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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You may be able to hear my screaming children in the background, such as life during the pandemic. Someone was telling me the other day, and I hadn't really thought about it this way, but we are well into our third season now of this new reality. First, it was spring and summer, and now here we are into fall. And it goes on. I mean, look, this is nothing compared to the Antonine Plague, Marcus Aurelius, you know, the plague comes to Rome. And maybe they were telling themselves the same thing. It'll be over by summer.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  This will just disappear like a miracle, as one head of state has said. But certainly, no one was expecting it would last for 15 years. I'm definitely not saying that the coronavirus is here for 15 years. But the point is, I think it's a good reminder, this idea of like, oh, when things go back to normal, oh, when things go back to normal, or, oh, this will be over soon. It ties us into this stock bill idea that... It's the optimists that get wrecked, the people who think, oh, we'll be home by Christmas. And Christmas comes, it's out of your control and you're wrecked by it. So it's not to say I don't have expectations, I don't have hopes, but I do try to manage those things. I try to be present.

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  It, look, it has been three seasons, but they've also, you know, flown by and, but as much as they've flown by, I have the receipts, right, for what I've managed to do in that period. And I'm, I'm proud of that, not just the time I've spent with my family, not just the, the time I've spent getting a nice bit of stillness here or there, but also, you know, I've got the, I've got the pages to prove it. I, I finished a, a book project, Lives of the Stoics, we were doing the last bits of editing on when this started. That's now out. I started the next project, that's winding up. And the ghostwriting project and something else I'm not ready to talk about, but I'm excited about. Whole bunch of other stuff, right, including really investing in and spending a lot of time on this podcast,

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  which I'm excited about. The Stoics would say that it's not just about productivity, of course, but look, like, those three seasons are not just arbitrary days or moments on a calendar, they're your life. You're watching them flip by. Every day I rip off the page in the Daily Stoic calendar, which you can check out in the Daily Stoic store, but I try to tell myself as I'm pulling off this tearaway page of the calendar, that's a day of my life gone. And Seneca would say, you know, those days now belong to death. We've died three seasons, we've died six, seven months here, we never get that time back. And so if you did waste that time, look, it's not the worst thing in the world, but you wasted it. That doesn't mean you have to waste today, doesn't mean you have to waste tomorrow. You can start over right now.

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  You can push yourself forward, you can decide to, to live the rest of the time you have, however long that is. That's of course what we talked about here at Daily Stoic. And I'm really excited about today's guest. I got a surprise text. From Eric Musselman, I had no idea who it was or how he got my number. The former head coach of the Sacramento Kings, that's how I'd heard of him. He also coached the Golden State Warriors. He was an assistant for the Grizzlies, Timberwolves, the Magic, the Hawks. It's been all over professional basketball and then sort of struggled a little bit towards the end of his time there with the Kings. It was not a, it was not a perfect fit and he has reinvented himself as a college coach. As he talks about in the thing, he had the sort of humility and the hunger to go from

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  head NBA coach, which is like as good as the job gets to being a D-league coach, which is what it was called then, to being an assistant college coach. But, you know, he wanted to reinvent himself as a coach. He wanted to learn and, and now he is the, the head coach at the University of Arkansas. You know, coaching a team through one of the most unpredictable crises in the history of sports. But here he is, right? And it's, it's a great interview. He's a fan of Stoicism. Talk about a bunch of Stoic ideas. It was exciting to hear from him. I'm always interested in hearing from folks and gonna be a good interview. I hope you guys like it. And of course, remember, I think where we opened this, like this is, this life is your

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  life. Today is today. Today could be your whole life. Don't waste it. Don't fritter it away. Use it. Carpe diem, as they say, and talk to you next week. Well, hey, man, it's, it's great to chat with you. I'm, I'm really excited to do this. Yeah, no, so am I. I can look forward to it. So obviously I first heard of you when you, when you became the coach of the Sacramento Kings and when, when we connected you, you texted me that you, you said you sucked when you were with the Kings. I was, I was curious about that because one, it's, it's, it's a, you know, it's sort of a self-aware statement, but I'm curious, actually less about what happened with the Kings.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  But if that's your judgment, how did you become better for that experience? Like how, if you felt you sucked then, how do you feel about where you've gotten since then and how did that happen?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting, Ryan, because you know, when I got fired from the Golden State Warriors, it was it was after two years and I felt really good about that experience. I I still would go to Warrior home games. My two sons had lived, you know, they they lived with their mother in in East Bay, in Danville, which is about 30 minutes away from from where the Warriors play. And and and it was a, you know, you never want to get let go, but but I walked away knowing that they had new management with Chris Mullin taking over. And I knew that anytime a new GM comes in the sports world, you know, there could be change with the coaching. But my Kings experience was just much different.

• 6:49Speaker 01

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

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And some guys loved it, like Kevin Martin, and and it changed his game philosophically, getting to the foul line in some areas that he needed to improve at. But I look at that experience and we did suck, you know, and I look at that as the one failure in my coaching journey so far. But what it did allow me to do, it allowed me to to go be a father to my two young sons. I didn't coach for three years. It allowed me to kind of reflect and then it it was kind of the turning point in a career reinventment, so to speak. I mean, I went from Being in the pro game my whole life to doing college TV games as a commentator,

• 8:15Speaker 01

  to also doing NBA stuff for Fox Radio. And so there was this transition where I was doing media with college, media with, with the pros and met my wife Danielle and she and I and my two sons kind of came to an agreement that we were going to try to go the college route after I had done two G League stints and had great success and set a ton of records in the G League that maybe the NBA thing for me to get another head job, it was going to take maybe four to five years as being an assistant. I wanted to run my own program and really, really humbling experience, Ryan, to, you know, to one, take three years off, then do two

• 8:59Speaker 01

  years as a G League head coach and mix in a stint coaching Venezuela and Dominican Republic national teams and then go be an assistant coach at Arizona State and LSU before I got my first opportunity as a college head coach at Nevada.

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  It is, you, you were a, an NBA head coach relatively young, right? Was, was there sort of an ego hit in having to like step back strategically and go, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna learn more, I'm going to figure out more of my system, I'm gonna practice on, you know, I'm gonna experiment with the G League, I'm gonna go to, I'm gonna do college programs. Was, was there sort of a, was, was that hard to, to do?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  It, it was, you know, my, my career was, you know, kind of an up and coming, quick riser. You know, I had worked for such great coaches like Chuck Daly and Doc Rivers and got, I was the youngest coach at the time in the NBA when I got the Warriors job and even a few years later, getting the Kings job. I, I think I was the youngest coach at the time then as well. And my father and I are the first. Father-son head coaches in the history of the NBA. So, you know, had this really quick rise through the ranks. And then all of a sudden, you know, you get fired for a second time. And what I did, Ryan, is I did a lot of research and there's not a lot of people that get

• 10:25Speaker 01

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

• 11:10Speaker 01

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

• 11:54Speaker 01

  And then are you going to get another chance? And fortunately for me, you know, I was willing to go the assistant route in college, which again. To my knowledge, there has not been a former NBA head coach that's been a college assistant. And you know, I wanted to try to learn the game. I knew what I didn't know from the college ranks, meaning scheduling and recruiting and so on and so forth. And probably the most humbling experience, Ryan was coaching in Dominican Republic and Venezuela where we would practice outside, open air, practice sites with birds flying and no air conditioning and half the team didn't speak

• 12:38Speaker 01

  English. And so I learned to become a better demonstrator. I learned to slow down my delivery in timeouts. I learned to diagram plays better in the heat of the moment because half the team didn't understand my language. I learned that you have to be in great physical condition as a coach because of a demonstration. Even as you get older, you've got to be able to go out on the floor and demonstrate for your players. So I think that, you know, all those experiences really helped and shaped me to become a much better coach.

• 13:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think you're in good, good company on the Dominican Republic thing, right? Didn't, didn't Phil Jackson sort of cut his teeth as a coach like in, in environments like that? I think we, we tend to think that these coaches are kind of dropped, fully formed as, as geniuses or as, you know, NBA champions. But, but in fact, the journey is a really long, arduous one.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no question. A lot of coaches, many years ago, would coach in the summer in the Puerto Rican league and that was a pro league that was really, really good. And, and there's a lot of great coaches. If you look into the history of the Puerto Rican Pro Basketball League, Phil Jackson did coach in Puerto Rico where he was able to experiment.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  And do different things. And then he also coached in the old CBA, which is equivalent to the NBA Development League. Now, Coach Jackson coached the Albany Patroons. And, and there's no question, like, to be a coach, I think the more experiences you have, the better you can become. And then even in the Dominican Republic, Coach Calipari actually replaced me with the Dominican Republic. And, and I think that helped Coach Cal experiment with different things. And, oh, by the way, it also helped him get a guy named Carl Anthony Town to Kentucky. So, you know, there's a lot of ways to, to shape your career. And

• 14:39Speaker 01

  again, I think the more experiences, the different leagues you can coach in, really, really helps you as you get older and grow in the business.

• 14:48Ryan Holiday?

  It's kind of this tension. I experienced it in my career. It's like, obviously, you want to get your shot early. And I think my first book came out when I was 24, which, you know, authors would kill to have their first book deal by then. And yet, like, you're also not as good as you could be when you get the shot. So it's like, you kind of want, it's like, you, you want to be as successful as early as possible. That's like what your dream is. That's what your drive wants you to get. And yet, as you're sort of saying, you tend to hit your peak in your 50s. Or, you know, for writers, you can write up until the, basically, the day you die. It's this weird thing where your ego wants you to get

• 15:27Ryan Holiday?

  the opportunity now, now, now. But objectively, like, the, the more experience you have, the better you're going to be at it. And, and, and the other thing is, when you get the shot early, there's a lot of sort of fear and anxiety and that sort of imposter syndrome, because you know, maybe you're not fully ready for the opportunity.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think like, you know, if you're an NFL coach at a young age or in the NBA, like, the players are so smart. So my second year with Golden State, you know, I had at the end of their career, Nick Van Exel and Avery Johnson. And that's not easy, being in your 30s, coaching players in their 30s, who had played for great coaches. Like, Avery Johnson had come from playing for Greg Popovich. So we would be in shoot around and be talking about how we're going to defend a Steve Nash pick and roll. And Avery or Nick Van Exel might have a different way that was successful, you know, in San Antonio

• 16:34Speaker 01

  under Coach Pop. So it is, it's really, really challenging. And along the way, you learn lessons. Like, Coach Daly always would say, don't ever put in a play to your team unless you know it's going to work and be successful, because you will lose, you know, power in belief. And so it's, it's, there's no question, like, coaching at a young age, or I'm sure writing at a young age, is, is really, really challenging.

• 17:03Ryan Holiday?

  I had, I had a question, one last question about Sacramento, and it's not the, probably the most pleasant topic, but I thought it'd be a good thing to talk about. I remember you, you got a DUI when you were there, and it was sort of a surprise. I was curious, like, as far as mistakes go, as, as far as messing up, how has that incident affected you now as a college coach? Because that's, that's sort of, and I guess as an NBA coach too, but, but, you know, athletes are always sort of messing up, they're always making mistakes, because they're people. How, how did that incident for you shape how, like, you talk to a guy who maybe, you know, got arrested, or, you know, got in trouble, or how, how has that experience affected, you know, your coaching style?

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that it's a, it's a good lesson to be able to talk to your players. I mean, you know, most of my players don't know that unless I talk to them about it. And, you know, a huge part of college coaching is Developing them, you know, to be men, developing them to go out in the world, real world. Everybody wants to play in the NBA, but the fact of the matter is, you know, most guys are lucky to play two and a half to three years at that level. And then you have a whole lifetime that you have to, you know, navigate. And so certainly that experience

• 18:27Speaker 01

  affected everyone. It affected my sons. It affected me. It affected my career. It affected my, and now it affects my current team because I am able to discuss and be very, very open about that particular time in my life and, and how I went from coaching an NBA team to, you know, coaching in Dominican Republic and Venezuela and trying to reinvent my own career. So I do think that, and that definitely, you know, led to, you know, once the season ended, being released. So, you know, I think oftentimes things happen in our life that can make us better in our profession and then just better personally as well.

• 19:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's a, it, it, it feels like that sort of apropos of this moment where, you know, you're watching these videos of like college kids partying in the middle of a pandemic or you're watching, you know, the, you know, the, the kids are, you know, the athletes are being sent to a hotel and then because they're in a hotel, they're having a party. How are you, how do you talk to them? Because I feel like unfortunately it's a lesson everyone is struggling with. How do you talk to them now about sort of responsibility where, whereas like before, you know, an athlete provided that their conduct off the field didn't affect, you know, the, the, the product on the field or on the court.

• 19:54Ryan Holiday?

  You know, they could sort of do whatever they wanted. How do you think about that now? As it almost feels like college sports is sort of a microcosm of what society is struggling with with this with this pandemic where, you know, like you'll have a baseball player who breaks quarantine and lies about it, you know, he he is endangering not just the entire, not just his team, but potentially the entire Major League Baseball experiment. How are you talking to them about that thing? Because it feels like a lot for an 18 year old or even for a 50 year old to wrap their head around.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, Ryan, it's really, I mean, it's really hard. You know, I think one, like we talked about during the beginning of this before we got back together, and it's a phrase stolen from Coach Doc Rivers is win the wait, meaning, you know, while you're waiting to get back into practice mode and get back on campus, how are you going to win that wait against your opponents? Meaning, you know, maybe what are you doing in your garage? Are you are you working on your ball handling? Are you doing pushups? What's your physical condition going to be like once we get back? And then, once we get back, which we bend back, is like the responsibility that you have to your team and to your coaches. So

• 21:10Speaker 01

  when you leave our building, whatever you do while we have this pandemic going on is going to affect all of us when we get back together the next day, and then the day after that, and then the day after that. And so we've just really talked about discipline and a change of lifestyle because once the student body came back and there was, you know, fraternities and sororities and other student athletes on campus, because we were one of the first group of student athletes to come back.

• 21:43Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  You have to have more discipline right now in your lifestyle than you've ever had.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  And that kind of means create your own environment or your own bubble, so to speak, where you're kind of going to practice, you're doing all your classes online right now. When you go out to eat, you know, how many people are going to sit at your table? How many of your teammates? You know, things that we've never really talked about, like, you know, we've always wanted our teams to be together, like when you're playing NBA 2K, get as many guys in the room as possible to partake. Now we're saying, you know, can you play video games remotely in your own rooms in isolation? So it's really weird. I'm not sure it's healthy mentally, but it's where we have to be right now until we get

• 22:36Speaker 01

  through this thing.

• 22:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I think, you know, obviously, like, well, they'll talk about this, it's like, you know, a player gets upset and they, you know, they throw a punch or they, you know, you cost your team a technical foul or you can get ejected or, you know, there's all these things that, you know, the athlete sort of vaguely understands, hey, if I do this thing negatively impacts the team. But it feels like such a good metaphor to me now that obviously there's this sort of contagious virus going around that people are having to realize it's like, oh, hey, if I go do X selfishly, you know, or, you know, because I didn't plan well, I have to do X, Y, or Z, and then that exposes me, then it's not just me that's affected, it's

• 23:22Ryan Holiday?

  the downstream consequences of all these decisions. It does feel like Americans uniquely in the world are struggling with that the most. But I think, you know, in the modern world, we've kind of been taught, like, you can do whatever you want, as long as you're not actively hurting people. But I think now we're seeing how some of these selfish decisions we make really does ripple through the rest of society.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  There's no question, like I have a 10-year-old daughter, like to try to explain all that to her because she's going into school every day, Monday through Friday. And so I have to explain that to a 10-year-old. And sometimes, you know, I'm not sure that that you really want her to have a burden of,

• 24:05Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  You know, hey, if you go to school and you catch something that you could bring it home to mom and dad. That's not really fair. But again, it's it's kind of where we are from a educational standpoint with everybody, you know, it's it's uh not be, you know, people in their 50s cannot really go see their their their parents even, and you can't hug people anymore. And in practice, I'm I'm told not to high five my players and like, how do you coach with the mask on when they can't see you smile?

• 24:37Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  That's, I mean, that's really, really hard. You're coaching them hard, but yet they can't see you smile or laugh. And that that that that might be the most challenging thing right now, Ryan, is, you know, the emotional aspect of joy in practice, even though you're grinding and going hard. That's probably been the most challenging thing for for our staff right now.

• 25:04Ryan Holiday?

  I know, I bet. And I think I think that's that's another sort of great metaphor of sports, right? Which is that it is hard, it is unfair, it's, you know, the right thing isn't always rewarded. And I think I think you're seeing people who don't who haven't trained that in like regular people, I'm saying, who haven't trained the way that athletes are forced to train or or, you know, sort of elite performers in any field are forced to train. And so there's this, there's almost this assumption that like your frustration or like, like, I feel like I'm hearing people say stuff like, oh, I'm just done with this, right? And it's like, just because you're done with COVID-19 doesn't mean COVID-19 is done with you, right?

• 25:48Ryan Holiday?

  And I think you're, I think one of the things sports does is it trains us to realize that, hey, when our mind, when our body wants to Quit. We have to understand, or sorry, when our mind wants to quit, we have to realize that there's actually sort of fuel left in the tank and that ability to sort of push past what feels hard or unfair or difficult. And I think a lot of people are, who have been used to getting everything they want, everything being the way they want it to be. I think that's been an, sort of an extra blow of the pandemic. It's like, they just weren't prepared to have, you know, seven months of hardship, right? Like, they just weren't, they weren't prepared for this to go on longer than they could afford for it to go on. And the reality is, life doesn't really

• 26:33Ryan Holiday?

  care what you want.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  No, there's no question. Cause we, we talk all the time about, you know, the mental toughness aspect of it. And for, for instance, for us last year, Ryan, we had one of our best players go down. And we went one in five during that stretch. And I kept trying to tell the team, like, you cannot feel sorry for yourself. The opposition, the other SCC schools, they do not care that we have an injury. And it's the same thing with the pandemic. Like, yes, our season ended abruptly. We had just beaten Vanderbilt. So we were still alive in the SCC tournament. And that ended abruptly. And so we can't feel sorry for ourselves because now there's a new

• 27:22Speaker 01

  season ahead of us. And we can't feel sorry for us if we don't know what our schedule is going to be right now. Cause we really don't. We just know the date when we're going to schedule. And so we're trying to figure that out on the fly. But, but what you can control is your effort, your energy and your enthusiasm that you bring to practice every day. And that's one of the things that we just continue to talk about, is what are you bringing to today? Don't worry about yesterday. Don't worry about tomorrow. What, how can you affect our team off the floor and on the floor today?

• 28:00Ryan Holiday?

  And yeah, people, you know, people say that thing like, oh, I can't wait for things to go back to normal. One of the things I think the study of Stoicism has helped sort of define for me is that that doesn't exist, right? Marcus Aurelius is writing and living, you know, he takes over as emperor and shortly thereafter, what's now known as the Antonine Plague begins. And, you know, there was no hope of a vaccine. There was no hope of it going away. It lasts for like 15 years. So it became normal. And I think a lot of the changes that we've made as a result of this pandemic are going to take a long, even if there's a vaccine tomorrow, as a friend was telling me, it's like, even if they, even if they were able to do a million doses of the vaccine a day,

• 28:42Ryan Holiday?

  that means it'd take almost a year for every American to get it, right? And so even if this goes away tomorrow, the virus that is, the actual, or if there's a breakthrough tomorrow, the actual, as it was a slow acceleration of the of the problem, it will be a slow implementation of the solution. And so I think when people sort of go around and they go, oh, I'm just wait, like, imagine if your team was like, well, we'll just wait for so and so to come back from the injury. It's like, you can't afford to do that. You have to make whatever now is the new normal, because it could be like this forever. Like, you know, they might not

• 29:22Ryan Holiday?

  come back, or another injury might follow this one. You really can't wait around for what you want. You have to adjust and accept what's in front of you as reality.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's, I think that's one of the things like that you've got to talk to your team about and your family and your kids is like, you're going to have to be flexible for the foreseeable future. Like, don't think that this is going to end. Don't, don't even worry about that. That's out of our control. We have no control over anything other than living under the current circumstances. And when we tell our team, like, we have no idea what the NCAA tournament is going to look like. They can tell us something today in September, but it means nothing once we get to March. Because as we all know, this stuff has changed for the last

• 30:13Speaker 01

  six, seven, it changes daily. So you just got to be flexible and go with whatever it is medically that they're telling you. But you got to live your life as well.

• 30:24Ryan Holiday?

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

• 31:09Ryan Holiday?

  that creates the opportunity for a competitive advantage, creates an opportunity to make up gains. And I got to imagine, especially, you know, when you're coaching at a school that isn't Kentucky or Duke, you're looking for, hey, how can we, how can we actually find a way to be improved by this? So we can, you, we can compete in what is essentially an unfair fight.

• 31:35Speaker 01

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

• 32:19Speaker 01

  And it's the same thing's going to happen in the season, like. Somebody or some team is going to get hit with two or three players and be unavailable. And how does that affect you mentally? And we're even kind of practicing that way. Like, we're going with weird combinations in practice. In other words, like, let's take all three point guards off the floor. And today, we're going to go with five players, no true point guard or quarterback, whatever you want to call it, and see how our team functions as if this is a plan for what could potentially happen during the year.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  And I think you really got to plan that way, not just your basketball team, but any business has to plan for the abnormal right now.

• 33:09Ryan Holiday?

  I think you got to plan for the abnormal. And then the other thing I've taken from it, and I've done this on some of the talks I've done with sports teams and stuff in the pandemic too. It's like, also, the abnormal has been an experiment, and it sort of blew up the old routine. So like, one of the things I'm trying to take out of this is like, oh, hey, I write better. I'm happier at home. You know, I'm more creative. I have better business ideas. My team works better when I travel less. And so I was under the impression that, hey, I had to travel to be good at my job, to do speaking. To, you know, like, I had sort of taken, or I had told myself, hey, when I travel, it's only a minor inconvenience, right?

• 33:53Ryan Holiday?

  To, or the cost on my productivity is relatively low because I can write on airplanes and write in the hotel room. But it turns out, actually, the normalcy of traveling around, doing multiple talks a week or a month, and, you know, having meetings, and, you know, just my old schedule was actually, you know, more costly than I thought. And so one of the things, and I'm be curious what lessons you've taken out of this, is I've sort of reimagined what my life is going to look like day to day. Even if I can do anything that I want going forward, I'm going to try to preserve parts of the bubble or the quarantine life because it turns out it's actually much more conducive to being good at what I want to be good at.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the one thing, especially in the athletic world is because we've all been under a dead period, quote unquote, where recruits can't come on to campus and you can't leave campus to do in-home visits or to do evaluations during the AAU summer sessions. So we've had to recruit in a completely different way. In other words, we've had to do in-home visits now virtually where maybe the whole staff tries to bring the recruit into my home where my wife is available and they get to say hello to my daughter through a virtual

• 35:19Speaker 01

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

• 35:59Speaker 01

  And how do we get better at that? Like, we've created probably four different virtual campus tours because we want to continually and constantly evolve and get better. So I think from a recruiting standpoint, it's really taught us a lot, Ryan, on how we can still recruit players. And then kids are still making decisions and they're committing places in all sports without actually going on campus. And I think from a health standpoint, you know, college coaching and the recruiting, it kind of seems to never end. And what we found, although we do need to do live, you know, evaluations, we do need to do in-home

• 36:42Speaker 01

  visits, I do hope that there'll be a new set of rules so that we have more life balance and this recruiting doesn't take over our lives like it did, you know, pre seven months ago.

• 36:58Ryan Holiday?

  The other thing I was curious about with you, because it's something that I think about writing about philosophy, which is, you know, potentially not something a lot of people are interested. It seems like you particularly, but I know all coaches have had to figure this out. You've, it feels like you've really figured out like social media and all these sort of media strategies as, as far as sort of recruitment goes. I know you're really early to blogging. You're really great on Twitter. Like, how have you, how have you thought about using these tools, which I imagine at some, at certain points in your life, you must have been like, I did not become a head basketball coach so I could spend all my time on Twitter, but kind of part of your job, and it makes you better at your job.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, well, the interesting thing, Ryan, is, is when I grew up, my dad was coaching the University of Minnesota. And when we would like go to a fast food restaurant, and we'd go in to order, he would bring like 25 University of Minnesota Golden Gopher basketball t-shirts. And he would pass them out. And when he was a coach, now you got to think, this was like in the 70s. He's at the University of Minnesota. They had a pregame warmup. They had like over 40 cheerleaders slash dance team. Music would blare. They had a unicycle guy that was part of the team that would ride a unicycle and juggle three

• 38:25Speaker 01

  basketballs during their pregame warmup. It's on YouTube. He was way ahead of his time as far as thinking outside the box and understanding that you're going to get a certain portion of your fan base that's going to come because they like basketball. You're going to get a certain group of people that's going to come when you win big. But then how do you get the extra people? That want to come for entertainment. So from a very, very young age, you know, I was, I was taught that. My dad actually got an opportunity. He didn't take it, but Charlie O. Finley, the old Oakland A's owner owned an ABA team called the Memphis Tams. And Charlie

• 39:05Speaker 01

  O. Finley wanted to hire my dad just based on his marketing and promotion ideas. And so that's been ingrained in me. And then you add in the fact that my wife Danielle worked for ESPN, worked for NFL Network, was an on air person. So I have that media aspect as well. And so I kind of put those two things together. And then I have two young sons, one a sophomore in college and one who's a part of our recruiting staff on campus. You know, they're obviously both in their twenties. And so they have a whole different aspect. So we actually have this little think tank group and we meet almost

• 39:47Speaker 01

  every day. My son, sometimes my wife joins us and we just talk about, you know, ways to impact recruiting, ways to impact our fan base, and we try to be as creative as possible. And then I think when you hit a certain age or a point in your career, Ryan, like there's vulnerability in some of the stuff we do, whether it's, you know, me coaching at the beginning of the pandemic in an empty gym, or me making fun of myself kind of in interviews, or acting like a fan in an empty arena about what they're saying about our coaching style. With all that stuff comes vulnerability. But you also reach a point

• 40:30Speaker 01

  in your career where you really don't care and you want to have fun and, and you're not worried about what other coaches are going to say about you or what you're doing. And, and right now, like, we want to bring joy to the job and we want to try to impact recruiting and we want our fan base to look behind the curtain. And that's so that's kind of the, the thought process behind our social media plan.

• 40:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like, uh, sometimes people turn up their noses at sort of meeting the audience or the people where they are, but it's like, if the athletes you're trying to recruit are on, on this platform or that platform, you've got to figure out a way to, to get there. And, and that's what I've always thought as an author too. It's like, look, would I rather only be able, only write long form, you know, deeply nerdy books about ancient philosophy? Yeah, that's, that's what would get me out of bed. But you've got to find the overlap of what gets you excited and what helps you accomplish what you want to accomplish with and for other people.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, you know, like, and we, we still need to get better. I, you know, I, I mean, there's been some really high level coaches, both in basketball and other sports that have reached out about, our social media and, and kind of how we go about it. But I still want to get better. Like, yes, we, you know, we're, we're really active on Twitter, but, but, but what about some of the other things like, you know, Instagram, I feel like I'm way behind and, and that's one of the things that, that I want to get better at, learn that a little bit better. And now my daughter's so into TikTok, like, how do we, you know, create a, a platform on TikTok, TikTok for Arkansas basketball? So I think there's,

• 42:17Speaker 01

  you know, like the biggest thing in this world that just moves so fast now because of social media is, how can you, you know, stay a little bit ahead of the curve? How can you be as creative as possible? Basketball is such a, a small part of what you do as a college coach. The X and O's is, is really, really a small, small fraction of what we really do.

• 42:39Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I think that's a, that's a great attitude that I think people should pick up on, which, and, and again, people sort of turn up their nose. They're like, I didn't become this, so I could have to do that. And you really have to see it all as just equal, that all as sort of equally interesting challenges. So in the same, I think about it's like, the same way I try to crack the puzzle on a book, I have to also think about how am I going to crack the puzzle on, yeah, growing my Instagram following or growing my following here because. Being successful over there then allows me to be successful in the other thing. So you can't, you can't just look at a job which includes all these different parts and

• 43:21Ryan Holiday?

  say, well, I'm only going to get great at one part of it because that's the only part that matters to me. That's just not life.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  No, and I mean, it's so interesting because I think the perception of me at a young age was old school X and O's, doesn't have enough fun. Now there's all these younger coaches that are breaking in the business and they think, you know, that I don't do X and O's, that I'm just messing around on social media. And so the perception, it's, it's interesting because a lot of my friends and even my college roommates, because we're in a group text, will bring that to my attention. But the social media, like, it's not just about, you know, our basketball program or

• 44:07Speaker 01

  our coaching staff, but, but more importantly, with where we are going as far as college athletics, name, image and likeness is about to hit. And so the social media platform for your players is going to become really, really valuable. So, you know, that's going to be part of this whole process as we move forward as well.

• 44:31Ryan Holiday?

  No, and, and I think that's where that sort of Pete Carroll philosophy of just like, compete everywhere is the way to go through life, which is, it's not that you have to be the best at everything, right? Because that's a, not a fun way to live, that you have to win every single thing. But you do have to try to be great and compete. You have to try to be in, in the, in the mix of it on every, every facet of who you are and what you do.

• 44:59Speaker 01

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

• 45:34Ryan Holiday?

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

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, and I think that's what drives the great players that I've been around or competed against is their will to win and their drive and the Allen Iverson's competing at his size and his weight and the way that Kobe Bryant would compete from quarter to quarter and he would compete the same way on game 81 as he would game three. And the competitors don't care how many people are in the crowd. It doesn't matter to them whether it's a seventh game of a world championship or whether it's the first game of an exhibition season. True competitors compete nightly.

• 46:40Ryan Holiday?

  I love it. Coach, thanks so much.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Ryan, thanks so much for having me on. It's been awesome. Love reading your stuff. You've been, your Cleveland Browns talk on your podcast was a listen the other day for our entire team. And so thanks for giving back to the leadership world as well.

• 47:01Ryan Holiday?

  I love it. Thanks, man. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps and tell a friend.