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July 2, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
43:27
Episode 126 - Dre Baldwin, Expert on Discipline, Building Confidence, and Mental Toughness
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Hey everybody, come on in.
It's a very special coffee with Scott Adams.
And before I tell you what all the fun is going to be about this morning, it's time for the simultaneous sip.
You know the simultaneous sip is the best sip of the day.
And if you don't get it early, well, somebody else is going to get it.
Are you ready?
Simultaneous sip, everybody.
All right, well, I'm delighted today to be talking with Dre Baldwin.
Dre Baldwin.
You can find him on Twitter at Dre All Day.
Is that right, Dre? Yes.
Dre is an expert on discipline, motivation, and mental toughness.
These are all the things that you want to know and this is my favorite topic.
Dre is coming to us from Miami.
I'm connecting to him using the Interface app.
That's the app that my company makes.
It's called Interface by WenHub and you can connect to experts.
And experts can make money, or in this case, making WEN tokens, which we hope will be on an exchange to turn into money real soon.
So, let me introduce Dre Baldwin.
Dre, say hi to everybody on Periscope.
How's it going everybody?
Going on everybody on Scott's Periscope.
Welcome, glad you're here.
Looking forward to this conversation.
Great. And I'm hoping our sound is pretty good.
I'm using a new technology here using my iPad behind me and broadcasting from my phone.
All right. So, Dre, what is the biggest problem that people have with getting disciplined?
What do you think is their biggest obstacle to being disciplined?
The biggest obstacle to being disciplined is that it's just not fun for most people.
They don't see it as something that's...
It's not that people don't know what discipline is.
Everybody knows what it is.
And this is something that I don't remember where I said it, but somewhere either writing or speaking, I talked about it last week, is that if you have a job and you show up every day and you keep your job, you have discipline because you show up every day to do your work.
You have kids and you're raising them.
You're disciplined. If you go to school or you play on a sports team or you have a garden that you maintain and the grass stays cut, you have discipline.
So it's not that people don't know what it is or it's not even that they don't have it.
It's just there are certain areas of life that it's painful for some people to apply.
Actually, I think we all have areas where it's painful for us to apply discipline.
That's the challenge. Now, before we get into some of those details, you used your own concepts here to succeed in basketball, is that right?
That's correct. Can you give us a little background on how you did that?
Sure. The short version is I started playing basketball.
I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
That's my hometown. I started playing basketball at the age of 14, and the environment that I come from There's no grass at the playground field.
Some people play football, but not many.
There's a tennis court that nobody used.
There's a baseball field that the grass doesn't get cut.
I did play a little bit of that.
There's no swimming pool.
We didn't know any other sports.
So the only thing that most young men do is go to the basketball court, at least in our early teens.
So I started playing at age 14.
I didn't have anyone teaching me.
I have a sister. She doesn't play sports.
I'm six feet four inches tall.
My father is five, seven, five, eight maybe.
So he didn't play basketball.
There were a lot of kids in the neighborhood playing.
There were only maybe three coaches in the neighborhood, so no one took me under their wing.
So I had to teach myself, and this is in the mid-90s.
No YouTube, no programs online, no Instagram.
So I just went to the court and just started trying stuff just to see what would work out, and eventually it started to work.
Finally made my high school basketball team as a senior, where I averaged an unbelievable two points per game as a senior in high school.
That's age 18, where most people are looking at me and saying, okay, well, look, you can be successful in life, but it probably won't be in sports.
Me, 18, graduating high school, two points a game.
But five years later, I was signing my first professional basketball contract that was in Lithuania.
And if you're looking at me saying he's a basketball player, who is he?
You probably never heard of me because my whole career was played out.
I played for nine years internationally, and while I was doing that, I started making programs, making YouTube videos, and that's where I kind of became known.
I got more known through YouTube than I did from my actual playing career.
That's the short version of my basketball life.
What was the point at which you thought, I could do this professionally?
That's a great question. Around age 15, 16, Scott, I started believing because I saw how quickly I was developing.
I was actually getting better at basketball despite the fact that, and there was a whole lot of irrationality in this on my end because I tried out for the high school team in 9th grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, got cut the first day.
Those of you who know how sports tryouts work, there are several levels of the tryout.
I never made it past the first level of tryouts.
Cut every time, but I was improving.
So I started to believe, you know what?
I want to be a basketball player.
I had always had this dream of being rich and famous.
That was always the thing that I wanted.
That's what I saw.
That was all the people who had the success.
It seemed to be that's what they had.
So I figured my path would be through sports.
And around age 16, I started thinking that maybe I could become a professional, but it was a very big...
It was a dream, a goal.
But I had no path, no plan.
And then at the age of 18, so this was the summer...
After high school graduation, so that summer between high school and the start of college, that's the summer where I knew I was actually good at basketball.
And players ask me, well, Dre, what does it mean to be good?
How do you know that you're good?
And my definition of good is, at that point, I knew that you could put me on any basketball court, anywhere in the world, with anybody, and I would earn respect as a player by the end of the day.
That's when I knew I could actually become a pro.
I did not know, it wasn't until years later, maybe two or three years later, that I learned what the actual path would be to plan, but I had the belief that I could do it by age 18.
Now, like you said, was that irrational, do you think?
Because you couldn't have possibly known, you couldn't have known that it would work out for you, but did you feel you had this something special?
I did. And it was absolutely 100% irrational for me to believe I could become a professional basketball player.
There's a funny story I'll tell you.
When I graduated from college, I went to an NCAA, for those who follow sports, I went to an NCAA Division III school.
So I would have a degree from Penn State.
But Penn State, just like every other state school, has several campuses across the state, right?
So I went to Penn State Altoona, which is an NCAA, and in sports, they're D3, whereas the main campus is D1 with the football team and all of that.
So I went to a D3 school.
I did not put up eye-popping stats.
I did play, but if my stats were not, I didn't blow anybody out of the water.
I didn't even play my senior year because I got kicked off the team by the coach my junior year, and When I got home from college, my parents were asking me naturally, okay, you got a college degree now, son.
What are you going to do? And I said, I want to play professional basketball.
So you can imagine, just from the little bit I told you about myself to this point, how ridiculous that sounds, right?
You didn't make the high school team to a senior.
You didn't even play your senior year at a D3 college.
Now you're going to become a professional athlete?
Like, what sense does that make?
It didn't make any sense. None at all.
And my mom just tore into me there.
Like, man, you went to school for four years.
I've sacrificed all my life for me and my sister, for you and your sister to get good education.
So now you want to play basketball.
Listen, you need to get a job.
You need to get yourself a car.
You need to get an apartment. At the time I had braids in my hair, you know, cornrows.
She said, you need to get a haircut.
So these are all the things that my mom, like, she couldn't believe that I was thinking.
And it was still irrational even to that point.
And I was so angry from that conversation.
I didn't lash out at my mom or anything, but I was so angry that Someone could look at it and just smack me in the face with that reality, quote-unquote, that that emotional drive from that day pushed me to guarantee that it was going to happen.
So yes, it was 1,000% irrational to believe that could work.
But that's the exact reason why I did.
Do you have some parental influence?
Were one of your parents sort of the same mental state as you, which is, I'm just going to make this happen?
No, absolutely not.
My parents were very much more practical, much more on the realistic side.
And with my mother and father, my mother was really the one who kind of laid down the wall, Scott.
She was the one who made the rules and enforced the rules and did most of the talking.
My father was there, but he kind of let her, she kind of steered the ship.
So I don't even know what he really thought about it because she was on such a roll that he kind of just co-signed it.
But I would say the discipline that I have developed since then definitely 100% comes from my mother.
So there was the yin and the yang of it.
Alright, so I've got to ask you a mom question.
Did your mother tell you you were going to be successful as something or did she assume you were going to be successful or was that really not part of the conversation?
It wasn't part of the conversation.
I think, I mean, my parents, I'm 36, so my parents were born in the early 60s, and this was before, of course, we didn't have an internet then, so this was the whole, the plan, like I like to call it the plan in capital letters, like a proper noun.
So this is go to school, get your education, go to college, get a degree, get a good job, get yourself a car, get yourself a house, get married, have 2.5 kids and a dog, and live happily ever after.
Just be a little bit better than your parents.
So I think that's what my parents wanted my sister and I to do.
They never explicitly said it, but when I told her I wanted to be a pro athlete and I saw her reaction, I figured, okay, yeah, that's pretty much what she wanted, but she didn't want to have to tell us that.
My sister went and did kind of exactly that, and I did kind of the opposite.
What was your major?
Business with a focus in management and marketing.
Alright, so what I like about this is that you were building what I call a skill stack.
So even if the basketball didn't work out the way you wanted, you still had lots of ways to go.
You could still get there on multiple paths.
Now, let's get to what the viewers probably care about the most, which is they're really happy that you're motivated, but they're wondering, like, how the hell could we be like that guy?
You know, they're thinking, how can I feel that confident about what I'm doing?
What techniques do you coach people in to get them in the right mindset?
Well, if someone's looking for confidence, the first thing I want to figure out is what is it that they're looking for and why are you actually looking for it?
And then try to uncover what they really want.
Because usually, Scott, I'm sure you know, People tell you that they want something.
That's not really what they want.
That's what they say they want. But there's something under that and maybe even something under that that they truly want.
But if we were just saying someone wants to be confident on the surface, the number one thing that person has to do is create what is the outcome.
The first thing you need in your mind is the outcome.
It's the same with me and playing basketball.
I'm 16, not making a basketball team, and I said I want to be a pro basketball player.
So all I had was the starting point and I had the ending point.
I had no idea what was going to happen to me.
But because I had that vision, that vision was kind of propelling me forward in order to get what I wanted, I guess as a rough version of attraction.
So the number one thing is, what is it that you actually want?
And you have to really, that has to be what you really want.
Not what sounds good, not what looks good on the internet, but what you actually really want in your life.
Something that you may even be embarrassed to tell people because the reality of the facts in front of you says, that doesn't even make sense.
Similar to my situation.
Now, I like to make a distinction between what people say they want and what they decide to do because they're different.
When you decide, you've gone beyond wanting it.
Wanting it doesn't get you as much as deciding to go get it.
Now, did you visualize yourself in the future?
Did you write down what you wanted?
How did you kind of get on that?
I did. I visualized it Well, I visualized it.
This is, so this is like the mid-90s.
I graduated high school in the year 2000, so I didn't know what visualization was.
I had never, I didn't get introduced to personal, what we call personal development until maybe 2002.
So I didn't know, I didn't know there was a such thing as visualizing, and I didn't know about writing down goals.
So every year, every New Year's, I would write down my goals the next year on it, actually by hand on paper.
I don't even write by hand anymore, having it in years.
But I would do that and visualize what it is that I wanted to achieve.
And then around 2002, 2003, I heard this radical idea.
Instead of writing down goals for each year, how about write down goals for the next 10 years or for your whole life?
So I did that. And I remember writing down a goal that I wanted to one day have a website called DreBaldwin.com or Dre.something that was going to be about me, by me, for me.
And that eventually became...
Dre All Day, which eventually became the brand.
So I was doing a rough version of visualization back before I even knew what this whole realm was.
Personal development is what I tell people is making yourself better and more valuable on purpose.
And a lot of people don't do it on purpose.
I was kind of doing it somewhat on purpose and somewhat by accident.
But now that it's available to everyone, now I think it's a requirement for anyone who wants to go somewhere.
So, on top of visualizing what you want, tell us a little more about technique, because some people can visualize, but then they're not doing anything about it.
So, how do you connect the visualization to the actual actions?
Once someone has a clear vision, Scott, of what it is they want to achieve, the next thing, of course, is you want to take some actions.
The challenge is, I don't know what to do.
I don't know where to go. I don't have any ideas.
And I get emails and DMs from people saying these exact things every single day.
And here's what you do at that point if you don't know what to do.
Come up with some ideas. I got this idea about getting ideas from this guy named James Altitude.
You familiar with James? Oh yeah, yes, of course.
James talks about the idea machine.
Come up with 10 ideas per day.
I started actually doing that a few years ago.
Come up with 10 ideas per day and it becomes automatic where you just start coming up with ideas easily.
These are not necessarily good ideas.
They're not necessarily actionable.
None of them may actually turn into anything, but if you do 10 ideas a day, That's over 3,000 ideas a year.
So if you come up with just 10 ideas for, I want to be a basketball player, what are 10 things that I could do that could make me become a professional athlete?
Who can I talk to? Who can I DM? Who can I email?
Who has a YouTube video out there?
Who's at the park across the street?
What about this guy who lives next door to me?
He looks like a basketball player.
He always has the drawers on.
What are 10 things you could do right now and ask the questions to those people And somebody's going to know something is going to lead to something.
So taking action, I would say, is the number one thing that you do.
And your actions do not have to produce results.
They don't have to be sound. They don't have to be logical.
If you take enough action, eventually you're going to run into the person who knows the person who knows the person or someone who has the information.
And another thing that I tell people these days, in 2018, it's unacceptable to be clueless.
It's unacceptable to not know what you could possibly do next.
It's illogical to say that I've tried everything or I don't know what to do next when there's people like yourself out there sharing your knowledge, answering people's questions every single day.
We have books, we got YouTube, we got blogs.
How could you not have another option, another resource, something else you can go to to figure out what's another way I can make this work?
Alright, let's summarize some of those parts before we go on, because people are joining the Periscope as they go.
So you've got the visualizing what you want, the affirmations or sometimes writing it down, sometimes visualizing it.
At the same time you were building a skill stack, so you had options, you had different ways to go, you had a four-year degree, right, in business management?
And so that gave you options, but your primary passion was to play professional basketball.
So you had the skill stack, you had the visualization, and then you did the James Altucher thing where you're coming up with 10 ideas a day.
Now, I would call that habit.
There's a real good book called Habit, which is exactly what I was hoping you would say, by the way.
There's a point in this where you have to turn the visualization into some kind of a habit, and your habit that you consciously determined was, I'm going to come up with ideas every day, lots of ideas.
Then the next part was action.
And probably the most important thing that people are going to want to hear is how did you actually get off the couch?
How do you do the first thing?
And it sounds like, don't let me put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you were taking action without a huge regard to whether this was exactly the right thing to do for the rest of your life.
But you were saying, try this, try this, try this, just sort of opening every door and seeing what's behind that door, right?
Now, would you call that a system of just opening as many doors as you can until you find something?
I wouldn't have called it a system then, but I could see how you could see it as a system looking back by connecting the dots.
What you do, and just to speak specifically about playing professional sports, there are these things called exposure camps.
This is how I actually got into the pros.
An exposure camp is like a job fair, Scott.
But instead of putting on a suit and handing out your resume and shaking hands, you bring your equipment for your sport.
And I know they do this in basketball.
I don't know what other sports they do it.
And you actually play against 200 other guys who want to play pro basketball.
And in the stands, instead of there being fans, there are scouts, agents, coaches, managers, team owners from all around the world watching you play.
And your goal there is to impress somebody.
You only got to impress one person.
So when I went to my first exposure camp, this was in 2005, all I needed to do was impress one person.
And I know from watching basketball and playing so much, listen, you can make one play in the You can score two points the whole game, but that one play could be spectacular enough that somebody's impressed and they're like, well, I don't want that guy.
Hold on that point because I want to emphasize that.
That's such an incredible point.
I find that what stops people often is an incorrect view of their odds.
In other words, they think there are overwhelming odds, I can't do this.
But you were thinking that the odds were actually better than most people would think, because you were looking at all these people and saying, I only need one.
I just need one person to say the right thing.
Let me give you, and I'm going to get right back to this, but when I tried to become a cartoonist, I sent out my samples to a bunch of different places, and my attitude was exactly that.
I only need one person to like it.
And exactly one person liked it, and now we're talking, you know, years later.
Alright, so let's get back to your story.
So you're in the tryouts, you only need one person to like you?
Right, and I made some great plays there, and somebody liked me.
They wrote up, basically what they do though, is they make a scouting report.
After the exposure camp's over, it was only three days, they write down a scouting report for everybody who was there.
They had video of everyone who was there, and they put it up on our website.
So I took that scouting report.
This is a link to a webpage.
And I had the footage.
Now this footage was on a thing called a VHS tape.
And I know you know that, Scott.
Maybe some people don't remember VHS. That footage actually became my first YouTube video, which started a parallel story.
But I took that link and that footage.
And I called every basketball agent whose phone number I could find in the United States of America.
I emailed them or called every one of them.
Maybe seven or eight of them.
Repried to my email or message and called me back and was interested.
Those seven or eight I made copies of my VHS tape and physically mailed that tape to those agents One of those eight agents called me back.
He became my first agent.
He got me my first deal to play basketball overseas.
And it's similar to what you said, Scott, piggybacking on that.
I heard someone say that the entertainment industry, whether we're talking about publishing books, cartoons, basketball, they call it a bandwagon business because nobody wants to mess with you when nobody knows you.
But as soon as one person is Right, so you have one person who liked you and then you're off.
So you had a vision of the whole plan.
I mean, you need to find somebody and then you would leverage that one thing to more exposure.
All right. Now, was there the one agent, or I guess the one scout who first noticed you and gave you your break, was there something they saw in you in particular that they called out and said, oh, you've got this one skill or quality or something?
Was there anything that they noticed in particular?
I think so. When I played basketball, my calling card in basketball, at least in my early years, was my athleticism.
So my ability to jump, play above the rim, and dunk the basketball, basically.
And anyone who's watched a basketball game knows that a dunk is probably the play you're going to remember more than anything else that happens.
Now the game's changing a little bit now to where you've got the three-point shot.
Now people want to be Steph Curry, but back in my day, people wanted to be like Mike, right?
They wanted to be Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan's thing was dunking on everybody.
So I had this one big dunk at that exposure camp that the whole gym just went crazy.
And after that game, one of the scouts came up to me and he asked me a few questions.
And he was one of the guys who was responsible for writing the scouting reports.
So because he saw it and he was impressed by what he saw, that helped me get this glowing scouting report.
And then when I sent it out to the agent, the agent saw the scouting report.
He wasn't at the camp. But he saw the footage, he saw the scouting report, and said, okay, I can leverage this and get a team interested, and we can make something happen, and that's exactly what happened.
Now, when somebody sees a dunk, they're seeing two things.
They're seeing, you know, you have the athletic ability, but isn't there also something about the attitude that gets you there in the first place?
I mean, by the time you're throwing that ball through the hoop, you're like 90% attitude, 10% athlete at that point.
Like, that's got to come through, doesn't it?
All right, so...
Absolutely, I mean, to...
Yeah, all right, so...
So, what parts do you pull out of your experience that you go to first, that when you've got somebody who's just stuck, they can't put all the pieces together like you do?
What do you find is like the main lever that gets somebody from doing nothing to doing something, which is the big change, right?
The big change doesn't even matter what you do.
If somebody is doing something, they're going to be more successful than the person who can't get off the couch.
How do you do the first get off the couch motivation?
The first motivation has to be them believing that doing something can actually lead to a result.
What I found, Scott, is that people say they want things, but they're unwilling to take the action on it because they Don't believe that taking these actions is going to actually produce the result.
They just don't believe that it's going to work.
If you believe something's going to work, you are willing to make call after call.
If you have a book that you want to get published, you're willing to go to every publisher.
If you have a movie you want to put out, you're willing to go to every studio and get rejected because you know there's some value in this.
And people don't really believe in what it is they want to do.
They're not going to take the action on it.
It doesn't matter what you say.
It doesn't matter how you try to motivate them or push them.
If they don't see it actually working, then it's not going to work.
Now, if you're able to get someone to start taking an action, and you can get them to take an action that will produce at least a small, a little bit of result, and they can see that, then you can build on that, but you can't always move a person to that action.
Maybe if there's a personal relationship, let's say you're If your kid or one of your best friends, you drag them to the gym and they start to get some results after a week, then maybe they'll keep coming.
But if you don't know the person or someone on the internet, you can't make somebody take action if they're not going to do it.
I mean, at some point, you have to have something that moves you off your butt to at least try what you think will work.
But if you don't believe it's going to work, nothing I say is going to change that.
Now, I had an experience that you reminded me of.
When I first became a famous author, I was still actually working in my day job, and my coworkers came to me, several of them, and said, hey, I think I would like to be a writer.
For magazines or one wanted to write a book.
And these are people who had never written a thing, did not have any special writing talent, and came to me and said, hey, I want to be a writer.
So I encouraged them, told them, you know, how to find people.
And here's the weird thing.
100% of them succeeded.
100%. And it was all because of that thing that you said earlier, which is people are not good at estimating the odds of success.
So it turns out that being a number one best-selling author, of course, is very hard, but getting published somewhere and being a professional writer is a lot easier than people imagined.
And working with editors and putting some effort into it, they pretty much all found some place to get published and got paid for it.
So probably the first thing is that people are bad at estimating the odds, especially if they're willing to try a lot of stuff.
That's the first thing.
I have a little tip that I give people which is that things that are going to work out eventually always suggest themselves in the bad form.
In other words, the first time somebody made a cell phone, the very first cell phone, it was always dropping and disconnecting and not working and blah blah blah.
But you could tell people still loved it and had to have them even with all the flaws.
And I find that I've tried, I don't know, dozens and dozens of different business ventures, and I always just do the first thing.
So I say to myself, what's the first thing you do if you're going to write a book?
Well, come up with a title, write a first chapter, maybe get some chapter outlines.
If you do that, And then you look at it and you say, my God, this is really interesting to me.
It's pulling me along.
Then that's good. And if nobody cares and you don't care, then you drop that one and go to the next one.
So do you find that the project itself has to pull you?
Because that's a big thing for me.
There are all the things I could do and I poke at them all and one of them just grabs me and starts pulling me.
And I wait for that one because I can't motivate myself to do something I don't want to do.
It has to pull me.
So do you think people should focus like a laser or try a lot of different things?
What's better for motivation? I think try a lot of different things and see which one works.
I mean, it's hustling.
Having a bunch of different hustles going at the same time, see what works.
Even if it's in one specific area, like you said, coming up with a title, writing a chapter, maybe coming up with a list of publishers who you're going to call.
Get their phone numbers, get a contact name, get an email of those people and have a spreadsheet of it.
So now you got a little bit of momentum going, which you just created yourself.
And I'll tell you a quick story about pro basketball that kind of goes right to what you said, is that the result is going to show itself even when it's not actually working.
The first exposure camp I went to was not the one that was a success for me.
The first one was a tryout for this small team in a small league called the ABA. And I don't know if many people even heard of the ABA, but this team was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a little small town.
Now in exposure camp, I tell you, there's hundreds of guys who want to play basketball all show up.
My first exposure camp, three guys showed up.
It was me and three other players showed up.
And one of the players, he bailed out of it 10 minutes in because he was in such bad shape.
He was doing a full court drill.
He couldn't even participate.
But the players, the coaches who were there, they liked my game a little bit that they could, you know, surmise from there only being three guys there.
And they invited me to the next one and then to the next one because people weren't showing up.
So even in those failures, I saw a little bit of success.
I'm like, oh, these pro coaches...
Actually liked my game after I got kicked off my team in college.
So this was something. This is something.
This is a string to pull on.
So those little...
Success is even in the failures, but do show something, like you said.
Yeah, sometimes I refer to that as the X factor.
There's sometimes something that you can't put your finger on that makes something better than another thing, and you were probably noticing that in your own game very early on, that there was something about you and basketball, your body, the way you think, that was just perfect for this thing.
So you probably saw the future in the bad version of yourself.
You could look forward.
So we're talking to Dre Baldwin, expert on, somebody just asked to reintroduce you, expert on discipline, motivation, and mental toughness out of Miami.
And Dre, where can people find you?
Social media. I'm on Twitter, at Dre All Day on Twitter.
My Instagram is my name, Dre Baldwin, one word.
What else is there? I'm on YouTube.
Just look up my name, Dre Baldwin, and my website is dreallday.com.
I also have a podcast called Work On You Again.
And you do speaking and coaching?
Yes, I do. Speaking, coaching, consulting, writing, all of it.
Alright, it's for corporations, organizations, individuals, all of that?
Yes. And he's appearing right now on the interface by Wenhub app where you can talk to experts.
That's my startup. Most of you know about that.
All right. Give me a few examples of things that people just don't think of, things that when you tell people, alright, here's a key, here's a technique, that people go, wow, I wouldn't have thought of that.
Something that's, you know, that's that little extra sauce that you bring.
Sure. You know how with confidence.
People want to be confident.
You've heard of the The technique, fake it till you make it.
You heard of that before? Sure.
It's my motto.
It's my life motto. Fake it till you make it.
Now, when it comes to that phrase or that technique, some people think that it works perfectly.
Maybe you do. Some people think it's complete garbage.
I've heard people even argue that fake it till you make it can make you worse.
The thing about faking it till you make it is that once you decide...
You're going to quote-unquote fake it and be, you're going to be a pro athlete even though you're still an amateur.
You're going to be a millionaire even though you don't have any money in your account.
Whatever the situation is, as soon as you make that decision to become that person, you're not actually faking it.
You're actually being it.
It becomes real.
Because in a moment that I decide I'm going to present myself as this person who I wasn't two minutes ago, once I decide to be it, I'm being it.
And it will last as long as you decide to keep making it last.
Because human beings, we don't have the brain power to look at everything we see and ask ourselves, okay, is he being for real?
Is he faking? Is this who this person really is?
Are they... Trying to be something that they're not.
We just had to accept things on the surface because we don't have the brain power to examine every little tiny thing.
It's kind of like that movie Catch Me If You Can with Frank Abagnale, if I'm saying his name right, how he would just go around places and pretend to be something, and he was so convincing that people were doing whatever he said to do.
Because he assumed the position so much.
And the problem people have with faking it till you make it, if you want to call it that, is that they have it in their mind.
80% of their mind is still thinking that I'm faking this.
This is not for real. Are people going to figure me out?
How long can I keep this up?
And because you're thinking that, that's the exact thing keeping it from working.
So if you were to just dive in 100% into it and immerse yourself in that faking it, It would become so real immediately and you would see results so quickly that you would be astonished as to why you hadn't done it soon.
So I'm thinking of writing a book about all the mental things that people do that are holding them back.
And one of them is that the worst advice I've ever heard is be yourself.
Because first of all, if being yourself was good enough, you know, you're done.
Hey, I'm just being myself.
I'm poor and I'm hungry and nobody likes me, but I'm being myself.
Now, my observation of life is that nobody is themselves.
Like, if it were just me, I wouldn't have shaved, I wouldn't be wearing clothes.
I mean, everything you do should be in the context of a society, a culture, a family.
You're connected to all that stuff.
You're not some, like, floating, free-floating variable.
Your variable is everybody.
And if you're not doing something that other people like, You're not succeeding.
I mean, ultimately, you need to make yourself into something that other people care about and want to pay for or want to be around, or else you've done nothing.
So, and I also believe, this is the Dr.
Laura Philosophy.
That you are what you do.
You're not your mental thoughts on the inside.
It's what you do. So you could be the worst person on the inside, but if you spend your whole day doing charity work and helping people, that's who you frickin' are.
You're not those bad thoughts you had.
You're the person who's actually doing stuff.
So your faking until you make a thing reminds me of that, which is that the faking it is actually doing something.
You're actually doing it.
The doing it makes it you.
That's who you are. You're the person doing it.
So, yeah, I'm totally on board with that.
But how do you...
You seem to have an unnatural...
Well, not unnatural. A natural...
It seems like you're born with confidence, which I think I was born with as well.
I mean, six years old, I was sure something was going to work out, wasn't sure what.
And that's never changed.
How do you help somebody get...
To be comfortable with confidence, is it just by observing their own success in small ways?
Is that the main thing? No, I don't think so.
I think the main way for someone to build confidence is to start with something that you're actually good at.
It's kind of like you talk about the skill stack.
What skills do you actually have?
And develop more and more of those skills.
In the world that we're in now, as the world continues, The more skills people have, the more options you're going to have.
The more options will be available to you because every day there's some new way popping up for people to build success, I guess, if we want to call it that.
So the number one thing is to start with something that you're actually good at.
Are you good at speaking to an audience?
Are you good at talking to a camera?
Are you good at talking to people one-on-one?
Are you good at writing? Are you good at being funny on YouTube?
What is it that you're actually good at Do the thing that you're good at and then expand from there.
Expand from where you're actually getting results and keep going outward from there.
So the number one way of building that confidence is where are you good now?
Don't try to force it.
What I find, Scott, is a lot of people are trying to force themselves to be good at things that they're just not good at.
They just don't have the ability.
They don't have the talent.
They don't have the natural inclination.
Like, I wasn't good at basketball when I first started.
But I have some talent. You know, I'm tall.
I can run fast. I can jump high.
I got long arms. I'm black.
So maybe those are good things that could possibly work for a basketball player.
I wasn't trying to force myself to be something I wouldn't.
Alright. So I often tell people that if they're trying to build their personal talent stack, you know, their collection of skills that make them unique, it's good if you start with at least one thing that you've got a natural advantage at.
So in my case, I'm a little more creative than the average person.
But I added to that a mediocre drawing talent, artistic talent, modest, but I could just try hard.
Much the way you trained hard, I could just try hard to draw.
And then writing, figuring out how to produce, how to make a cartoon and stuff.
But I had to start with something that I was a little naturally good at, so I'm right with you on that advice.
Let's get ready to close down.
I like to keep these periscopes under a certain time so that they don't run too long.
I've really enjoyed this.
In the comments, give me some comments about what you liked about this in particular.
Dre, is there anything you want to say that maybe I didn't ask?
Something that's like a big point that We would all be lacking if we had not heard.
Well, there are two things that we both kind of touched on.
One is that whole fake it till you make it thing.
As soon as you decide, once you have a clear goal of what it is you want to be, who you need to be in order to achieve your goals, Assume that position and become that person right now.
It will automatically change your actions, and that will change your results.
And the other thing is, when you were talking about what you do is who you are, I tell people that often.
I often hear people say something like, well, it's what I do, but it's not who I am.
That's garbage. Because whatever you do is how people are going to judge you, right?
Because all they can see is what you're doing.
If someone says, well, listen, I work 80 hours a week in finance, but that's not who I am.
That's the only thing that you do.
Of course that's who you are. If someone's describing you, that's the only thing they can say is he works in finance.
I never see him anywhere else.
He's not at the bar. He's not at the party.
He's not at the birthday. He's at work.
So what you do is who you are.
If you want to change who you are, All you need to do is change your actions.
And to change your actions, you must change, change, change, change your thinking self when you look in the mirror.
And you can decide to change that in any given moment.
How long it lasts is 100% your choice.
There's another piece of advice I give people, especially young people, and I say, this is the most important thing you'll ever learn.
You're going to hear this from me now, you know, if I'm talking to a young person, and I say, you're not going to believe it, but sooner or later, this is going to come back to you, and you're going to believe it later, because you're going to see enough examples, and it goes like this.
Everybody is faking all the time.
Everybody is a little less confident than they want you to see.
Everybody's showing themselves a little bit better light than maybe they're thinking on the inside.
And if you think that other people are more confident than you, you are simply mistaken.
Because other people are insecure on the inside.
And once you realize that it's really a level playing field, because the mistake is to think that the things that are happening in your head, your personal insecurities or whatever, are somehow unique and that other people have got it figured out because they're acting like they have it figured out.
But they're acting. And when you learn to act, and fake it till you make it, then it's a level playing field.
Alright, I love this conversation, but let's not go too long.
People, I'm seeing great comments here, so people are really enjoying this.
And so, Dre Baldwin, thank you very much for this.
This was a tremendous time.
I'm going to sign off of Periscope, and then I'll keep you on, and we'll wrap up over here.
You want to say goodbye?
Goodbye everybody here on Periscope.
Scott, thank you for having me.
I've been a fan. I heard you on Altucher years ago, so I'm finally glad to be able to connect and talk to your audience here on Periscope.
Thank you everyone for being here.
Hit me up on Twitter. Any questions, I'll answer them.
Great. And your Twitter is again, one more time?
At Dre All Day on Twitter.
Dre All Day. D-R-E All Day.
Alright, that's it for today.
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