#125 Paul Rabil: Confidence and Competition
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To have that endless competitive streak, you've got to have a fire in your belly morning, noon, and night. The trait that I'm describing to is really the 1% of the 1%. And you know it when you see that competitive, because it's kind of a competitive asshole is what you have to become in sports at least. And what I've learned in business and in life is you've got to be a competitive compromiser.

And that requires kindness, empathy, ingenuity, but the same level of like aggressive competitive spirit. But it's shifted in sports. It's binary. You can just tackle someone and win. Can't do that in life. Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. The goal of this podcast is to master the best of what other people have already figured out so you can unlock your potential.

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Paul Rabel is here today. Paul is the Michael Jordan of lacrosse. Not only is he the face of lacrosse, he's literally the best lacrosse player to ever exist. He's also a gold medal winner. He's also one of the co-founders of the Professional Lacrosse League, which is heading into its fourth season.

I wanted to talk to Paul because I'm interested in how the best become the best and how they stay the best. I want to know the mindsets, the competitiveness, the drive, and all the things that make that possible. We talk about how Bill Belichick tried to make him a safety in the NFL, where confidence and competitiveness come from, the business side of sports, the mental tools to recover after making a mistake, how to handle stress, and so much more. It's

It's time to listen and learn.

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I think the place I want to dive in is tell me the story of how Bill Belichick once tried to make you a safety. He, uh, he is a lacrosse player. He grew up playing lacrosse in Annapolis, Maryland, and he played lacrosse in college and his father was the football coach at Navy. And that's really where he cut his teeth, um, literally in the film room cutting tape. And that led to where he is today is I think, uh,

the football coach giant of the world. And even like in a micro setting for Coach Belichick, he started cutting tape. And I think in the world of sports, I'm in the sports business, a lot of the best executives, commissioners, owners started selling tickets, if that lands for anyone out there listening.

Then Bill, because of his fandom of lacrosse and his allegiance to lacrosse in a way, he would come to Johns Hopkins practices, which was the school I attended 2004 to 2008. And I built a relationship with him. And my junior and senior year, I was the captain. And I remember asking my coach at the time, Petra Mala, if I could get 10, 15 minutes with Belichick when he would come to Baltimore. And then he granted me that.

I graduated from Hopkins. He sent a box of Patriots swag to my home at the time because he knew that I was a Washington football fan growing up in the DMV. And he was like, now you can support the Patriots.

I had a really good rookie year playing professional lacrosse, and I continued to build my relationship with Coach. And we would go to dinner a couple times a year, and he would invite me to a Patriots game and spend the weekend with him. And then it started turning into conversations. And I would suspect that for players that he has either drafted or signed, more likely signed, that aren't football players or non-traditional SEC recruits, it started with a conversation that we had, which was, I think you could play in the NFL.

And I was like, I want to play wide receiver. He was like, I think you'd be a strong safety. And I was like, why? He was like, because you have the size and the speed of strong safeties and you have a work ethic in our league. And we went for about six months of deliberating that. And then we both came back together. He was like, you know what? Things are tracking really well in lacrosse. I was just the MVP at the time and playing with Team USA. And we just had a practical conversation weighing risk reward and never pursued it.

Well, talk to me about that because you would be going from the top of the lacrosse world to, I'm assuming, on the bubble of the NFL roster. For sure. The bottom of the football world, I guess, to your analogy. You know, we just had a guy play for half the season in the PLL. NFL fans know him. His name's Chris Hogan.

Chris is two years younger than me and literally took the path that I was contemplating. He was an All-American at Penn State, and he did take a fifth year because you're given five years of athletic eligibility at the NCAA level, four of them to one specific sport. So he took his fifth year and played football at Monmouth, and he went the NFL route. And he was like jumping from training camp to training camp, roster, roster. It really took him eight, nine years to break through. Then when he broke through, he had big moments, right?

big Super Bowl moments that led to an $11 million a year contract. But not every path goes like Chris's. It was just really significant for me because we shared in so many

similar traits. He was a college midfielder as I was, and Bill ended up trading for him. But there's just so much risk. And I don't regret it at all because of where I am in my career on the professional side, on the ownership side of a sport that continues to emerge.

And what I really love doing, which is storytelling and building businesses. I'm not sure if I would have been able to protect my head, to be honest. It's such a violent sport. And I wonder if you would have looked back and sort of, you know, life expectancy of an NFL player is not really long and miss this opportunity or regret becoming the greatest ever in your sport. I mean, the thing about.

sport that I don't think people realize. And it's the same in any industry. There's a reset button at every level from junior high to high, high to college, college to pro, pro to international, meaning you can be the best in class. And when you go to the next level, you're then at the bottom of the roster.

And the difference between amateurism and professionalism, I know amateurism is changing now with name, image, and likeness regulation at the college level, but just call it amateurism is college and below versus professional is you have people looking after you and holding your hand as an amateur athlete. Professionally, no one does. And no one talks about it either. In fact, all we talk about is the path to pro. We don't talk about the path as a pro to 35.

And that's really what athletes want. They don't want to fall into the expected two and a half year cycle that all pro sports have. So it's uncharted territory and remains to be that way. But the reason I share that story is like,

It just doesn't matter how good of a college player you are. What matters is like what you do and how you apply yourself consistently in your head space at the professional level. And that's what Bill has a sense for. And he was like, this guy didn't play college football, but he's got this work ethic that translates to longevity. And I think that we see, again, we see that in business, but that, that was, that's been a glaring characteristic.

characteristic that I try to identify even with the next gen lacrosse player or athletes that I see today in other sports. How do you maintain that level of work ethic and sort of dedication and love for the sport through the grind through the years? Yeah, it's, it's, um, I think a lot of it is innate to be honest. And it's a, it's a dangerous path because to have that

endless competitive streak, you've got to have a fire in your belly morning, noon, and night. And that's hard to reconcile with because most of the time in sport, most of the time in life, you fail. And so those that have that competitive streak and that desire to be the best and that relentlessness, the doggedness,

They also sit in that seemingly black hole of failure more than others, but that's also why they come out better more than others. And so you need therapy, you need like good sports psychology. And the trait that I'm describing too is really the 1% of the 1%. And you know it when you see that competitive, 'cause it's kind of a competitive asshole is what you have to become in sports at least.

And what I've learned in business and in life is you've got to be a competitive compromiser.

And, uh, and that requires kindness, empathy, ingenuity, uh, but the same level of like aggressive competitive spirit, but it's shifted in sports. It's binary. You can just tackle someone and win. Can't do that in life. Talk to me a little bit more about what did you call it? Competitive, competitive compromise. But yeah, I think the difference between sports and, and real life is compromise. And, um, you know, we, we,

My position is unique because I got to build a league and play in it. Most athletes play in leagues, and then when they retire, they transition. So the conversation is always transferable skill sets between sport and business, sport and life. I got to see, oh, damn, I actually think there might be better transferable skills in business back to sport. It's just that's reverse order that most people don't get.

And it really helps with leadership. And essentially what I'm referring to in sports and why people love it is that we get to sit for two hours and count on a binary outcome. Someone's going to win, someone's going to lose. And it's usually a derivative physicality. And then there's community and engagement tied to which team or which players you're backing.

So it's these exits that we get from the reality of life and we get to know that we're going to either win or lose. And life, if you approach it with a win or lose mentality, you're always going to lose. Because in business, put it this way, the network deal that I'm structuring right now, if we feel as a company that we won, that means that they lost. And there's certain aspects of the deal.

It's nuanced. Same thing in sponsorship. Same thing with employment structure of agreements. And so you actually just want to build towards win-win. And that requires sometimes more conversations. It also requires more concessions. And that's what I mean by compromise.

But if you think of that, like the only sustainable relationship is win-win. Like if somebody's losing, if one party's losing in a relationship, it can't exist across time. And what will exist is resentment, which inevitably comes to the surface at some point, unless there's like narcissistic relational tendencies or manipulation that is also unhealthy. And I think that's your point. You know, you look at romantic relationships, platonic relationships,

The compromise to me prevails. We're going to jump around a little bit here in terms of the podcast, but you're the only player I can think of who started their own league. What sort of surprised you the most about that journey? How I got there, I think, because it was never part of my plan. I wanted to model and emulate my career really around Michael Jordan. That's where competitively I ran into...

some challenges and I referenced sports psychology and therapy earlier to help get through it. Michael Jordan, I think was the greatest athlete, greatest competitor of all time. And the way that- What makes you say that? Well, having read most of his biographies, having watched every piece of media around him that's been published across traditional mediums, I can't say I've watched every YouTube highlight of his, but knowing his team,

and then his track record. So if you just look at success side by side, every championship he was in, he won, and he was the MVP of that championship. No one's ever done that. He was six for six at the highest level. And he probably would have been eight for eight if he didn't take a short sabbatical to go play baseball. That feat to me is just sheer dominance.

that you can win every championship you're in and be the MVP of that in a two-way sport where he plays offense and defense, where he was also defensive player of the year, offensive player of the year. So he just dominated. And I think those that are close to him, which I am not, would say that that was through his sheer competitive level day to day and everything that he did. Yeah. So I wanted to be Michael Jordan on the field and I want to be Michael Jordan off the field, which meant I was going to take an ownership position in professional lacrosse.

but I thought it would be through the existing league. Um, and then over 10 years of playing, um,

I have this like, I think it's probably more innate than it is learned, but learning has really sparked that passion over the last 10 years for me more than anything else is for media and storytelling and then what soon became business. And I think business was by necessity because professional lacrosse players don't make much money. So you have to figure out ancillary income streams.

But I became a student of sports and sports business and sports media. And I kept running into almost at every turn, obstacles and questions as to why Major League Lacrosse at the time was not doing what the UFC was doing or MLS was doing or MLB was doing or NBA was doing. And I would have those conversations with leadership. And they're met with a lot of resistance.

And over a 10-year period, I had, I think, lobbied enough

support from players and respect from players and even different, you know, outside interest. And then the intersection of my brother and I, my brother's a serial entrepreneur and him finishing really his like third cycle of building businesses, looking for a new one. We decided to look at the intersection of sports and entertainment in particular sport that I think I have subject matter expertise on and that's lacrosse. And that was how we got there.

What are some of the lessons that you've learned about the business of sports that most people in the industry miss? If I could just say lessons in the business without really knowing if people miss or I could refer to where MLL was missing is that we're actually just in the media business. It's all about distribution. You can have the greatest product in the world, agnostic of industry. If no one sees it, it doesn't matter.

And so if you want to monetize your product in the commercial space, which we're a commercial business, you've got to get the core audience eyeballs on it and engaged. And then you've got to go after net new eyeballs. And so everything starts with your distribution deal. Professional sports, team sports in America dating back to the early 1900s in our pastime as Major League Baseball, that was a ticket business and that was an event business.

It was just print and radio at the time. Television era of the 60s uplifted the NFL. Now you could say sports, especially emerging sports, are transformative because of the digital and social era that we're in. That's our media. But you still have to access the knowns of media, which are television, print, and call it audio now.

Um, because that gives you maybe not the scale that digital and social does, but it gives you the, um, it gives you like the gold standard of respect and, um, and almost like eligibility of, of mindshare for sports fans around the world. I want to come back to a little bit about you as a player. I mean, you, you achieved basically being the Michael Jordan of your sport, right? How did you handle that?

the pressure that comes along with that? Or did you ever feel that pressure? Well, based on my standard of Michael Jordan, I did not achieve that. I've lost championships. And I certainly wasn't the player that he was relative to his sport. Well, just to put it in context, the greatest lacrosse player of all time. We can consider MJ the greatest basketball player of all time. Yeah. The unknown for me at the time, at the trick in a way, is that I never...

I never focused on getting too far ahead of where I was at the time. And the time for me and the lessons in sport are really meditative. It's being present and completing the task at hand to the best of your ability. So whether that was like every day against the wall, shooting on net,

I would have this approach that I wouldn't stop until I felt like I got as close to perfect as possible.

And so it wasn't like timed, it wasn't a number of reps, it was just out there because I wanted to be great. And then when I was playing, whether it was high school, college, professionally, internationally, I always wanted to be the best version of myself and then the best version on that team. And then the best player on the field, which then quickly became best in the world or best in college or best in high school.

So it was like that process to me unfolded organically, if that makes any sense. Because I do see kids that say, I want to be the best in the world or I want to be the best player in high school. And they're not even close to being the best player on their midfield line yet. So I stacked them, I think, appropriately. It's not that I ignored or I never put a goal that I wanted to be the greatest player ever. I did. Yeah.

But I focused on how to get there versus just saying, I want to be there. Were you always the hardest worker on the teams that you were on? I mean, I think that's relative or I shouldn't say it's relative, but mostly subjective. I believed that I was. Yeah.

And there were probably guys that thought that they worked harder than me, but they maybe only thought of it linearly. They worked harder than me in the weight room and worked harder than me maybe on the field. But why I think that my meter was always full is I never stopped thinking about it. And even to this day, I think what helps drive our business is that Mike and I think about it all the time.

And it's a blessing and a curse, but I'll be watching Squid Game and thinking about how Squid Game became the most popular title on Netflix. I immediately start thinking about the business and I'm reading about it and seeing the simultaneous release in 190 countries and 31 different closed captions and 13 different dub overs all at once. First time they ever did that. So they eliminated the language barrier. It became a universal title overnight.

What are the lessons in sports? And so that's what I mean. Whether I was playing, I was like watching Chris Paul make a pass with his weak hand off balance. What's that lesson in lacrosse? How can I emulate that? So it wasn't just what I was doing on the field. It was what I was doing really in everything in life. I think that's so important. I don't think you'll ever be exceptional at anything you're not sort of thinking about constantly. When you were practicing, was it sort of regimented or was it more creative? Yeah.

It was creative at first, and then it became very regimented. The way that I think about my career is actually in three phases. I started playing the game when I was 12, and all the way up until my sophomore year in high school, I was playing because I had a passion for it. It was fun. I loved it. The fun and the love didn't go away. It got superseded by competitiveness. And my sophomore year, I started getting a lot of eyeballs and recruiting letters and stuff.

And so then I started really like regimenting, gamifying in many cases, doing whatever I could, timing, counting everything that I did. And that was both tiresome, but it was also, in my opinion, the fastest path to like high growth improvement.

And that lasted really all the way until I was about 28 to 30 in that range. That's when I started getting injured. And I think what happened is like sustainably, you can only be that competitive in a contact sport the way that I played for so long without finally breaking down. And the breaking down was my body and then my mind because of my body. That's when I got in, you know, had surgeries, got into sports psychology, got into therapy. And then the

the back portion of my career, call it 31 to 35 has been more reflective and more appreciative. I've had to recharge that compete level at moments, but I could also shut it off and I could also play for fun and shut that off too. And so you think about athletes when they're at their best is maybe the ability to, to have a, an overarching opportunity,

approach that is within their control. You're still going, I mean, you're still playing. What things do you sort of do to take care of your body now? Like what nutrition habits do you have? What do you do from a physical standpoint to keep it going? Is there like a Tom Brady stretching routine?

sort of pliability regimen going on here? What do you have on the back end here? Well, I just retired after the season. Yeah, I had a really good season, which actually didn't make it difficult to retire for me because...

I had made that decision at least personally in advance of the season because of the toll of building the league and playing in it. Physically, my body continued to break down and then just mentally I was not there as I used to be. Coming out of the pandemic and building the bubble and playing in that was difficult as well. But I felt like it was time to really centralize my efforts and drive lacrosse forward.

So, so it turns out I had one of my best seasons as a 35 year old plane injured. And that's, I think largely because I knew, and I was the only one who knew that I was emptying out the tank every weekend, but to sustain a career into your thirties, even into your twenties as a,

as a hard charging professional athlete that's in a contact sport you always have to take care of your body sleep number one hydrate number two eat number three stay on your workouts number four stay on your skill number four 4.2 and the reason i say that is like you know as you get into your late 20s and 30s the margin for improvement on skill is really thin

And in fact, like you're able to tap into skill better if you're smarter that you weren't able to utilize. You didn't even know you had, so to speak. But to be able to play well in your career, you just have to take care of your body and your mind in season and off season. Always, always omnipresent there. How do you take care of your mind? Go deeper on that. Well, taking care of your mind starts with taking care of your body because your body will let your your mind down as an athlete.

And I think that's probably the case for anyone, really. So there's tactics, tangible steps that will help your mentals by eating well, sleeping well, staying hydrated. That's one. Number two is really understanding why the way you are. And in particular, I find it very relational. What makes you happy? What makes you sad? What makes you agitated? Yeah.

what gives you your anxiety and stress and understanding whether that's attachment theory, whether that is the way that, you know, you have overlapped your career with your life and what are the upside and downsides there. The way to unpack it, the best way to unpack it is with counsel, whether that's for athletes in sports psychology or,

and therapy and couples therapy. I think that in sports, it's a great place to analyze how we improve. No one bats an eye at having a shooting coach, a head coach, an assistant coach, a strength coach, a medical team, doctors, physios, physical therapists, trainers. They're all there to help because they're experts. Why not

Why not tap into if we want to improve our mental health experts in that field? Well, it's been stereotyped and stigmatized through modern media and slower turn advancements as to why. But I think we're close to breaking through that obstacle. When you were playing, did you ever feel like somebody else was better than you? Like there was a better player than you? That's a great question. So the truth is that I didn't.

But I always felt threatened by that. And I was always comparing myself to others. And that was the bad side of it. The comparison was the bad side? Oh, yeah. Because you're constantly A-Bing. You're constantly judging other people and looking at their stats versus yours. And it's unhealthy because that wasn't the best path to continued growth personally, which is what I was describing earlier. But that was just there because I was a competitive asshole.

And, and so the, you know, the, the tricky part about sports is, you know, the balance of, of confidence versus cockiness versus, you know, hints of narcissism around. I am the best and I'm the best because I just believe I'm the best or I'm telling you I'm the best. Like it's highly subjective. You can't get there without like fully buying into that.

And you can't fully buy into that without really putting in all the work that you can and having the results on the field. So, you know, I see, I see, you know, people trying to convince others that they are convinced themselves, but it's, it's a holistic approach. And then, and then irrational belief, because a lot of times I wasn't probably very few times I was, but if I didn't buy into that,

belief, then I wouldn't have continued to improve like I did. So almost sort of like, if I were to paraphrase, confidence comes from putting in the work and the results and at times having an irrational belief in yourself. Yes, that's right. And the ability to persevere through failure. I think there's a misconception out there that successful people have faced fewer obstacles than

than most. It's quite the opposite. I think what makes successful people or successful athletes, I'll just use that as an example, is they have failed in many cases more than most people because they've had the audacity to try things that are out of their wheelhouse more regularly. They have high risk. We'll continue with Michael Jordan, famously cut from the varsity team.

He was a sophomore. That's not the part of the story they told in a time where no sophomores made varsity. The story is like, oh, he was cut from the basketball team. Well, he played JV and he was the best player in JV. He had the audacity to try out for the varsity team, then get cut, take it personally, and come back way better than had he made the varsity team his sophomore year. In hindsight, it's actually those high-risk, the

The volume of risk-taking met by the resilience and the ability to get up and be better because of that failure, a lot of great athletes take it personally. And those are things that you also have to shed when you get out of sport and into life and business is take things less personally.

Uh, but in sport, things are very personal. And I think that in a way drives that, uh, outcome that we see with a lot of athletes. How do you do that in a game or sort of after a game? Like you make a mistake. How do you put that out of your mind? Go on to the next play, the next series or the next game? Like how, how, what is the mental process you go through, uh,

to sort of, you know, in Belichick's words, we're on to Cincinnati, right? Like what is that process that you're sort of drawing? Well, I think every athlete will tell you it's easier said than done, but it is the key to success and consistency over time is your ability to have resilience in a game.

I think what makes sports great is that you can have a poor game and then use the week to recalibrate. So you go back and you practice and then you get the benefit of time, which time is a healing mechanism. To do that in a 60-minute game is a lot more difficult. It requires, I think, a high level of mental aptitude.

um, and, and mental training. So, uh, I'll give you one example. It's called a rebound goal. I think golf gets it right. Cause golf is a really challenging sport and that's the Genesis of rebound goals. Uh, an example of a rebound goal in golf is an up and down where like literally Phil Mickelson has made tens of, if not hundreds of millions of dollars being famous for hitting a

miraculous shots, which by the way, it's a miraculous shot because he had a shitty tee shot. But they celebrate an up and down and that's a rebound goal because it's coming off of a bad shot. In most sports, if you have a bad shot, what do you think the next shot is going to be? Bad again, bad again, bad again. And that's what we're trying to fix is your suggestion.

So creating in team sports, a lot more difficult than golf because of what kind of just said in team sports, there's more people on the field and there's more actions and reactions that are out of your control. So I always focused on what are my rebound opportunities off of a bad play that are within my control. And

and it's like a lot of it was like effort getting back on defense like I took a bad shot or turn the ball over I would stay on the field to try to like get that mental rep back where a lot of people make a bad shot or turnover and they run off the field and they sub out so not knowing that I can't count on the ball will be back on my stick again can I go stay on the field and play defense against the guy who does have the ball on a stick and build that

confidence back up. That's a rebound goal. Control the controllables, right? What can I do right now? What's the next sort of thing to get me back on track? It's almost like remembering the basics, right? So it's like you get lost, you make a bad play and then it's like, okay, I don't want to get fancy. I don't want to get complicated. I just want to get back to like, what are the core things I need to pay attention to? Yeah. But you know, the other thing is, you know, step one is that awareness. Step two is then adjusting the neuroscience, right?

And that's where athletes really struggle. It's like, I know you can almost zoom out and be like, I know what's happening to me right now. I'm losing confidence because I made two bad plays in a row. And I know that I can turn this around, but I have this feeling in my body. I'm running hot and I'm ruminating and I can't get out of it. That's like real biochemical takeover. There's science behind that.

Um, so there are also techniques that you can do breathing, you know, actually getting, uh, an ice towel on your neck to like shift the chemistry that's happening in your body. Your body actually is getting hot when you're getting angry. And, uh, and I found that those tactics actually resemble a lot of in basketball. When you get on the free throw line, you go through your routine.

That is meditative. It's a reset for everything that's happened up to that point. So you can just put the ball in the hoop from close range, which you're tend to be really good at if you're at the NBA level. I want to come back to MJ and sort of competitiveness and getting cut. Like where does competitiveness come from? It seems to a lot of people. I mean, Tom Brady might be the counterexample to this, but, you know, it seems to come from anger. Yeah.

in a lot of people or I mean, even Brady, a huge chip on his shoulder, right? Like gets to Michigan, can't even, you know, start. Drew Henson comes in. He's like switching duties with him. Like talk to me about where that drive comes from for you and where you see it come from for other people.

I don't think that it comes from anger because I think operating with anger isn't the best path. And if you look at best in class, in theory, operating from anger, I have a hard time thinking that that was the source. I do think that mentally elevating doubt and fear is

is probably the better way to describe how these top athletes think. They're fear motivated, fear of not being the best, fear of losing, and fear of not performing well. It's a huge motivator. And so I think that that's probably it versus anger.

And I think that that can come from a number of things. It comes from the way that we're raised, product of our environment, socioeconomic disparity from athlete to athlete. Again, like all things that differ from one person to the next.

Um, and then I think there's, I think there's gene pool as well, whether you're, uh, you know, a descendant from, uh, a conqueror or an emperor like Genghis Khan or not. Um, that's a crazy theory, but like that, that, like, I think that that conquering spirit performs quite well in sport. Where did yours come from?

I think it's probably a combination of the Rabel family tree coming over from Lebanon as immigrants and the work ethic of my great-grandparents, my grandparents, and to my father that was demonstrated there.

to me as a kid, all the way through to today, the fear-based motivation really began to trigger for me in that high school phase two that I'd mentioned. And so I think it began to form as I started tasting success.

Because success was so good and failure was so bad that I really wanted to skew toward the former as much as possible. And that was binary for me. Because in sport, you can block out everything else in life. And so it's like a breeding ground for that type of motivation.

So that's what I think as a combination of having supreme work ethic bestowed upon me from my family heritage.

uh, you know, blessed with strong athletic genes. And I celebrate the notion that I have performed beyond my, probably like my projected capabilities. You know, when my younger self may, would it may have taken offense to it? Like, what does that mean? I'm not as good of an athlete as I think I am, but I think that we should all feel good about our lives if we out,

kick our coverage or punch above our weight class. Well, one of the challenges in a team sport is that you're sort of defined by your wins, right? And the greatest players get paid the most and they also have to mesh with their teammates. How do you think about contracts that sort of incentivize individual success and not team success?

as a player being on the team and the best in the league, but also as an owner of a league and trying to create the best product on the field? I mean, it's a huge dilemma in sports and teams and ownership groups do it differently. But I totally see the paradox of incentivizing wide receivers based on number of catches and touchdowns scored, and then trying to address the sideline issues of the quarterback not throwing to them and then, you know,

having a temper tantrum, like you get, you understand it. And then it's distracting to the overarching goal of the team, which is winning.

I think the Patriots do a really good job of building incentives around starting and playing in games, and they don't incentivize based off of number of catches or touchdowns or yards passed. So you can still build an incentive structure to performance, which is kind of the business behind the scenes and what agents are going to want to push for. So as an athlete being represented by...

like you want them to create best in class terms in your contract. And then you walk away and you go, well, these might be at odds with the team. So that's just pro sports. And frankly, there's that in business too.

sales figures within your BD org are incentivized and you want the entire sales team to collaborate and share on deals and share contacts and so on and so forth. So that's where like good managers and good leadership comes in, whether it's the head coach, assistant coaches to, you know, your, your executive team down and like building a really strong culture so that you celebrate individual performance, but you,

individuals widely recognize that their success contributes to the companies or the teams. Talk to me a little bit about what it means to be a captain of a team, like leading a team as a player. Well, the person you should interview who's best suited for this is Sam Walker.

who wrote the captain's class. And he's studied the best teams and dynasties in the world. And he'll tell you that the best captains are...

Most responsible for the success of dynasties and the best teams in professional sports history around the globe. So he ran this study around the best teams ever, most championships, dynasties in eras across sport, across gender.

And he came down to like 10 teams and he found something he wasn't looking for, which was a singular captain across each of those teams that was a water bottle carrier, which was often not the person responsible for top performance. And he references Pele, for example, that never had or was never given the responsibility to Captain Brazil because they always viewed it as like, why give him that extra responsibility when he's got enough?

He's got to score three goals a game. Let's get out of his way. Let's get out of his way. Yeah, it doesn't mean you're the best player. Yeah. And I think Western culture gets it wrong in sports for that reason. I grew up in a system where best player was captain. And we should think critically around who is best to be captain, where you're leading the team, you're empathizing with the team, you're bridging the comms from the coaches to the teams, in some cases, teams to coach to GM.

And that requires a lot of time and a lot of individual and group conversation. And time must not be discounted because time is at a premium when it comes to pro sports and individual performance and all the stuff we just talked about.

It's a really important question because your team's success relies on your choice for captain. I want to switch gears a little bit and get into a little bit more personal questions if you're okay with that. Sure. What have you struggled with in life? A lot. I struggle every day.

So there's not one thing I can think about. The first word that came to mind was balance. And I've thought a lot about it, spent a lot of time around balance. What does that mean to you? Well, it means that like happiness, there isn't a moment or a time in your life or a place to be where you'll feel more balanced than you do now. I think the perspective...

at least that I subscribe to around balance and happiness. It's more of the frequency of those moments, small moments. It gets you feeling whole in the intensity of one.

You win a championship, it's amazing, but it's actually just not as great as it's led up to be. And most athletes and coaches like a day or a week later, like, okay, on to the next one. So it's a frequency of moments of happiness, a frequency of moments of feeling balanced and secure, right?

And frequency meaning that there are a lot of moments where there isn't, but if you can get more than half, then that's a good place to be. So I think where I struggle with the most, probably just talking this out is dealing with the lows and knowing that there's always going to be the other side of it if you continue to persevere. When do you feel the greatest sense of inner peace? In the morning, I think, before the day starts. And then sometimes mid-morning after the day has started and I get a break, that's probably like

The time where I feel the most inner peace. Are you alone? Typically, yes. And it doesn't matter where you are, like in nature, in your car. It's just that inner, like your alone inner peace. That's right. It's the reset, the start of a day. You know, sleep is really important in that regard. And it doesn't happen every morning because there's some times where you wake up with your head on fire with a bunch of stuff to do.

But in those moments where you do have time and space and using it wisely, that's where I have the most inner peace. When are you most likely to lose control of your thoughts? Pretty regularly, actually. I struggle with ADHD. In today's technological world, there are things happening to me, not just in my own head, but around me with hardware that distracts me. It's a big challenge of mine is being present.

And then the flip side, embracing some of the benefits of the way that my mind tends to work, which shoots off in sometimes a dozen directions at the same time, helps me solve for problems that I think are multidimensional or abstract. So it's again, that balance of what got me here is also important.

making me feel this way. And so let me use the strengths and also acknowledge the weaknesses and care for those and help cure those.

It's so like ADHD in society is so strange to me because we tend to focus only on the weaknesses without the corresponding advantages that you gain from that. Yeah, no doubt. So I grew up with learning differences and I believe that my learning differences ended up being a gift because the way that I've had to learn in a traditional education model, which is very linear, was almost through R&D.

like a course of action. And in some cases, like acting out a history lesson helped me retain the information. And so schools that specialize in educating children with learning differences, whether it's somewhere on the spectrum to dyslexia, to ADHD, to auditory processing disorder, I think they actually get it right. And it's led to a very entrepreneurial environment for me.

uh, where I, I actually love to problem solve and I'd like to question the status quo, even like the, the quick snare at like I retired and, you know, maybe I'll come back is a challenge to the status quo. Like why in sports, if you, if you want to take a break, do you, do you have to like end it all? Well, it's just because it's all, it is a commoditized business. Athletes are commoditized. However, like it just doesn't need to be that way.

Like Gronkowski needed two and a half seasons to heal. And now he's playing great again. Yeah. And I'm not, for the record, I'm not planning to come out of retirement, but I do think that the systems are cane and it's worth talking about. So, so that I'm constantly, and I think it's because of the way that my brain functions, constantly challenging status quo. What are you afraid of? I'm fearfully motivated on the field. I think fear kicks in, in a lot of other aspects of life.

I feel that it is more unhealthy than motivating. I'm not afraid of anything at the moment. When I've spent seven years in therapy, I do weekly therapy. I think that I have the mammoths on my shoulders that we all do. Critical, negative, self-talk, etc. What therapy does is just kind of like dissipate.

a lot of that or lower the volume and gives you perspective that those mammoths never go away.

The goal is to actually just shrink them in size. And that I think helps with fear of one thing or another. What habits are you trying to break right now? Phone habit, maybe some caffeine kicks, critical self-talk, those types of things. What are you most stressed? I'll stick with time and space. Usually like the three to five o'clock range in the afternoon because I never get everything done.

in a day, never. And I think that's okay. It's called entrepreneurship. And at this stage of my life, I'm really trying to explore relationships more and the enjoyment of life more, which conflicts with 80-hour work weeks. So that bottleneck is that 3:00 to 5:00 PM range because I don't stop work at 5:00.

But like you start thinking, all right, if I need to get out of here by six or seven, I've got to start jamming now. And then, and then looking at a calendar from time to time where there's 12 or 13 meetings in a day, then you're like, fuck, this is going to be a stressful one. What's most important to remind yourself in those moments when you're feeling that stress? That there are tactics to get out of it. I mentioned, you know, meditation, breathing, accessing meditation.

cold ice. Yeah, that was an interesting one. You mentioned putting cold ice around your neck. So similar to schools that specialize in educating children with learning differences, I think that certain therapy that is focused on working with

Certain people on the DSM call it. It's actually like really good therapy for anyone. So, so example is dialectical behavioral therapy. It's called DBT. It is a process often worked through with people with personality disorders. But it's very tactical because people with personality disorders are often dealing with disassociation. But the difference between personality disorder and somebody who doesn't, at least from a,

prescription standpoint, non-medical is, is like, we have the same thoughts. We just are able to step away from it. It's that critical inner voice. I was just mentioning someone who experiences disassociation has that same thought that we do. And then it becomes reality. So DBT will give tactics to stepping out of it. One of them is changing your body temperature. So like putting your hand in the freezer or like having, having an ice pack and just cooling off your head, taking a walk,

and meditating, things like that. What does a walk do? Reactivates your biochemistry in your body. It's like begins to release endorphins, which helps shift some of that mindset. Some of the most stimulating, I think, breakthrough thoughts that Mike and I have are on hikes. Yeah, I find it's a great way to think and reflect and also just generate new ideas. I love walking meetings.

It feels so much healthier and just looser and more natural. Yeah. The only thing you have to be careful of is meetings running long. And then all of a sudden you're missing others. I was there during COVID. I would take most of my meetings walking with headphones in. And then I found out I was bumping up against other meetings. So I had to

be more thoughtful. What keeps you up at night? Fortunately, not much. I can sleep really well. It's a benefit. I can go to sleep really well. Oh, you don't stay asleep? I don't stay asleep. So maybe the question is like, what keeps you from sleeping? Do you have the entrepreneur's curse of like waking up at 4am or 3am and just being ready to go?

Literally, you should have stopped at 4 a.m. I did it this morning. I did it the morning before. I can count on waking up at 4 a.m. almost every day. And I think it's for different reasons and different moments. Right now, a lot is going on in my life because I've retired. I'm bi-coastal in a big moment for our business in transitioning from year three to four. So I'm having trouble staying asleep. But going to sleep, again, has never been an issue. Yeah.

Luckily. What are you most optimistic about? The future of our business right now. I'm really optimistic about where the PLL is going and the people that we have here, the talent.

it's not just in the workforce, but on the field. It's what I spend most of my time thinking about is, is, is our business that we're building. And final question. I always try to end with the same question, but what do you want other people to say about you when you're no longer here? Oh man, that's, that's really difficult. It's like writing your own obituary. I think that the one word comes to mind, it's impact.

and impact fill in the blank but I hope to have an impact on the next generation impact on the current I don't want to call it current generation I just want to call it impact on people that I know and people that I share an experience with that to me is at the highest level what we're hoping to do in business relationships interactions of all sorts that's a great place to end this thank you so much Paul

Yeah, thanks for having me. I enjoyed it. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham Street. I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to. Email me at shane at fs.blog. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog slash podcast. To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog slash tribe or check out the show notes. Can you do me a small favor? Go online right now and share this episode with one friend who you think would love it.

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