:13]:
I don’t know how much you follow basketball, Nick, but back about 20 years ago, they used to have this thing called the and one mixtape. And these were guys who are like street ball basketball players. They played basketball in the street and it became really popular and they had an international tour. But these were guys who had all the highlights but no fundamentals. So their careers went to the street and it ended in the street. And N1 mixtape didn’t last but so long. When you have fundamentals though, you can play 20 years like Tom Brady. Kobe Bryant give you one more example.

Dre Baldwin [00:28:40]:
Speaking of Tom Brady, there was this documentary on Facebook. It’s about maybe eight years ago, 10 years ago. It was called Tom versus Time. And it was like this hour long documentary. I think it was a series. And one thing stood out to me in that documentary. It was right after Tom Brady had won another super bowl with the Patriots. And in the summertime he’s living in New England where he played.

Dre Baldwin [00:29:01]:
And at one point in the documentary he flies to California where he’s from, and he went to a field football field in California where there was this old guy who was a quarterback coach. He was like a quarterback technique coach. And Tom Brady’s in his gear throwing footballs and this old guy is watching him and giving him pointers on his technique. Now Tom, this is Tom Brady. He had just won his sixth super bowl in NFL. And at that point many people were saying this guy might be the best player in history of the NFL. He flew across the country and paid a coach to critique his technique on throwing a football. The thing that he did better than anybody in the world after he just won the championship.

Dre Baldwin [00:29:42]:
Again, that’s fundamentals. That’s mastering the fundamentals. It’s the extra stuff that everybody wants to get to without doing the base stuff from the beginning. Hopefully that answers your question.

Nick Urban [00:29:52]:
Yeah, that’s really important. I think it’s one of those things people generally recognize that they should be focusing on the fundamentals and then nailing the fundamentals and then moving on to the fancy flashy stuff. It’s not as exciting, but there’s also a lot to handle when it comes to the fundamentals across sports or Life. How do you go about choosing which of the fundamentals to focus on? Because that alone could be like a whole lifetime endeavor to master the fundamentals. Especially even if you’re at the very top of your game, you’re hiring a coach to help you with the very fundamentals.

Dre Baldwin [00:30:26]:
Where does that.

Nick Urban [00:30:27]:
Where does that transition and how do you prioritize where to focus?

Dre Baldwin [00:30:30]:
I’m going to challenge you on that question. Which space, which industry? Do you think there are too many fundamentals that people can’t keep it simple? I think it’s pretty simple.

Nick Urban [00:30:39]:
Yeah. I mean, I guess you can just always continue to abstract and simplify the fundamentals to a certain point. But then, like, if you want to actually go in and start making the changes, it’s like, say you talk about health and wellness, you want to focus on diet. Then it’s like, okay, yes, there’s these fundamentals, but then how to actually implement and change these fundamentals in my life.

Dre Baldwin [00:31:01]:
Okay, so let’s say diet, like what you put in your body. So this is your area of expertise. It’s not my area of expertise, but I am going to, as a layman, I’m going to lay out some fundamentals. You tell me if I got them right. Okay. Fundamentals. Water is the basis of what you should be drinking. Is that relatively true? Yes.

Dre Baldwin [00:31:20]:
Okay. Processed foods are not good for you. Is that true? True. Okay. Fruits and vegetables are better than candies and cakes. Is that true? Yes. And no matter how much you work out, if you eat terribly, it’s gonna mess up your body in the long run. Is that true?

Nick Urban [00:31:37]:
Yes.

Dre Baldwin [00:31:38]:
And if you want to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you are consuming. Is that true?

Nick Urban [00:31:44]:
Correct.

Dre Baldwin [00:31:45]:
Okay. So there’s the fundamentals right there. So if people would just follow that, and I’m sure there’s a lot of details that can go underneath each one of those pillars, but if people just followed that, they can get the result. Now, people, what most people need is not that understanding. Most people logically get everything that I just said.

Nick Urban [00:32:01]:
Yeah.

Dre Baldwin [00:32:01]:
What most people need is a structure. And to keep it. To be honest, you probably notice they need a foot in there behind that forces them to follow the structure, even when they want to not follow the structure. That’s the challenge that a lot of people have.

Nick Urban [00:32:17]:
Did you have that challenge around certain things? Obviously, when it came to basketball, that wasn’t a concern of yours because you were. And would you say you were intrinsically motivated? What motivated you specifically so that it didn’t you didn’t need like a foot in your behind.

Dre Baldwin [00:32:30]:
Well, I had to give credit to my upbringings. I come from a two parent household. My parents were not. They did some small business, no dabbling, independent things. But for the most part, their mindsets were they are nine to five workers, employees. And they showed up and did their job every single day because. And what, why that mattered to me, Nick, is because they didn’t have fun, exciting, sexy jobs like we have, all right? They weren’t doing this for a living. All right? They.

Dre Baldwin [00:32:58]:
My dad worked as a machinist, basically in a factory and my mom is in educational space. But I know I saw my dad at work, I know what kind of work he did. That was manual labor with his hands. Like the kind of work that you have a set of clothes that you just wear to work because it gets so greasy and dirty that you can’t get the grease out no matter how many times you wash it. My dad did that and did music on the side. My mom was in education and she would, I know she sometimes didn’t like her co workers because she would get on the phone when she got home and talk trash about her co workers, whoever she was talking to. So they didn’t have sexy jobs, but they went to work every day and they showed up every day. They never bragged about showing up every day and they never preached about showing up every day.

Dre Baldwin [00:33:36]:
But I saw them show up every day. And I, when I went to play basketball, my parents are not athletes. When I went to play basketball, all I did was use what I saw them doing. I was not getting the result in basketball, but I just kept showing up and kept practicing. Good thing about the sport that I chose is that you can practice by yourself. You don’t need any other people, you don’t need special equipment. So I just kept showing up and practicing and I could feel myself getting better. And then when I started to get tangible results, that local team in my neighborhood, then making the high school team, then actually playing in college, that was proof to me.

Dre Baldwin [00:34:07]:
That stamped in my mind at age 18 that if I just show up consistently at doing something, it can produce a result. So that was stamped before I finished and my brain hadn’t even finished developing. That was already stamped in my head. So I wouldn’t even call it motivation. I would say I understood without being able to explain it that if you follow a structure, it produces an outcome. Also, comparatively, the young men in my neighborhood who are my age bracket, they all played basketball too. Everybody played basketball where I’M from. I’m from the inner city.

Dre Baldwin [00:34:38]:
All the young men play basketball. By the time I was a senior in high school, a lot of the guys who had been playing when I was a freshman, they weren’t playing anymore because they didn’t have a structure. They just had some natural ability, some. And they had been playing since they were five years old. So they were just naturally better than me. But when I started practicing on purpose, I eventually passed them in much fewer years of effort because I had a structure, they didn’t have a structure. So that all of that combined led to me having this type of mindset. And again, this is before I even got to college.

Dre Baldwin [00:35:08]:
So when I got to college, I just applied the same thing. And now I have the resources. Now I have access to an indoor gym for the first time in my life at college. All right, now I can go and actually practice when I want to practice. I’m not limited by the weather. Again, I’m from Philadelphia, so you get a whole six months when you can’t really play outside. Now I have access to all of these things. All I did was put it in overdraft.

Nick Urban [00:35:29]:
What would you say are the secret ingredients of a discipline like structured execution framework? How do you go about building that? Is it the three we were talking about previously, or are there other things that you should know before going about trying to design a system?

Dre Baldwin [00:35:43]:
Number one thing is principle structure is followed because you are making your principles come to life through following a structure. So the order of operations is the principle comes first. Principles are your etched in stone, etched in concrete, never changing, never moving. What I’m about, this is your identity that never changes. And the challenge for many people is that they never thought about this. Therefore, they don’t have any hard principles. Therefore they’ll just go with whatever. And this is the reason why they can’t stick to a structure.

Dre Baldwin [00:36:15]:
So you have to have the principles first. What are you about? I’ll give you one of my principles. I stopped playing basketball professionally in 2015. I don’t know when this episode’s coming out, but it’s been at least 10 years. My identity is I will always be in the shape of an athlete. That if you. Most of you are seeing this or seeing me sitting here in this suit. If you saw me in the gym and I told you I was a pro athlete, you would believe me.

Dre Baldwin [00:36:37]:
I say that not to impress you, but to impress upon you. Actually, I’m trying to impress you a little bit, but really to impress upon you that the Way that I carry myself and the way that I look and what I’m doing in there, if somebody watched me, they would say, this guy looks like he’s an athlete. I don’t know who he is. It looks like he’s an athlete. And that’s because my principle is I’m always going to be in that shape. And because that’s my principle, what do I do? I follow a structure that reflects that because I know what it looks like, I know what is required. Now, I don’t work out three times a day like I did when I was an athlete. I work out once a day, but it’s still once a day.

Dre Baldwin [00:37:12]:
Now I. Could I go play in a pro game in any sport right now? No. But am I in better shape than a guy with a gym membership who just goes to the gym because he has a membership? Yes, I am. And I never lost. I never had this drop off because when I stopped playing, I kept working out. I didn’t have this three years where I didn’t work out and I got a belly and all of that. A lot of athletes I played with, that’s what happens to them because they don’t want to be in the gym anymore. But I never stopped.

Dre Baldwin [00:37:34]:
So the principle leads to applying the structure. The structure leads to the discipline behavior. Disciplined behavior produces confidence. When you’ve done the work, you believe in yourself. That confidence is an energetic signal that people can feel. That confidence leads to performance. The performance, when it’s good, leads to results. The results lead to rewards.

Dre Baldwin [00:37:54]:
That’s the process. And then you just repeat the whole thing over again. So your question was, how can somebody, your question was, how can somebody plug into a structure?

Nick Urban [00:38:03]:
Yeah. How do they go about designing the right structure? And if there’s any tips or tricks or secrets to making sure that it actually works for them and their lifestyle, two ways.

Dre Baldwin [00:38:11]:
One is the. The manual way, and the other is a shortcut. So I’ll give you the manual way first. The manual way is you deconstruct your own process and then you just turn around. You turn it, flip it around and do it. So in sports, for example, I saw by the time I got to age 18, graduating high school, going to college, and then playing in college, I saw that if I go to the court every day with my ball and I just practice stuff that I saw or things I know I need to get better at, or somebody I was playing with said, hey, you need to work on your left hand or you need to work on your layups, or you need to work on making shots off the dribble. I would just take that to heart and I would go practice it. And turns out they were right.

Dre Baldwin [00:38:48]:
Hey, I did. I saw somebody on TV doing that. I can’t do that. Let me work on that skill so I can at least be competent at that part of the game. I saw over the course of about four or five years that that actually works. So knowing this, all I did was deconstruct it. This is actually only a two step process. There’s a system system folks don’t have to be a whole page sop.

Dre Baldwin [00:39:08]:
A system can, doesn’t have to be a manual. A system can be two steps. Go to the court and practice, get better. That was the system. So when I knew that that system worked, all I did was I kept doing it. The challenge for most people is they get bored with the system. They want the results to come faster than they actually come and they’re not. And the reason why they get bored with the system is because they’re not seeing enough ROI from the effort to make it worth it.

Dre Baldwin [00:39:34]:
You have to have realistic expectations of how long is it going to take to get a return on this thing that you’re doing. So that’s another part that a lot of people, they have unrealistic expectations of how long it’s going to take to get the result. Therefore, when it’s been three weeks and they haven’t gotten a result yet, they’re like, well, hey we’re, I’m not rich yet. Why am I doing this business? Hey, I don’t have a six pack yet. Why am I going to the gym? You’ve been going to the gym for three days. You weren’t there for 10 years before that. Now you’re expecting this outcome to be so fast. So it’s having the realistic expectations, it’s having the right, the right idea of what’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen.

Dre Baldwin [00:40:06]:
And often it gets harder before it gets easier. That’s the manual process. And you could do this with anything. It could be a 20 step process or a two step process. Now that’s the manual. The shortcut is even simpler than that. It’s only a one step thing. Go find someone who has already figured out a system and plug into it and just do what they tell you to do.

Dre Baldwin [00:40:23]:
Simple as that.

Nick Urban [00:40:24]:
Yeah, I love that. That’s definitely a potential fast track. If you’re going the manual route, you’re going to inevitably come across people who have different ideas on what it is that you should do what you should work on, whether it’s your free throw, your left hand dribble, whatever it is. How do you decide which of that you’ll actually take in, which of that you’ll practice? Because even if you get a bunch of ideas, you have to prioritize your training time, where you’re going to allocate it, and not every piece of advice you hear is going to be helpful or accurate to your circumstance.

Dre Baldwin [00:40:56]:
Yeah, that’s true. Now what? There’s a couple things you can do. One is that you can test out anything you can dedicate. Let’s say I heard this, people say it at Google. Every employee has the freedom, actually the mandate, to take 10 to 20% of their work time and just try some project. That is a crazy idea. But it might work, right? So it helps keep everybody creative. So you can try it out, and if it fails, it fails.

Dre Baldwin [00:41:18]:
But at least now you have the activity knowledge of how it came about. Also in those spaces, a lot of great inventions come from failed side projects. This is how we got sticky notes. It was a failed side project. It was supposed to be something else. It became a sticky note. Slinky silly putty play. D’oh.

Dre Baldwin [00:41:36]:
All of these things were results of failed projects. They were trying to do one thing. They created something else by accident. So that’s one thing is you can try a little bit of anything and give it a little bit of time. Let’s see, does that work? Is that producing a result for me? No. Okay, then I’ll move on to the next thing. Another thing is that you can always cross reference people’s suggestions against those who already have the results. So when a basketball player would say to me when I was 16, Dre, you need to work on shooting off the dribble, you’re good at shooting if someone passes it to you, but off the dribble, you’re not good at shooting.

Dre Baldwin [00:42:08]:
So now how do I know if that guy’s advice is any good or is he just giving me bad advice? How do I know? Okay, well, let me turn on the tv. There’s Kobe Bryant. Is he making shots off the dribble? Yes, he is. Okay, that guy’s advice was good because Kobe Bryant is doing it, and Kobe Bryant’s pretty damn good. So that was good advice. Maybe I can’t do it like Kobe does it, but is that a necessary skill? Yes, it is, because not just Kobe, but a bunch of players, the guys who score all the points, they’re able to dribble and score at the same time. So if I’m going to be a guy who can score, I need to have that ability. He was right.

Dre Baldwin [00:42:39]:
So you can cross reference people’s suggestions, then you can test things out, and eventually, you’re going to run into other people who have already tested them out. So you can learn from other people’s experiences. You can get people who can give you better detail and explanation of how to do and why to do certain things. Because sometimes someone will have the directional information of what you need, but they can’t tell you specifically, step by step, how to do it. So, for example, when I was a teenager, some coach in a neighborhood or a player in a neighborhood might say to me, dre, you need to build your body up. You’re physically. You have some physical gifts, but physically, you’re weak. You’re physically weak.

Dre Baldwin [00:43:17]:
So somebody can bump you off the line or they can push you out. They can kind of push you out the way and muscle you out the way. They’re not as good as you, but they can use their physical strength to neutralize your skill. Now, how do I know if that’s true or not? Actually, I knew it was true because it was happening. But what do I do about it? How? What do I do? I don’t know how to lift weights. Nobody ever showed me how to lift weights. Nobody showed me how to go into a weight room. I didn’t have access to a weight room until I was in college.

Dre Baldwin [00:43:40]:
So then when I got to college, there was a guy who saw my physical talent, and he said, okay, and when the season was over, I’ll be in the gym playing against just regular students. And he would come in there and say, well, look, you’re not going to get any better playing against these guys. Which was. Right. That part I knew that he knew what he was talking about, because that was true. He said, come in here with us. This guy liked basketball, but he didn’t play basketball. He was a basketball observer, but he knew the game.

Dre Baldwin [00:44:04]:
So when he saw me, he saw the skill. He said, okay, this guy can play. Obviously. What does he need that I could possibly help with? All right, you need to be in here with us. And in here was the weight room. Him. And there was him and a few other guys. They would just hang in the weight room.

Dre Baldwin [00:44:18]:
They was lift weights. That’s all they did, lift weights. And he brought me in there and said, listen, y’ all need you to be in here with us. And he introduced me to other guys like, yo, this guy this kid, he can play. They were a few years older than me. He can play. He needs being here because he’s not gonna get better playing with those guys. And they introduced me to the weight room and they started showing me lifts.

Dre Baldwin [00:44:34]:
Do this. Do this. Lift over here. Do this one right here. Try this. And at first, I couldn’t even do a lot of the lifts, but I knew that I needed that because again, cross reference, I read Michael Jordan was getting beat up by the Detroit Pistons. He started lifting weights. He got better.

Dre Baldwin [00:44:48]:
He got a little bit stronger. Kobe Bryant, he put on weight. He put on muscle. He got better. Look at tv. Look at these players. Sorry. Do they have muscles? Yes.

Dre Baldwin [00:44:56]:
Look at me. Do I have muscles? Not like them. All right. Do they lift weights? Yes, they do. Do I lift weights? No, I don’t. Okay. So I need to. And these guys have skill too.

Dre Baldwin [00:45:03]:
So it’s not like you’re picking one or the other. It’s both. All right? This is something that I need. I need to build up my body. I remember being in the game and some. They put in some meathead guy who’s not even skilled, but he’s so much stronger than me that he kind of pushed me around and scored on me when he has no gain. But I couldn’t do anything about it because he was too strong. So I knew I needed to fill that gap.

Dre Baldwin [00:45:21]:
I just. I was the. As the saying goes, when the student is ready to teacher a Pierce, that’s. I was open minded to that. So when the guy said, come in the weight room, I said, okay, I know I need to be in there. I just don’t know what the hell to do. He showed me because I was open to it. So I don’t remember what your question was.

Nick Urban [00:45:37]:
Yeah, that’s great. So I’m now thinking that even if you don’t go the automatic, structured execution route, if you go the manual, it still seems like it’s important, regardless of whether it’s sports or it’s sales training or it’s learning a language, to be able to capture your repetition somehow, whether it’s through video, audio, and then be able to compare that to the standard that you’re trying to accomplish, whether it’s professional sports or a native speaker of a language or something. That way you can figure out what it is that you’re doing and how you’re stacking up against that. And then also how you should consider prioritizing any future training you’re doing towards that thing.

Dre Baldwin [00:46:18]:
Absolutely. And in sports, what we say Is that the eye in the sky doesn’t lie in the sky being the camera. All right? So no player can lie about what the film says. The film tells no lies. Now, people can tell lies, but film doesn’t lie. And in sports, you have film review these days. They didn’t do it when I was playing. But these days, every team records practice.

Dre Baldwin [00:46:40]:
They record every single minute of every practice. So even what you’re doing in practice can be seen, let alone the games. So you can review everything. And then anything that of course, is text based, it’s written down. Let’s say if this was a conversation, I’m sure you do coaching calls and sales calls through like, zoom, right online, things like that. So you can take that, you can get the transcript and you can go over the transcript. Let’s say if someone was working for you as a salesperson, you can go over to transcript line by line with them or the call itself and say, okay, right here. When the prospect said this, you responded this way.

Dre Baldwin [00:47:14]:
Well, here’s how you can respond better next time. You can say it this way or that way. And a great thing nowadays is with technology now, the artificial intelligence can speed this whole process up. It can transcribe pretty quickly. It can look through what you said. It can advise you, if you train it the right way, how you want to be advised and all of these things. So there’s no excuse for any of us these days, at least those who are tech savvy a little bit, to be able to take what we’re doing and get some honest, clean assessments of what we did and how we can get better at it. But it’s still in the.

Dre Baldwin [00:47:49]:
At the end, still comes down to the human being, first of all, having the initiative to want feedback. That’s an important thing that not everybody has. You have to want the feedback. Number two, you have to want honest feedback. Number three, you have to take the feedback as a critique of your performance, not a critique of you as a person. And number four, you have to apply the feedback that you were given. Now, all four of those are not a given for every human being. I have enough experience to know that’s another subject entirely.

Nick Urban [00:48:16]:
It’s like, in order to progress, you need to actually be comfortable getting that feedback. I have a friend, I’m down here in Baja, and he’s a professional pickleball player, and he watched my pickleball game and he was like, we need to work on your backhand. And I’m like, yeah, yeah, I already know that he’s like, we also need to work on your forehand. I’m like, oh, wow, that’s like the whole game. Okay. And at first I was a little offended by it, but then I’m like, wait, but I’m not going to improve if I just. I’m offended by it and don’t actually entertain what he’s saying. And of course he knows he knows the game much better than I do.

Nick Urban [00:48:44]:
So I’m going to take this into account. I’m going to like, listen to what he has to say. For people who have a hard time with that, it will be a big hindrance to their ability to master whatever their chosen activity is. How do you recommend they get comfortable with that? Is there anything they can do?

Dre Baldwin [00:49:01]:
Absolutely. It’s a mindset shift. And when you get the mindset shift in the right place, then all the behaviors become easy. So the mindset shift is this. Is that your friend, when he saw your pickleball and said something about your backhand and your forehand, he wasn’t talking about Nick, he was talking about your backhand and your forehand. He was talking about your performance. He wasn’t talking about you. And the challenge for many people is that when they receive feedback, honest, direct, sharp feedback, they take it as something, somebody talking about them, the person.

Dre Baldwin [00:49:30]:
The feedback is not about you. The feedback is about what you did. And if you can separate the two, then it’s easy to take the feedback. So if I go this conversation right here, let’s say I’d say I take this conversation and when this comes out and I show it to somebody who’s trying to help me sharpen my message and I say, go through this and critique it. Tell me where I talk too much. Tell me where I gave too much explanation. Tell me where I was not clean enough. Tell me where I was over talking and they give me feedback and they send me back a 10 page document with all the places I’ve messed up.

Dre Baldwin [00:50:01]:
I don’t take that as a personal attack of me. I take it as I’m glad they gave me this because the next conversation I have, I’ll be that much better. Because my ego is not attached to what I do. My ego is attached to. Did I follow the process? Did I uphold the standard? That’s my job is to uphold the standard, which is I have a process. I follow the process. Now if I show this to somebody and they say, well, this, you could have did this better, this better, this better, and 20 things, they tell me I did better. Nick, what I say Is okay, I followed the process, and I got that, and I got this feedback, and I trust this person’s feedback.

Dre Baldwin [00:50:36]:
So what does that mean? Doesn’t mean something’s wrong with Dre. It means, let me update my process. Now, the next time I follow the process, the process has improved, so my performance will improve. All I’m committed to is following the process, not the outcome necessarily. For example, there’s a gentleman that is a coaching client of mine. He’s a single guy living in Miami, and he. One of the challenges we’ve been working on is him going out and talking to girls in real life. And one of the things he talked about or we’ve talked about and worked on for months is him thinking himself out of opportunities.

Dre Baldwin [00:51:12]:
So he’s on a train, he sees a girl, and he starts coming up this narrative in his mind about whether she has a boyfriend or not, she’s gonna be interested or not. And by the time he decides what to do, she got off the train, he didn’t miss the opportunity. And then his other time, he’s gotten better to where he’ll go cold. Approach a girl, and she’s interested, she’s not interested. And now he can just move on to the next thing. And he doesn’t take it as a personal attack of his ego or anything wrong with him. She just wasn’t interested, move on to the next one. And one thing that I’ve ingrained into his mind, he has to keep with him, is that your goal is not, is the girl going to give you her phone number or go on a date with you? Because you don’t control who.

Dre Baldwin [00:51:46]:
You don’t know who she is. You don’t know her situation. Your goal is you see a girl you’re interested in within three seconds. You approach, you ask, as I. We call it, ask for the sale, I. E. Ask for a phone number or a date, because you got to ask. If you don’t ask, you can’t get it.

Dre Baldwin [00:52:00]:
And that’s your process. That’s the process. See? Approach, ask. That’s it. That’s all you are held accountable to. What she says, what she does, how she responds. You don’t control. All you control is execution of the process.

Dre Baldwin [00:52:13]:
As long as you executed the process, you’re good. If you don’t execute the process, that’s a mistake. And it’s the same thing with me is that I look, I separate me from the process. All I do is follow the process. If the process isn’t working, we fix the process.

Nick Urban [00:52:27]:
That’s it is that related to what I saw in your Instagram bio, which you call the Execution Reliability Index. Can you break down that system?

Dre Baldwin [00:52:36]:
Sure. Execution reliability is. It encompasses everything that I’ve been about from the very beginning, which is we want to create a standard and a measure for execution. Not just execute, be disciplined. We’ve been spending a lot of time here talking about discipline and mindset, and those are all necessary. The challenge with those is that they are intangible and they’re very malleable terms. People can define these in very different ways. So Execution Reliability Index takes the concepts of discipline, Mindset is a piece of it, of course, and basically doing your job.

Dre Baldwin [00:53:08]:
And we turn it into a metric, something that can be measured and counted and you can be held accountable against. So now when we say who is executing, who is upholding the standard, who’s doing their job, now we can give it to you in black and white. So now we know where you’re at, we know where you are slipping. We know what needs to be reinforced and fixed, and we can see improvement or regression over time. So we turn it into a metric. And this is something that businesses can use and people who like to see things in black and white can use. And any human being who wants to understand that they’re getting better in a measurable, tangible way can understand more than, hey, I feel better, I feel more confident, I feel more disciplined. Those matter, but you can’t count them.

Dre Baldwin [00:53:50]:
And things that we can’t measure, we can’t manage.

Nick Urban [00:53:52]:
So to go back to the example of your client approaching women, how would he use that system?

Dre Baldwin [00:53:58]:
Simple. It’s before. Let’s look at the before and after. So before he would see a girl he’s interested in and he would start thinking about it. And at some, on some levels, he would be a little bit self reporting. So how long did it take you between the time you saw the girl and you had the thought and you actually did anything? How much time passed so before? It might be four minutes. He’s thinking about it back and forth. Is she looking at me? I’m not sure.

Dre Baldwin [00:54:22]:
No. Should I do it? Should I not do it? No. Does she think my shoe is going to look funny? It was four minutes. Now we got it down to 30 seconds. All right, that’s a measurable change. Did you approach yes or no? All right, that is a measurable change. What did you say? At what point did she indicate she was either interested in which you stepped forward and you asked for the sale, or she indicated she wasn’t interested. She’s giving you short answers.

Dre Baldwin [00:54:46]:
She’s looking back at her phone. She’s looking away. She doesn’t really want to talk to you. How long after you saw the signal did you exit the situation and say, okay, she’s clearly not interested. Let me move on to the next one. So it’s these measurements of how long to action. How much time are you spending hemming? Hauling? No, thinking about it. What did you do when you approached? Because we know it is a simple process.

Dre Baldwin [00:55:06]:
You introduce, you have a little bit of small talk, you ask for the sale. How long after that did you linger in the situation? If you approach a girl and she says she has a boyfriend, do you say, hey, well, if you ever break up, hey, maybe give me your Instagram. All right, don’t do that. All right. It’s exit the situation. So it’s breaking actions down into measurable steps and then measuring improvement over time between where you were, where you started and where we want to take you.

Nick Urban [00:55:33]:
Nice. I’m glad that you’re actually adding a system to that. Unsurprisingly, knowing you, it makes sense you would add a system to that.

Dre Baldwin [00:55:39]:
Yeah. And it’s necessary because it makes it easier for people to follow when it’s systematized, rather than it’s just feelings based. The feelings based part can work, but when it’s systematized, it makes it easier for someone to know step one, step two, step three. That also helps people get out of their heads when they have a system. And it also makes it easier to get the ideas and the concepts out to more people because everybody can count, Everybody can follow instructions.

Nick Urban [00:56:06]:
We’ve been doing it our whole lives around systems. You also have something I came across called the third day. What is the third day?

Dre Baldwin [00:56:13]:
The third day is a branch in the execution Reliability index, or eri. And the third day is the showing up consistently problem solver. So the third day is this concept that I came up with in my basketball days. It was probably about 2014, and I used to go to the same gym every day and practice. And I used to put these videos on YouTube not being the same gym all the time. And if you watch somebody playing basketball in the gym, you can hear the balls bouncing in the gym. But in my gym, you would only hear my basketball. So anybody who knows basketball knows that a lot of times when you’re in the gym practicing, there’s a bunch of other kids there because everybody likes playing basketball.

Dre Baldwin [00:56:54]:
So the kids will see me in this gym by myself and say, dre how do you have a gym to yourself? Because that’s not a normal thing. Everybody’s at the basketball court. They said, do you have a. Do you own a gym in your house? Do you rent out the gym? How are you getting to this gym that nobody else is in? Why are you just having that gym to yourself? And I explained to them that the reason I had the gym to myself is not because I don’t rent out the gym. It’s not blocked off from anyone else. This is not some exclusive facility. There’s actually a city owned facility. It’s not far from where I’m at right now.

Dre Baldwin [00:57:21]:
The membership to this gym is literally $10 a month, is owned by the city of Miami. So there’s not like Equinox, all right? It’s $10. Why is nobody else in the gym? Because of the third day. All right? The first day anybody does anything, everybody’s all excited. It’s like the welcome party. Everybody’s all excited. Everyone’s doing everything they’re supposed to do at the highest possible level. Second day, people are still doing their jobs, but there’s about a 10 to 15% drop off from the first day excitement.

Dre Baldwin [00:57:45]:
And by the third day, this is metaphorical, sometimes it’s literal. By the third day, the only people who are showing up are the people who are really dedicated to the job because the new car smell has worn off. The welcome party is over. The novelty of the situation is gone, and the only thing that’s left is the actual work. The third day is any situation or time period or realization. When a person understands, they come to the realization that, okay, this thing that I signed up for, these kids, that I had this job, that I took this career, that I started this business, that I got into this program that I signed up for, okay? It’s not all fun and games. It’s not all as fun as it looked in the brochure or on the website. There’s some actual work that has to be done here.

Dre Baldwin [00:58:27]:
And that’s the third day when you realize that there’s work to be done. And the third day is really not about the occurrence, Nick. It’s about the decision of what are you going to do now that you understand that there is some real work to be done here. Are you going to show up and do that work or are you going to opt out of the gig? And that third, getting past that third day is a big part of, of execution. Because again, execution is easy on the first and second days is when you get to that Third day, and you realize, oh, this is not as easy as I thought. I mean, you work with people in health, so if you do, you do things like telling people what they can and can’t eat.

Nick Urban [00:59:03]:
No one wants to hear it.

Dre Baldwin [00:59:05]:
Yes, but do you do that, though? I’m asking. Okay, so on the first day is exciting because they’re thinking about all the results they’re going to get. And by the third day, metaphorically, this might be literally the third day. Sometimes. Sometimes it takes a month. But they’re like, damn, I can’t eat that anymore. I got to eat this again. I can’t have that again.

Dre Baldwin [00:59:24]:
And that’s when they hit the wall. And it’s a question of, are you going to go over that wall, through that wall, or are you going to let the wall knock you down? That’s the third day. It’s the same thing in anything in life. You’re going to hit that point where you get to make a decision. That’s the third day, is the decision that separates the pros from the amateurs. Do I keep going and make my way through this, or am I going to let this stop me? And what happens when you get past the third day is you get to what we call the fourth day. And the fourth day is when you’re still doing work. It’s just as hard as it was yesterday, but it feels easy now because you’ve raised yourself to a different level to where that.

Dre Baldwin [01:00:00]:
That is not hard anymore because you’ve been through it.

Nick Urban [01:00:02]:
Although it might not be relevant in basketball. When did Dre Baldwin, the discipline guy, not show up?

Dre Baldwin [01:00:11]:
When did I not show up? Something that I. I’m trying to think. Something that I signed up for that I was supposed to do, and I just didn’t do my job. I honestly, I don’t. I can’t think of a time I’ve always shown up and I tell people this, that even after I stop playing sports, Nick. I go to the gym every day. I work out every day, whether I’m running outside or I’m at. At the facility.

Dre Baldwin [01:00:35]:
If I don’t work out is because I literally cannot get out of the bed. And in the last five, six years, I got sick once, around 20, 21. I missed a day or two. And last year, I was sick for about two days, and I missed two days. And other than that, I have not. I don’t miss days. I don’t miss workouts. And it’s not.

Dre Baldwin [01:00:56]:
It’s some motivational thing. It’s identity. I do not miss Workouts. So have I ever not shown up? No.

Nick Urban [01:01:02]:
We come full circle to understanding identifying your. Ironically, identity is an important first step through which everything else connects after.

Dre Baldwin [01:01:12]:
What was the question?

Nick Urban [01:01:13]:
No, it’s just a observation that, like, if you don’t have your identity set, then it’s going to make it everything under, underneath that much harder to maintain.

Dre Baldwin [01:01:20]:
Yes, well, everything underneath that won’t maintain if it’s not connected to identity. Because identity is the foundation. Identity is the foundation of this is who I am and this is what I’m about. And every action you take is based on who you see yourself as. Who you see when you look in the mirror determines how you think. It determines what you do. It determines what you do not do. It determines what you accept and what you do not accept.

Dre Baldwin [01:01:44]:
And when your identity is set and collapse into singularity, then decisions are easy. Actions flow naturally. And everyone around you can feel what you’re about. They don’t. You don’t have to say what you’re about. They can feel what you’re about because your behavior makes it clear. So you look at somebody like, who’s your favorite athlete?

Nick Urban [01:02:08]:
Michael Jordan.

Dre Baldwin [01:02:09]:
Perfect Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan had a collapsed, singular identity. His identity. He told you what it was. If you watch that, I’m sure you watched the last dance documentary that came out a few years ago on Netflix, espn. Michael Jordan said my thing. A lot of people thought Michael Jordan’s thing was, this guy’s just so good at basketball and he is pretty damn good. But Michael Jordan’s thing was, I’m a competitor.

Dre Baldwin [01:02:31]:
I am just the super competitive person even to this day. Now he’s doing nascar, right? He’s the owner of a NASCAR team. His thing is I just want to compete and I just want to win competition. Basketball just happened to be what his physical gifts lended him to. But competition was his thing. He would have been competing in something else if it wasn’t basketball. So that competition was I dominate on the court because that’s his chosen job every night, every day. As a matter of fact, he did it in practice and the games.

Dre Baldwin [01:02:58]:
I just dominate and I beat everybody because I want to compete. That was his thing. You didn’t see Michael Jordan sitting out games for rest as you see players doing these days, or load management. He was managing a load the whole year and he never needed to sit out. Load management was what you why you go to work, not why you don’t go to work. It was opposite of what the players are doing these days. And Michael Jordan’s whole thing was competition. And because that was his identity, he was the guy that everybody else orbited around, even his opponents orbited around him because of the way that his identity was collapsed into one thing.

Dre Baldwin [01:03:29]:
Now compare that to a lot of players that you see today. And let’s use basketball. Since we said Michael Jordan, a lot of players today don’t have a singular identity. They have these multiple identities. They got this multiple personality disorder, kind of in a tongue in cheek type of way. Because they’re not just a basketball player. You’re also a podcaster and you got a clothing line and you got a record label and you’re building a brand and you want to be a social media influencer and you want to tell people who to vote for in the election cycles. They’re doing all these different things besides playing basketball.

Dre Baldwin [01:04:00]:
Because interestingly enough, a lot of athletes today are trying to do what Michael Jordan did, but they’re doing it backwards. Michael Jordan just played basketball and dominated on the court. And as a result, he got a lot of endorsements, he had a lot of brand deals, and he made a bunch of money off the court. To this day, he still makes a bunch of money off the court. A lot of players today, they want to do that. They want to get brand deals, endorsements and make money off the court. But they’re pursuing it. They’re trying to do it.

Dre Baldwin [01:04:26]:
If you read Michael Jordan’s books, and I’ve read every book Michael Jordan ever wrote, he wrote several and he had several written about him. I read all of them. And Michael Jordan said when he first became really popular, after the sneakers took off, he started to get a lot of opportunities. A lot of people were calling him, they wanted to do deals with him and do business with him and have him endorse their stuff. And he had a hard rule that I am interested, but anything that interferes with my preparation of my performance in basketball, I’m not doing it. So famously, summer of 1995, he was doing the Space Jam movie, the original Space Jam. And some people know the story. I think it was in that documentary.

Dre Baldwin [01:05:05]:
He told Warner Brothers that I will still do the movie, but I must be able to train. You cannot interfere with my training because my main job is not making movies. My main job is basketball. So they built a gym, an NBA quality facility on the set in Hollywood where he was doing the movie so he could train in between filming takes. So anytime he wasn’t filming, he was on the court or. And they built a weight room and everything. And that’s where he. What he would do.

Dre Baldwin [01:05:34]:
They didn’t need him on the set. He was in that gym. Because he told him, if y’ all don’t. If y’ all get in the way of my training, I’m cancel. I’ll give you money back. I’m not doing a movie. And that’s how he was able to in those next three years. He won the next three championships because he had a collapsed identity of this is the main thing that I do.

Dre Baldwin [01:05:49]:
And because he was so good at the main thing, all the other stuff came to him instead of him going to it. The challenge for people today, not just athletes, but all people, is that they’re trying to be too many things at the same time. You’re this on Monday, you’re this thing on Tuesday, or this thing on Wednesday. You look at somebody’s resume, ask them, what do they do for a winner? Who are you? And they say, well, I’m this. And this and this and this and this. The challenge with this is human beings have a limitation in that you can only focus on one thing at a time. You cannot focus on two things at a time. As the proverb goes, you chase two rabbits, you cast neither one.

Dre Baldwin [01:06:22]:
And focus is a force multiplier. The longer and stronger you focus on anything, the better you get at the that thing. And as soon as you divide your focus, you’re not giving your best to anything. And if you’re not giving your best, you cannot expect to get your best. That’s just mathematically impossible. So using Michael Jordan is a perfect example here. And there are many other people when your identity has collapsed into one specific thing, you tend to do pretty damn well at that thing. Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Tiger Woods.

Dre Baldwin [01:06:51]:
There are many people when they are only focused on one thing, they do great at that thing. And actually, since I brought up Tiger, he’s a great example of when it falls apart. Because I’m talking about even when he was playing, forget about the stuff that’s happening now. He’s not really that active anymore. But when he was playing, he had some stuff going on on the side that we didn’t know about. When he realized that we realized that he had other stuff going on besides the golf, his whole identity collapsed. Because now he knew that everybody else knew that his identity was not just I dominate golf. It looked like he was doing a bunch of other things besides that.

Dre Baldwin [01:07:25]:
And because it was exposed now, he didn’t have the same aura. And all of a sudden, all the other golfers got better overnight. They weren’t scared of him anymore because his aura was pulsed, because the identity collapsed.

Nick Urban [01:07:36]:
Well, Dre, we can keep going for a while. We got a lot to cover, and it’s been a pleasure hosting you so far. If people want to connect with you, to check out your work, your website, all your TED Talks and all your books. Is it true that you’ve written 43 books?

Dre Baldwin [01:07:51]:
That’s true.

Nick Urban [01:07:52]:
Do you have a place that you want to send them? And if they were to start with one of your books, which would you choose?

Dre Baldwin [01:07:57]:
They would start with one. They can get that book. Well, the third day, we didn’t mention that was a book, but the third day is a book. You can get the book for free. As a matter of fact, all we ask is that you cover the shipping. We will send you a physical copy. Just go to third daybook.com that’s spelled out the word third day, book dot com. The book is free.

Dre Baldwin [01:08:15]:
Just cover the shipping. Other than that, you can find me on any of the social platforms and my main website is work on your game.

Nick Urban [01:08:24]:
And if people have made it this far, any final takeaway messages for them.

Dre Baldwin [01:08:27]:
One thing that I would suggest to everybody who’s listening here today and the world that we’re in now, where we have these devices within arm’s reach literally 24 hours a day, is you need to choose and decide on your singular identity. What is the one thing that you are about above and beyond everything else? And anything else you do doesn’t mean you can only do one thing. But anything else you do must fit under that umbrella of one thing. Collapse your identity into a singular focus and make everything get aligned with that. And that is where you’ll find your strongest power.

Nick Urban [01:08:59]:
Dre Baldwin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It’s been such a blast chatting with you around all these different topics that fall under the structure, execution, mindset, personal excellence, and other umbrellas.

Dre Baldwin [01:09:13]:
Nick, I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you for sharing your platform.

Nick Urban [01:09:16]:
Thanks for tuning in to high performance solutions. Longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their health span. You can find all the episodes, show notes and resources mentioned@outlier.com until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.