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From time to time I am contacted by someone who says they have an interesting and thought provoking guest who would be perfect for Unstoppable Mindset. Since I am of the opinion that everyone has a story within themselves worth telling I always work to learn more about the guest. Such was the case when I was contacted about our guest this time, Dre Baldwin. Dre and I had an initial conversation and I invited him to appear as a guest. I must say that he more than exceeded my expectations. Dre grew up in Philadelphia. He wanted to do something with sports and tried out various options until he discovered Basketball in high school. While he wasn’t considered overly exceptional and only played one year in high school he realized that Basketball was the sport for him. Dre went to Penn State and played all four of his college years. Again, while he played consistently and reasonably well, he was not noticed and after college he was not signed to a professional team. He worked at a couple of jobs for a time and then decided to try to get noticed for basketball by going to a camp where he could be seen by scouts and where he could prove he had the talent to make basketball a profession. As he will tell us, eventually he did get a contract to play professionally. Other things happened along the way as you will hear. Dre discovered Youtube and the internet and began posting basketball tips which became popular. While playing basketball professionally he also started blogging, posting videos and eventually he began selling video basketball lessons online. His internet business grew and by 2015 after playing basketball he decided to leave the sport and open his own business called, Work On Your Game Inc. His business has given him the time to author 35 books, deliver 4 TDX talks, create thousands of videos and coach others. Dre and I talk about such concepts as discipline, mindset and the value of consistency. Our conversation will provide many useful insights and ideas you and all of us can use. About the Guest: As CEO and Founder of Work On Your Game Inc., Dre Baldwin has given 4 TEDxTalks on Discipline, Confidence, Mental Toughness & Personal Initiative and has authored 35 books. He has appeared in national campaigns with Nike, Finish Line, Wendy's, Gatorade, Buick, Wilson Sports, STASH Investments and DIME magazine. Dre has published over 8,000 videos to 142,000+ subscribers, his content being consumed over 103 million times. Dre's daily Work On Your Game MasterClass has amassed over 2,900 episodes and more than 7.3 million downloads. In just 5 years, Dre went from the end of his high school team's bench to a 9-year professional basketball career. He played in 8 countries including Lithuania, Germany, Montenegro, Slovakia and Germany. Dre invented his Work On Your Game framework as a "roadmap in reverse" to help professionals with High Performance, Consistency and Results. A Philadelphia native, Dre lives in Miami. Ways to connect with Dre: http://Instagram.com/DreBaldwin http://YouTube.com/Dreupt https://www.facebook.com/WorkOnYourGameUniversity http://LinkedIn.com/in/DreAllDay http://X.com/DreAllDay http://TikTok.com/WorkOnYourGame About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children’s Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association’s 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us. Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Hi again. Welcome to another edition of unstoppable mindset. Our goal in unstoppable mindset is to show you that, in fact, you are most likely more unstoppable than you think you are, at least that's the goal. Is to try to get people to believe that it's been fun talking to a lot of people about that, talking to people about the fact that they show that they're more unstoppable than they thought they were. And a lot of people tend to to stay that right out. Our guest today is a first for me. I've not ever talked to a professional basketball player live on unstoppable mindset. And our guest Dre Baldwin was a professional basketball player for a number of years, and I'm sure we're going to get into that, along with so many other things to talk about what he does today, because he's not doing basketball as such today. He's got a company called work on your game, Inc, and I'm sure that that relates back to basketball in some way. So we'll get to it. But anyway, Dre, I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset, and thank you for taking the time to be here. Dre Baldwin ** 02:28 Oh, thank you, Michael. And you can call me Dre, yes. Dre, yeah. So okay, I I appreciate, I appreciate you having me on. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Well, we're Michael Hingson ** 02:38 glad that you're here and all that. Why don't we start by you maybe telling us about the early Dre growing up and some of those kinds of things. Dre Baldwin ** 02:46 Sure, come from the city of Philadelphia, PA and now live in South Florida, but always played sports growing up, dabbled in a little bit of everything that was available. So went to my mom, put me in a little tennis camp once for a week or two, played a little football, touch football in the driveways. Played baseball for a couple years on an organized level, but didn't really find my find my groove in any sports. I got around to basketball, which is around age 14, which is pretty late to start playing a sport, if you're trying to go somewhere in it. That was my situation. No barely played in high school. Only played one year, and then it led to, I'm sure we'll get into what happened after that. But for the most part, as a youth, I was really into athletics and just figuring out what I could do athletically. So no, of course, you know, in the the street, you grow up on foot races, two hand, touch football, etc, things like that. But I figured that my meaning was going to be somewhere towards using my body in some way. I didn't know how, but that's what I figured I would do. Michael Hingson ** 03:47 I would presume that along all the time you were in Philadelphia, you never did encounter Rocky Balboa running up the steps of Liberty Hall, or any of those things. Dre Baldwin ** 03:57 Oh, that's, that's the art museum, the Philadelphia Art Museum. Oh, the art museum. Yeah, Rocky, running up the steps. I never did that. The only reason, no, go ahead, I was saying, the only reason I never did it is because where I grew up is kind of far from the art museum. Is big city, but had I moved near the art museum, then, yeah, I would have ran up steps as exercise. I just, I just, it just wasn't in proximity to me. So that's the only reason I didn't do Michael Hingson ** 04:21 it, well, that's okay. Well, so what did you do after high school? Well, Dre Baldwin ** 04:25 I wanted to go to college. I knew I was going to go to college period, even if it weren't for sports. I figured college was Well, first of all, I didn't know what I want to do with my life. Yet at age 18, and the small Inkling I had that I could be a professional athlete at this point, I got that idea around age 16. I wasn't not like I was good enough to be LeBron James or Kobe Bryant, who were no so good. They skipped college and went straight to playing at the program. I wasn't that good. So if I was going to play pro, I needed four more years of seasoning, which meant I needed to go to college. So just on that level alone, I knew I wanted to go. So, but because of my unimpressive high school career, if you want to call it a career, no one was recruiting me to come play in college. So whatever college I went to would not be on the basis of sports, it just be on the basis of I'm here, and let's see if I can get on the basketball team as an unknown, unverified person. So that's what I did. I walked on at a college that happened to be a division three college. Was the third tier of college sports. Most of your pro players are sourced from the Division One level. And I did go there, and I was able to get on the basketball team. Played four years of college basketball at the Division Three level, yet, and still Michael at that level, nobody at the pro level is really looking for pros from the Division Three level. Because, again, who cares about division three players? They can pull from the Division One ranks Division Three guys. So that was my situation. Graduated from college having played, but still, at that point, nobody was looking for me to come play at the Michael Hingson ** 05:57 pro level. What did you get your degree in? I have a degree from Dre Baldwin ** 06:01 Penn State University in business with a focus in management and marketing. Michael Hingson ** 06:05 That explains where you went later, but and kind of how you ended up, yeah, sort of, and Penn State so you were a Nittany Lion, huh? Dre Baldwin ** 06:17 Technically, yeah, we never talk about, we never say that. But yes, Michael Hingson ** 06:21 well, yeah, whatever, yeah, Penn State, yeah, well, that's, I didn't know that they were division three in basketball. They certainly aren't in football. But okay, and they have more Dre Baldwin ** 06:33 than one no, they have more than one campus. So, well, that's true, yeah. So I went to my degree, so just so people understand when Penn State has 23 campuses. So I started at Penn State Abington, which is a division three sports school, and I transferred to Penn State Altoona, which is also a division three sports school. At the time, Abington was not full fledged d3 it is now Altoona was so Altoona was the second highest level inside the entire Penn State system, which was a four years of sports school at the time. At the time, there were only two schools in the whole system where you could play four years. It was the main campus with the football team, and it was out tuning. Nowadays, there are several others who you can play four years of sports. But back then, for many other campuses, you can only play two years. And the other piece is, when you graduate from Penn State, any campus your degree is still Penn State, regardless of which campus you graduated from, I graduated from Altoona, so my degree still just says, it just says Penn State. It doesn't say which campus, Michael Hingson ** 07:32 right? And, and in a sense, does it really matter? Not Dre Baldwin ** 07:35 really maybe, to the people who go to the main campus, because they say, Oh, you all went to the other ones. So they try to, in a joking way, kind of discredit it. But I only went to Altoona for basketball. I was accepted into the main campus straight out of high school, Michael Hingson ** 07:48 right? Well, so whatever. But at least you got a degree from Penn State, and you can't argue with that. Yes, you're right about that. I went to University of California, Irvine, UC Irvine, and when I enrolled my first year, my freshman year was the first year they had a graduating class. It was a new campus for UC system. So 1968 they had their first well 69 they had their first graduating class. And that was the year I was a freshman. And it was a only had like about 2500 2700 students that first year. I was back there in June of this year, they have 31,000 undergraduates. Now it's changed a little bit. Dre Baldwin ** 08:34 Yeah, so you were part of the first class, where they had all four classes on campus at the same time. Then, Michael Hingson ** 08:40 right, and they also had graduate school. They had started doing work. It was a well known, even back then, a biology school. In fact, if you wanted to major in biology in the first year I enrolled, I went into physics, so I didn't get to be a victim of this. But they had 1600 students enroll in biology, and the way they weeded them out was they insisted that before you could really take major biology courses, you had to take at least a year of organic chemistry. And so by the time students got to the end of their sophomore year that 1600 students got whittled down to 200 so they use organic chemistry to get get people out of it. Dre Baldwin ** 09:29 Oh, well, that would have worked on me. Yeah. Well, yeah, Michael Hingson ** 09:33 yeah, I had no interest in doing that either. So, you know, I dodged a bullet, but, but it was fun. So you went to college, you got a degree in in business and so on. And then what did you Dre Baldwin ** 09:48 do? Well, then I wanted to play professional basketball. So this is 2004 give everybody a timeline. And initially I didn't have any. Nobody was calling me. Nobody was checking for me, nothing. I tried a few things when. To a couple of tryouts for local, what they call semi professional teams that were based in the United States on smaller towns. Nothing really came of that. So the first work thing I did after college was get a job at Foot Locker as an assistant manager. So I was selling sneakers with the referee shirt and all and everything. So that was my first job out of college. I did that for about six months, and then after that, I went and got a job at ballet Total Fitness was a fitness gym that's now out of business, but not because of me. I made a lot of sales for ballet total fitness, and that's a relief. It Michael Hingson ** 10:34 wasn't you, what'd you say? I say that's a relief. It wasn't you, yes, Dre Baldwin ** 10:38 it wasn't me. If it was for me, they'd still be in business that was making a lot of sales, or maybe not, because people didn't like their contracts, but so maybe I contributed to the problem one way or another. So I then, in the summer of 2005 so this is a year removed from graduation, I went to this event called an exposure camp. And then, Michael, you familiar with those? Heard of them? Michael Hingson ** 10:57 I've heard of it. I don't know anything about it. I can imagine. Okay, I suppose Dre Baldwin ** 11:00 you can't. Similar to a job fair or a casting call in sports world. So it's where a bunch of people who want a job or want a better job, they go to this place that announces, hey, the people who can give you a job are all going to be here. And they all converge in one place. And as opposed to a job fair, where you just show up and shake hands and hand out your resume at an exposure camp. You bring your sneakers and you actually play whatever the sport is, and you try to impress the decision makers in the audience, who are there to look for people like you. They're there to scout and find talent people like you. So I went to one of these events. It was in Orlando, Florida. At the time. I still live in Philadelphia, so me and a couple college teammates who had similar ambitions to me. We rented a car in Philadelphia and drove to Orlando. It's about a 1517, hour drive, depending on traffic, and we showed up there 9am Saturday morning, hopped out the car, and that's the exact time that the exposure camp began. So I tell people, I could get away with that at age 23 Michael couldn't do it now, but then I could do it. How about the car and just start playing a two day event, and I played pretty well at that event. From there, I got two key things that I needed. One was a scouting report of a scout, a professional level Scout, who just wrote up some positive things about me that basically affirmed, like, Hey, this guy does have the ability to play at the pro level. Another thing I got was footage from those games, because you need in the sports world, you need proof of yourself playing. You can't just say you can play. You got to prove it, and the game film is your proof. So that game film was important to me, because even though I had played in college at college, I was only playing against Division Three level talent. At this exposure camp, I was playing against professional level talent. So this footage mattered a whole lot more. So with that footage, I had to be back in Philadelphia. I was still working in ballet, Total Fitness at the time. I negotiated, I had negotiated with my boss to get the weekend off just to go to this camp. Had to be back at work on Monday morning. So the camp was Saturday and Sunday, and had to be back at work on Monday so we when that camp ended on Sunday afternoon, we hopped right back in the car and drove right back home. So and I didn't sleep that Sunday night or that previous Friday night. And from there, what I started doing was cold calling basketball agents. So the way that agents work in the sports world is pretty similar to the literary or entertainment world, where the agent is basically the go between, between the person who has some ability, or at least they think they do, and the people who like to hire people with ability. And usually agents call you if you show potential, because they believe they can help well, they believe you have the potential to make money. And we know all know what agents do. They're the middleman. So if they help you make money, then they make money. Right? Of course, they want to find people who are going to make money. But no agent had ever been calling me, Michael, because it didn't look like I was going to make any money. But after I went to this exposure camp. Now I had some proof that maybe, maybe I might make some money. So at the same time, no agent knew who I was, so I started calling them. I started calling basketball agents myself, and I was selling myself to them and saying, Hey, I have this scouting report. This is some proof. I have this game footage. Here's some more proof. I called about 60 basketball agents. This is straight up cold calling. And after calling those 60 agents, I was well, through calling those 60, I was able to get in touch with 20 of those 20. I sent the footage to all 20, and one of those 20 was interested in representing me, and he's the one who signed me to become my agent. Now, when you get signed to an agent, doesn't mean you get any money, it just means somebody's working to help you make some money. And then he went and found me my first contract, which was in the late summer of 2005 August, 2005 playing in countless Lithuania. So that's how I started my professional basketball career. Michael Hingson ** 14:33 So you weren't playing in the US, and it was a long commute to go to Lithuania. So, so how long did you play there? Then? What happened? Well, Dre Baldwin ** 14:42 each year, for almost 10 years, playing ball, every year I was in a different place. So I never played in the same place more than one season. So I was in that year, I was in Lithuania. I came back to the USA later, later in that in the middle of that season, and I played for a Troy. Traveling team in the USA. It wasn't the team that any of you would know from TV, but play for a traveling team in the USA. Then from there was Mexico from there. After that, you had Montenegro, you had and this is as years are going on. So I don't know when you go through every single one, but I'm just fast forwarding here. Yeah, Mexico is Montenegro. There was Germany, there was Croatia, there was Slovakia. There was a couple other places. I'm not thinking of right off the top of my head, but this was between 2005 and 2015 these are all the different places that I played. Sometimes there were gaps in my schedule. I'm sure we'll talk about that. And there were other things I was doing besides just playing basketball, because the life of a professional athlete, for those who don't know, is a long day of work for us, might be four hours of committed time at work, that's all told. So we have a whole lot of time on our hands. So athletes tend to do other things besides play sports, because we have the time and space to do so, Michael Hingson ** 15:55 right? And so how did you fill your time? Because you couldn't practice all the time, Dre Baldwin ** 16:00 right? Yes, physically, there's only so much practice you can do. So I am an internet geek, a closet internet geek. So what I was doing, even back to when I was a child, I was always into computers. So I'm sure you remember given the frame that you gave me here, but I remember the days of the one computer in the whole school, we had a room called the computer we had. It'd be one room with maybe a couple computers. When I was in high school, there was one room with enough computers for everybody. But when I was in second grade, there was one room with one computer, and there was this the green screen, and we would play Oregon Trail and games like that in the computer with a little floppy disk. So that's as far back as I go. So I was always into computers, even back then. And then by the time I graduated college in 2004 now, we were starting to get what I guess people call web 2.0 so this was the Internet where you could kind of create your own stuff, even if you didn't know anything about the back end of the internet, like coding and HTML, etc. So that was about my era when I got out of college, and when I saw that during college, I said to myself, this internet thing, I'm going to do something on the internet. I didn't know what, but I knew I was going to do something. This is before we had we didn't quite have social media yet. We had some software or platforms where you could kind of make profiles and talk to people, but it was nothing like what we have now. So anyway, to answer your question, finally, in 2005 I took the footage from that exposure camp that I went to and at this good footage that I had this. It was not a link that I got this footage on. This is not a download. This was this thing called a VHS tape. Mike, you remember those? Oh, yeah, yeah. So the VHS tape was the format for my footage. It Michael Hingson ** 17:42 was VHS and VHS, and not beta max, huh? And not Dre Baldwin ** 17:47 that old, not that old. Remember VHS? Only the VHS the farthest back that I go. So with the VHS tape, I knew that no you can lose this. You can leave it in the sun. You can get it dropping in mortar. You destroy your footage. I needed this footage to last forever, so I took it to an audio visual store, and they transferred it onto a data CD, and that CD I uploaded to, I took the footage off that CD and uploaded to this new website called youtube.com and this website claimed that you could publish as much footage as you want for free. Now, yeah, and I said clean, because 2005 nobody knows is this YouTube thing going to stick around? So I put my footage up there and didn't think anything of it, because, I mean, who cares about putting videos on YouTube in 2005 and maybe six months later, I went just to check on the website make sure it still existed, and there were people who were leaving comments on my video. I didn't know. These people. Didn't know who they were or why they were looking for me. Turns out, they were not looking for me. They were just looking for a basketball period, and I happened to be providing it through my footage. And they were asking questions like, Where do you play? What schools you go to, how often do you practice? They just want to know more about this random person who is showing them this guy looks like he can play basketball. So who is he, and they were hoping maybe that I might give them more of what they were seeing on that footage. And that's it wasn't immediate, Michael, but over the next maybe year or two, the light bulb went off in my head that, hey, these players are just looking for help with basketball, right? And I can provide it, because I do actually practice every day. I can actually play. I'm at the pro level now, and at this point, by about 2007 I had this cheap little digital camera, $100 digital camera, because it's before we had cameras on our phones. So now I could just bring this camera with me to the gym every day, because I go every day anyway. Only difference is now I'm going to film myself working out, and I can take little pieces from what I do, and I can put it on his YouTube site, and if it can help some kids out and maybe stroke my ego a little bit, because they're happy to show them how to play basketball, and why not? So that that was the seed of what led to me building my name on the internet well, Michael Hingson ** 19:53 and that makes sense for me when I started at UC Irvine back in 19. 68 that was the first time I really encountered any kind of a computer. And what we had were, well, we had in a building, mainframes and terminals around the campus, but we certainly didn't have individual machines. A little bit later on, I started to encounter, for a variety of reasons, more mini and micro computers, like the digital equipment, PDP, 8e, and Data General, no, but to later on, but mostly it was all terminals connected to a big computer. Actually, there were two big computers and and that was, that was what we did. Now for me, of course, it was more of a challenge because all of it was very visual, right? And back then, we didn't have software to make computers talk or anything like that. So there were other adaptions that adaptations that I had to do, but I know exactly what you're talking about. And then I appreciate all the the the challenges and things that you ran into. But obviously it worked for you. And by putting that stuff up on YouTube, I knew you were going to what you were going to say, and how that actually started to open the door. You're right, yeah, which is cool. Well, you So you started helping people by putting up shots and so on. So what happened from that? I assume that more and more people wanted to know more and more about you and what you did and and started asking more questions Dre Baldwin ** 21:28 between 2005 when I first put the first footage up in 2009 I was putting video out sporadically. So every now and then Michael, I put a new video up on YouTube. I would record my workouts, but I didn't always put something up. So one thing about basketball, as in almost any profession, is that you're doing a lot of the same stuff over and over again. So it's not like I keep putting up the same video me doing the same drills. So I was just put stuff out randomly whenever I got around to it. On top of the fact this is compounded by the fact that there was nothing personal to gain from having people on YouTube watching your video again, you can get a little bit of an ego boost. But other than that, there was nothing tangible to get out of it, so I didn't really care. And mind you, at the same time, I'm playing basketball, my main thing is actually playing basketball, not YouTube. So in 2009 what happened is, Michael, I found myself unemployed, so I was in between jobs, waiting for the phone to ring, and the phone was not yet ringing. I wasn't sure if or when it was going to ring. Good news is going back in the story a little bit. And I got introduced to what I found out to be network marketing when I was in college, and I just wanted to a bulletin board posting about making some money, extra money in the summertime. Turns out some guy was doing network marketing, and I had gone to a few of the meetings. Didn't stay in the in the industry or build a business, but I go into a few of the meetings where a couple breakthrough things happened in my mind. Number one is that the speaker on the stage was talking about business in ways that my college experience had not taught, never even touched on. So that was one that was eye opening. Number two is that the speaker said, if you're going to build your business, you must also build yourself at the same time, because your business cannot business cannot grow any more than you grow. And that made perfect sense to me, and that introduced and then he went on to introduce the concept of personal development, or reinforce it to the people who had heard the message before. That was a phrase I'd never heard of before. I'd always been into reading and human psychology, but I didn't know there was a term called personal development. And number three, he mentioned a couple of the books that he was suggesting that everyone read, and he name dropped some some authors like Napoleon Hill and Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy and Jim Rohn and Errol Nightingale. And I'd never heard of these people, but I kept them in mind, even though he sold us outside of this hotel room, there's people selling books with these same authors. Just bought a book. Well, I was a broke college student. I could not afford the book, so I didn't buy the book, so I didn't buy the books, Michael, but I went on eBay when I got back to college, and I bought some pi rated copies of some of these books. And there were two of them that made a big impact on me that led to what happened in the future. One was thinking, Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, rich, right? Which showed me that there's a way that you could intentionally and consciously alter your thought patterns that lead to an alteration in your actions. And the other was Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki. And when reading that book, I realized, okay, there's another way that you can earn revenue and make money in life, aside from what my school teachers, college professors and parents were demonstrating to me. And this is what really set me on the path toward entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship. These, these, this little story I'm telling you here. And this all happened in the middle of my college years, right? So 2009 I just finished reading. I've always been reading. So I just finished reading another book, which was almost like the the New Age version of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And it was made for people who knew how to use computers, and it was called The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. And Tim was talking about similar it was a similar direction as Mr. Kiyosaki. Difference is Tim Ferriss was telling you how to do all of these things through the internet. He was the first person, for example, that ever heard say you can hire someone to work for you who doesn't even you know. Even physically met. They can live in India or the Philippines, where they cost the living is a lot lower than the United States, which means you can pay them less than you need to pay an American, and they can still do the same job as long as it's on the internet. I never heard anyone explain it, and then he explained exactly how to do it. And he talked about, know, how you need to structure, how you talk to them and deconstruct things. And my mind, my mind works in that way. So it was perfect for me. So all that is said to say 2009 Michael, that flashed forward in the story when my when I'm unemployed and trying to figure out what to do, I asked myself a really important question, which was, how do I combine these three things? One is my ability to play basketball. Number two is me being an internet geek, and number three is my desire to earn revenue in a way that I control. And what I just explained, the backstory tells you why all three of these matter, right? So that's how I started to build what we now call a personal brand. At the time, that was a new phrase. So when I what I started doing was, first of all putting videos on YouTube every single day. Because another thing that happened about that? Yeah, so another thing that happened at that time Michael was YouTube got purchased by Google and Google, and people don't remember this, maybe, but YouTube was not monetized up to that point. So YouTube was losing a lot of money. It was very popular, but they were losing money because they were spending all this money on the the space to hold all these these videos, but they weren't making any money. So by monetizing the site, ie that means putting advertisements on the videos. There was a time those of you listening that you could watch YouTube all day with no ads, but they started putting ads on the videos, and this allowed them to make money, and it also allowed them to share in the profits. So people like myself, the more videos we put out, and the more I got viewed, the more money we made. So I started making videos every day. Other thing was, I had always been blogging. I've always been a big reader, always a big writer. So I started writing more often, just about my experiences playing overseas. And also I started writing about my background in basketball, and also about how to play overseas, because there's a a niche market, but a hungry market of basketball players who believe they could play overseas the same way that I've once believed it. The thing is, is, unlike being a doctor or a lawyer, there's no, like, quote, unquote, official documentation on how to do it. So I started writing and explaining that, because I have the ability not only to have done certain things, but also I'm pretty good at explaining them. So I started doing that. That was the writing piece. And as I continue to do this, people started to know my name on the internet. So then I started to become kind of a, what we now call an influencer, specifically for basketball players, because of what I was doing online. So this all happened during that about 2009 to 2000 maybe 11 period, and the two other pieces I'll add to this cap, this long answer to a short question, which is also Tim Ferriss introduced this concept of you can sell your own products on the internet. And he gave a little experiment on how to test out the market viability. I did it. I started selling my own products. My first two products, Michael, were $4.99 each. That was the price. One was for dribbling the basketball. Ones for shooting the basketball, and they started selling immediately, as soon as I put them out. And the reason was because I had a hungry audience who was already following me, and I had already built a relationship with them, not because I was any type of marketing expert, but I kind of was. But by accident, I didn't, I didn't think of it as marketing. I just thought of it as I had something they want. And the last thing is, self publishing became a thing. So I told you I told you I was a big reader, big writer, so now I can write my own books, and I didn't have to go through a publisher to do it, because I always had the idea writing a book, but I didn't know anything about going through the traditional publishing process, which eventually I have done. But at the time, I wasn't thinking about doing that. But now I can write a book, and I can put it out tomorrow if I want to. So that's what I started doing. So all of this happened between 2009 and 2000 1101. More piece. I'm sorry. Lot of things happen in this period. One more piece was that the players who were following me online, basketball players, 99% of my audience, they started finding out about my background, because every now and then I would reply in the comments telling them, oh, well, I only played one year of high school, or I walked on to play in college, or I played overseas because I went to this exposure camp, or I would make a video just talking, just explaining these things, because I got asked the same question so often. And when players found out about this background of mine, they started asking questions about mindset. They started asking me things like, what kept you disciplined? What keeps you disciplined to keep working out because you put these videos out every day, or, where do you get the confidence to show up and perform at an exposure camp when you only have two days basically to make or break your career? Or why'd you keep trying when you were getting cut from your high school team over and over again, because they would say, hey, Dre I got cut from my team, but I feel like quitting. So why'd you keep trying? What is it that kept you going? Or they would ask something about, how do you get started now? How do you get started playing overseas? How do you get started getting known on the internet? Because now, internet? Because now this is when we start to have the seeds, Michael, of this generation of kids who, instead of growing up wanting to be a police officer or a firefighter, now they want to be YouTubers, because this is what they're seeing. And I was, I guess I was that to them. So they just want to know, how do you get started with all these things that you seem to be doing? Troy, so you. Now that's the end of my long answer to your short question. All of these things happen around a three year span, and that's kind of what sent me in the next direction I ended up going. Michael Hingson ** 30:08 So I'm curious. One thing you said earlier was that one of the things that you discovered by going to the meeting of the network marketing guy was that he was telling you things that were significantly different than what you learned in business courses in college. What kinds of things were different? Dre Baldwin ** 30:31 Well, so much so number one, the guy, well, the first, first thing is, I'm sure you've been to a network marketing meeting before. I everybody, I think my age or older has been someone so in these meetings, the first thing that they do, I would say, about 70% of the presentation is just helping you understand a different way of thinking about earning money and just money period. And the other 20 to 30% of the presentation is about the actual product or service that you would actually be selling if you were to take advantage of the join the business opportunity, as they call it. So the first thing is, they help people understand that to make more money, most people just go looking for ways to do more work, put in more time, put in more hours, when they explain instead, you should look for ways to have a network, or for ways to have assets that will do work for you, so you're making money, even if you're not doing the work. And then you language it in a way that makes it simple for the everyday person to understand, not the way that I just said it, but they make it really simple to understand. That's the first Michael Hingson ** 31:32 thing. But the reality is that while people may or may not realize it, anybody who tends to be very successful in business has probably essentially done the same thing, whether they acknowledge it or not. So I mean, I appreciate what you're saying anyway. Go ahead, yeah. Dre Baldwin ** 31:47 So that's the first thing. Is they help you understand that to make more money is not give more time to your job, whatever, because most people there have a job may introduce the business for the first time like myself, and many of them no older than me. So that's the first thing. The second thing is them helping you understand that, hey, it's possible to have other people working for you, which everyone logically understands, but most of us have this block in our minds that to get people working for me. Well, first of all, I had to have my own company. Secondly, I got to make a lot of money. And third, I got to go find the people. Fourth, I got to teach them what to do. And fifth, I got to watch them. And network marketing kind of handles all those problems at the same time. Because if you join the business and you get other people to join with you, the system teaches them all that stuff. You don't have to spend any money to get them on your team. You don't actually even be having you don't have to be making that much money yourself to get someone else on your team. And every time they make money, you make money, right? So it kind of solves all those problems of getting people on your team to where their efforts put money in your pocket without you having to do all the work. So that was the second breakthrough that happened in that meeting, and the third breakthrough to me, Michael, because I've always been a person who I consider myself a critical thinker, and I try to be as logical and as objective as I can be. As I already told you, I have a business degree from Penn State University, so I'm thinking to myself, why haven't any of my college professors ever mentioned anything is being told to us in this meeting? I just didn't understand it. Why are they not talking about this? Because it sounds like it makes perfect sense. So if it's wrong, maybe they can explain why it's wrong. But if it's right, why are they not talking about it? So these are the three biggest things that stuck in my head after I went to that meeting. Michael Hingson ** 33:26 How did you or what did you discover? Was the answer to that last one, why they don't talk about it? Dre Baldwin ** 33:33 We have a whole conversation on that so I understand the answer is that the system that we have in the United States, especially educational system is designed to produce employees. It's designed to produce people. We're going to go work for somebody else and work out your no salvation for someone else. Because if you are, this is just my my opinion here. If you are independently making your own money, then you are less controlled, and you are, it's harder to keep you under the thumb of anything or anyone else, and you can do or say, you have much more freedom. Let's just put it that way, when you have your own business and you're making your own money, as opposed to when you work somewhere and they set the rules upon you. So I believe the educational system not I believe, I know the educational system was initially created the way that it is to train people to be ready to be ready to go work in factories during the Industrial Revolution. Now we're not in that space anymore. Now it's more mental work than it is physical labor. But the system is the framework of the system still exists the exact same way teaching Michael Hingson ** 34:33 entrepreneurialism, if you will, is still something that is not nearly as common as it as it really probably should be correct. Yeah. So that happens. Well, so how long did you continue to play basketball? Dre Baldwin ** 34:48 I played basketball to 2015 so by this 2009 to 2011 period. Now I basically had two, if you want to call them jobs, neither one of them was well, basketball is technically a job. If you're a contractor, but I basically had two jobs playing basketball, and I have this internet thing going on that we now call personal brand, or you can call it a business, but I wasn't calling it either of those back then. I was just a guy who was known on YouTube, and I sell products, and I got books, and there was no word for it. So in this time period that last four or five years that I was playing basketball, of course, I'm traveling back and forth and playing, but as I told you, our long days of work are four hours, so I have plenty of time on my hands. So I'm blogging, I'm making videos, I'm updating my website. I'm making more programs, because when those first two four hour and 99 cent programs started selling, I said, Well, I know I got more about basketball than just two things. Let me just make programs for everything that I know. So I just made programs for every single aspect of the game that I understood, and I just kept putting them out. And I just was selling those programs to the point that I was making money online. And I got to the point probably about 2010 that I remember telling a friend that whatever this is that we're going to call this, that I'm doing on the internet is going to be bigger for me than basketball. I can see that very clearly, Michael, it's just for the simple fact that athletes have a very short shelf life. You can only play a professional sport for so long, no matter how good you are, because the body can't keep doing that at that level forever. But what I had created when I started selling products was what we call intellectual property. And you can create intellectual property forever, as long as your brain works and you can either write or you can talk or some way of communicating, you can sell intellectual property your entire life. You cannot sell physical property, at least not through your physical body, forever, not in the sports realm. So I knew my time was going to end in basketball, and my time using my brain to communicate something and sell it, hopefully that would never expire. To this point, I'm it's still true, so that's how I knew what I was going to be doing next. So Michael Hingson ** 36:46 you played basketball, but eventually, I gather that what you're really saying is you made the decision that you were going to go into to doing the marketing, to strengthening your brand and creating new intellectual property, and you were going to do that full time? Dre Baldwin ** 37:03 Yes, absolutely. So I was doing it from, again, my 2010 and 2015 I guess you could call it part time, right? And, but again, you had the off season, and I had a lot more time doing that than I had on the basketball court, right? And it was just building the business. Because remember the network marketing experience, reading Robert Kiyosaki, reading Tim Ferriss. I knew I wanted to go into the business world, because after sports, you start to do something. I mean, it's not like you just sit around do nothing for the rest of your life. You're 30 something years old. I was 33 when I stopped playing, so I knew there was something else that I was going to be doing, and I knew I didn't want to go the traditional route. So I knew that from watching my parents, I knew that from listening to my college professors, and I knew that from looking at my college classmates, I said, I'm not like these people. I need a different option. What else am I going to do? So I already knew that route was my route. Michael Hingson ** 37:51 When did you come up with the the title and the concept work on your game? Dre Baldwin ** 37:57 That same time period about 2009 so this was early in the days when I first started publishing on YouTube a little bit more consistently. And my audience is steadily growing, of athletes at this point. And athletes were starting to just ask me a lot of questions about, help can you help me with this? Help me with that? And one day, I was in a 24 hour fitness gym here in Miami, as a matter of fact, excuse me, and I just had my camera with me. My little $100 camera still had it, and I was finishing a workout on my own at about four o'clock in the morning, because I was couldn't sleep, so I just went to the gym, and I was stretching after my workout. And I remember recording this video. It's about two minutes long, and it's still on YouTube to this day. And what I said in the video was that a lot of you players, the reason that you all are having trouble getting better or making a team or you play, but nobody wants to give you the ball is because you all are spending way too much time watching me on youtube or playing Xbox than you are actually doing what I'm doing, which is being in the gym and literally working on your game. So I said in a little bit more colorful language than that, but when I put that out there, Michael, people really loved the phrase. They loved the phrase work on your game because they hadn't heard it used so forcefully in such a way. And it took about a year and a half of people repeating it back to me, seeing me in a mall, seeing me on internet, and saying it when I realized, you know what, I could just name. I can put a name on this and call it work on your game. Because the good thing about it is, because I already had this business mindset. Even though a lot of these players only knew me for basketball, I was thinking bigger than just basketball. And the phrase, the great thing about the phrase is that it doesn't limit you to sports. So that's where I first said it, Michael Hingson ** 39:32 right, which makes perfect sense, you know? And and one of the things that I'm reacting to is when you said earlier that people kept asking you, well, why did you continue? Why did you keep working and trying to get on basketball, even though you didn't get very far in high school and you did some in college, but you never got to be pro, and then you eventually went to the resilience camp and so on. But ultimately, a lot of it comes down to discipline. Uh, and you, you chose to be disciplined about what you did, which I think is really a very important thing. So the question I would ask is, why is discipline such a very important part of success? Dre Baldwin ** 40:16 I believe it's the biggest differentiator between, if you have people who have potential or resources. Biggest differentiator between who actually makes it and who doesn't is who has discipline. Because if everyone in the room has potential and everyone has access to resources, information, knowledge, talent, etc, the person who's the most disciplined is the one who's going to get the most out of the opportunities that are in front of them. And I believe so few people have discipline that it becomes the opportunity. Because I tell people, Michael, the opportunity is always in the opposites. So you just look around at what most people in any space are doing. If you could just be the opposite of that, that's where the opportunity is. You just have to ask yourself, all right, looking at how everybody else is and what everybody else is doing or thinking or saying, if I looked at the opposite of that, where's the opportunity? Because the opportunity somewhere over there. So if you just wrote, you'll find it so discipline, easy differentiator, because most people are not disciplined, Michael Hingson ** 41:10 no and and even the people who are, they're generally looking for that difference that they can take advantage of, which makes perfect sense. How about discipline and how it actually helps in building confidence? Dre Baldwin ** 41:28 Great question. Well, discipline produces confidence, and most people don't go looking for discipline, even though everyone understands that they need it. If you ask, if you stop the 100 people on the street and say, Do you need more discipline, everybody will laugh and say yes. And they can point to several areas in life in which they need it, but most people don't have it, even though everyone claims that they need it, because this is one of those things. But if you ask 100 people, would you like to be more confident, and in what area, most people would also say yes. The challenge is, most people don't know how to go about getting confidence. They don't know how to get this one either. But confidence, since you want it, confidence comes from discipline. So the more disciplined you are, the more confident you'll become, because discipline is basically about doing the work consistently, and confidence is your belief and your ability to do a thing. So the more you do your homework, so to speak, the more prepared you are for the test. If people can follow that metaphor, and that's what confidence is really about. And a lot of people tend to think confidence comes from faking it until you make it, or pretending that you're something that you're not. The problem with that is eventually you had to stop faking and then you have to go back to being who you were before. So you don't want to be on this roller coaster of up and down. Instead, you want to become it. And the way you become anything is by embodying it, by doing the things that that person that's you, the future version of you would already do. All you have to do is figure out what's the process, what are the disciplines of that type of person that already exists? You can model after that, follow the structure that's already been put in place by someone who's already done it, or already has become it. You follow it, and you can get the same result. So that's where confidence actually comes from, and it's based on following the disciplines, and you follow disciplines when you simply have a structure to plug yourself into. Michael Hingson ** 43:06 I am also a firm believer in the fact that if you try to fake it, people are going to see through it. People are generally smarter than people who fake it. Give them credit for being and the fact of the matter is, you can fake it all you want, but they're going to see through it. And the reality is, if you're authentic, no matter what you do, you're going to go a whole heck of a lot further Anyway, yes. So the other thing is that, when you're dealing with discipline and so on, another sort of phrase that comes to mind is the whole idea of mental toughness and and you've gotta be able to become tough enough to be able to cope with whatever you know you're going to be able to do, and you've gotta have the conviction to make it happen. That means you gotta be pretty tough internally, Dre Baldwin ** 43:54 yes, and that's another differentiating factor. All of these are differentiators, but mental toughness is about understanding that no matter how prepared you are, no matter how disciplined, how confident at some point along the way, many points along the way, things are not going to go the way that you expecting them to go. Something's going to go left, that you expect them to go right, a person's going to let you down. Just something randomly pops up that throws a wrench in your plans. And what people should understand is that everyone has these kind of things happen to them. Everyone has stuff happen in their lives. There's no one who is immune to this. The difference between the people who get to tell their story and everyone else, because everyone has a story, but not everyone has the luxury of getting their story heard, is that the people who get to tell their story are those who persevered through the stuff and came out on the other side to where they can tell their story. They created some success despite the stuff that they went through, and now, because you created the success, now you have this credibility, and you're on this sort of pedestal that makes people want to hear what you have to say and hear about your story. But it's not that the people who are in the audience don't have a story. Is simply that until you create a certain level of success, people don't care to hear your story. They only want to hear the story when you become a success. But you can't just be a success with no story. Instead of person who hasn't gone through stuff but they became quote unquote successful, nobody wants to hear that either. So you have to go through the process of going through the stuff, going through the challenges, the times where it looks like you're going to lose and you figure out a way to make it work. Then, once you're a success, now you get to tell your story. So that's what mental toughness is about. Michael Hingson ** 45:27 I wrote a book, and started it around the time the pandemic started began, and the idea behind the book was to teach people to learn that they can control fear and that fear doesn't need to overwhelm them and blind them and make them incapable of making decisions. And if they truly learn about fear and how to use it, they can use it in a very positive way to further them. And of course, that's for me. The example is what I learned in order that, as it turns out, I survived being in the World Trade Center on September 11 and escaping with a guide dog. And it's and it's all about really learning those skills, learning to be tough, learning to persevere, and at the same time, being, I think, resilient, and being able to go sometimes with the flow. You talked about the fact that, in reality, many times things will happen that you don't expect, and it can can take you down. But the other part about it is, if you analyze the things that are happening to you, especially when there's something that you don't expect happening, and it occurs, what are you going to do about it? What do you learn from that? And that's, I think the thing that most people never really discover is that they can go back and from all the challenges they face. They're not failures, and they can learn from that, and they just don't do that. Dre Baldwin ** 46:50 I agree with that completely. Is that, well, one reasons people don't tend to not look back often enough at the things that they've gone through, and also people are just not very people tend to not want to be too much of a critical thinker about themselves. Now, people will be critics of themselves or criticize themselves, but being a critical thinker doesn't necessarily mean beating yourself down. It just means looking at the situation and asking yourself, uh, given the same circumstances, if i What did I overlook at the beginning? What did I not notice that I sort of noticed, and of course, looking at what we know now after going through the situation, maybe what what I have done differently. But a lot of people don't take the time to really think critically about their own lives and their own situations. Therefore, they miss the opportunities in kind of debriefing, so to speak, as you describe it. And Michael Hingson ** 47:35 the other part about that is they don't develop, if you will, the mind muscle to be able to analyze and be introspective and learn from the challenges that happened, or even when they do something well, could I do it better? We don't. We don't tend to do that. And I think that so many people become so critical of themselves, it's a very negative thing. And I used to say it, I'm my own worst critic, because I like to listen to speeches that I give and learn from them. But over the past year, year and a half, what I really discovered is wrong thing to say. It's not I'm my own worst critic. I'm my own best teacher, which is absolutely true. I am the only one that can really teach me. And my own best teacher puts everything in a much more positive light. That's right, and which is cool. And you know, you, you, you certainly demonstrated a lot of personal initiative. You You stuck to it. You were mentally tough, and so on. And you build a business, and now that business, I gather, is pretty successful. You've written, what, 35 books, you've created lots of videos, and you continue to do things. What do you think the most important thing is that people get from you today and that they've gotten from you? Dre Baldwin ** 48:51 Great question. Well, I'll tell you the answer that I've gotten from people who work with us because I asked that question, I asked them, or I framed it by saying, I know, and you know, Mister client, that I'm not the only person in the world who does what I do, not the only person offering what I offer or talking about what I talk about. So what is it about my material? If you see an I sent an email, you see I just put out a video, or you're getting in a conversation with me, what is it about my approach that makes it different from anyone else who might be offering something similar in the marketplace, and the common answer that I get every time is, it's your style of delivery. So it's Dre you're no nonsense. You're no fluff. You get straight to the point. You're honest, you're objective, you keep it real. You do a good job of explaining different angles of things, while at the same time letting people know your opinion. So I just people tell me they just appreciate my style of communication. But nobody ever says, Dre you're the best in the world when it comes to talking about discipline or confidence or writing books or entrepreneurship or nobody ever says that even though I may be the best in the world, nobody says I'm the best in the world. They all say, we like the way that you get your point across. That's what they appreciate the most. Michael Hingson ** 50:01 Well, and I, I would buy into that anyway, because I think that authenticity and telling the truth in a way that that people can accept it is so important and and so often we don't see that. So I can appreciate them saying that to you. Dre Baldwin ** 50:18 Well, thank you. Michael Hingson ** 50:20 Me why? Yeah, go ahead. No, Dre Baldwin ** 50:22 I agree. Michael Hingson ** 50:24 Well, there you go. We'll see, see. Okay, we both bought into that one. Why is discipline more important than motivation? I mean, everybody talks about motivation. There are a lot of motivational speakers out there. I know that a lot of times I'm providing motivational or inspirational talks, but and I suspect that the answer you're going to give will explain the but, but, why is it that motivation isn't nearly as as crucial as discipline? Well, Dre Baldwin ** 50:51 just like you, Michael, I will give out motivational messages as well, so to speak. And if someone is booking me to speak and they say, need a motivational speaker, I'll take it right? They want me on the stage, so I'm good with that. The thing is, motivation and discipline are not diametrically opposed, and sometimes when we talk about these things, people tend to get the idea that they are like enemies. They're not enemies. They work together. The thing is, motivation comes and goes. We don't know when motivation is going to show up. Sometimes we're motivated, sometimes we're not, discipline always shows up. So even in the times when we are not motivated, if you're disciplined, you're still going to go to the gym, you're still going to write the next 500 words in your book, you're still going to record your show, you're still going to do the paperwork you're supposed to do. You'll still check your email inbox, whatever it is that you're supposed to do for the discipline. So motivation, if and when I have it, great, but if I don't have it, no one would know the days that I'm not motivated, because I'm still going to do the same work. So motivation is a good thing because, again, it'll get people fired up. It'll get you moving. It can light a fire under someone and get them to do something that they otherwise would not have done. The problem is motivation is much more temporary than the long term effects of discipline. So when people are going around looking for motivation, especially at the professional level, you're setting yourself up for a problem. Because at the professional level, you're getting paid to do something as your main occupation, which means you have to deliver consistently. The problem is motivation is not always there. So what will you do when you're not motivated? This is where discipline picks up. So what I advise people, and I give them a whole structure for this, is you need to take their short term motivations and convert them into long term disciplines, because that's the one that you can Michael Hingson ** 52:31 count on. I would also submit that those long term disciplines will greatly enhance the amount of time you're motivated as well. Good point, because the the reality is that the discipline and the things that you do consistently are going to lead, when they work, to having a much more motivational experience. Yeah, you're still going to have challenges, but when you go back to it and say, but this is what I do, and I'm going to continue to do it because it works and so on. That's going to help motivate you as well. Dre Baldwin ** 53:04 Yes, I agree. If you're showing up consistently with the disciplines, it's also going to start producing results. And when you're getting results, Michael Hingson ** 53:14 is much easier to get motivated. So it also gets down to establishing a mindset. You know, when I I talk about escaping from the World Trade Center, I talk about what I learned ahead of time, about how the whole complex worked, all the procedures to evacuate, all the the emergency exits, and learned a lot, as opposed to relying on reading science, which most sighted People would do. But that created a mindset, and that mindset is what really allowed me to be able to function and escape, because the mindset said, you know, what to do. And that was such a strong mindset that it actually worked, and it got me out of the tower, I think, which is exactly what I wanted to be. But, you know, the ideas mindset is extremely important. But what's the difference between, or better yet, what's the connection between mindset and execution in kind of high performance or any kind of environment? Great Dre Baldwin ** 54:14 question. Well, it's the being, doing, having formula. So who you are being as a person is the way you think, the way you see yourself in the mirror, the mindset that you're in, that leads to the actions that you take and how you do those actions, and that leads to the results that you get, the outcomes in your life. So the challenge that many people come across is that they focus only on the having and the or they focus on the doing and having. So they focus on doing stuff which encompasses hard work, effort, trying again that didn't work. Let me do something else that didn't do something else. And most people just go through a cycle of that their entire lives. They just keep doing stuff and looking for that doing to lead to a certain outcome, and when it doesn't, they just double down on doing or triple down or quadruple down on the F. Hurts, and this is where you get the the concept, the idea that hard work is the key to success, because for several reasons. First of all, because people don't even understand the being part, it has never occurred to them. So all they know is, do stuff, do I have the outcome? No, do more stuff. Do I have the outcome? No, and wash, rinse and repeat the that's one reason why people are so stuck on this concept of hard work to create success. Another reason is that a lot of people who become successful, indeed, they are noted for being successful. If you ask them, how'd you become successful? Michael, most of them say, hard work. They say, Well, I just I worked everybody. I showed up early, I stayed later, I just work hard and everyone else. That's why I'm more successful than everyone else. But we know this is nonsense, because the maintenance man in a high story building does works harder than the CEO, but the CEO makes 100 times more money. So we can't say that hard work is the key to success, and even if they work the same amount, CEO is making a whole lot more money in the maintenance man. So that is not the key to any outcome, whether you want to call it successful or not, because there are a lot of hard working people who do not achieve success. And another reason why this is what people believe in is because hard work, at least, can be counted and measured. I can count how many hours that I worked, I can count how many emails I sent. I can count how many hours I spent in the gym lifting weights and how many repetitions that I did. And that can satisfy me to say that I did it. It it can satisfy me to post in my workout app that I did this long of a workout, or share on my to my followers on social media that I'm in the gym at six o'clock in the morning. And the things that people do are measurable. They're visual and they're easily understandable, but being is intangible. You can't touch it, you can't count it, you cannot measure it. It has an effect, but since you can't count it and measure it, people tend to discount it. It's the reason why, I mean, you know, as well as I do Michael, that mindset, as valuable as it is, isn't valued nearly as much as it should be, and it's harder to sell mindset and mentality to people than it is to sell actions and steps to people, because we can count and measure steps. You can't count and measure discipline and confidence and mental toughness, even though the only way we can take the right steps is if we have the right mindset. So we got to kind of package mindset in with the tangible things that the average person understands. So we have to kind of feed it to them, where you would feed medicine to a dog, so to speak. So this is the reason why a lot of people tend to focus more on the action steps, steps, rather than the mindset stuff, even though, I think you probably would agree with this as well, that most of the time when someone comes to you asking for help, even if they're asking for something that's tangible, like, hey, I need a process for selling my widget, they at some point, will admit that mindset is a part of the deal. Because usually, if we're not doing a thing that we want to do, or we keep doing the thing that we don't want to do. There's something mental that is causing that is not something tangible, Michael Hingson ** 57:46 which gets back to human introspection, analyzing regularly, and I would say daily, what you do? Why you do it? What happens? You've got to develop that mindset. And it is, it is the very thing that most people don't really understand. I absolutely agree with what you're saying, Dre Baldwin ** 58:06 yes, and that mindset piece is, is the biggest thing is the foundation of everything that I do. And the reason why I was able to transition from sports message to a business message is because same mindset stuff that you need to succeed in sports, the same stuff you need in business. Michael Hingson ** 58:22 Yeah. And it goes both ways. You know, we have been doing this for an hour, and I don't want to keep you any longer, but I would like to explore maybe having you come on, because I have a whole lot more questions. I'd love to see if you'd like to come back and further our discussion. Yeah. So let's do it. We can schedule it perfect. Well, let's do that. But I really appreciate you being here today, and I want to thank all of you for listening and watching us and however you're interacting with us. We appreciate it. Would love to get a five star review from you, whoever you are, wherever you are and wherever you're listening. Please give us a great review. Dray, if people want to reach out to you and maybe use your coaching and other skills. How do they do that? Dre Baldwin ** 59:06 My main website that we're focused on now is our university. So it's just called work on your game university.com work on your game university.com that's where you can see some of our social proof for as we call it, receipts, people we work with and served up to this point. And then, of course, you can find me on any social media platform you prefer. I'm on all of them. My profiles are all public. Just type my name in, because we have different screen names on each one. Just type my name in. I'm very easy to find, usually the way I look right now, so you see, if you're watching this on video, easy to point out. Michael Hingson ** 59:39 Oh, it's Dray D, R, E, Baldwin, correct. B, a, l, D, W, I, N, yes. So hunt down Dre and let him help you develop a good mindset. I would would say to all of you and Dre you as well. If you know anyone else who ought to be a guest on unstoppable mindset, we'd love to have you give us ideas. To introduce us. We would appreciate it, and I would love it. If all of you would email me, let me know what you think, love your thoughts on today's session. You can do that by emailing me up. Michael H, I m, I C, H, A, E, L, H i at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S, I b, e.com, or go to our podcast page, www, dot Michael hinkson.com/podcast if Michael Hinkson is m, I C, H, A, E, L, H, I N, G, s, o, n, we really value all your input and your thoughts and so on. And once more, I want to thank you for being here, and we will definitely schedule another time to continue this. Looking Dre Baldwin ** 1:00:37 forward to it. Thank you for sharing your platform and for the opportunity, Michael, Michael Hingson ** 1:00:46 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.
