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Mark interviews Dre Baldwin the CEO and Founder of Work On Your Game Inc. about his books and his experience helping others in finding their own paths to success.
Prior to the interview Mark shares comments from recent episodes, a personal update, and a word about this episode’s sponsor
This episode is sponsored by FROM PAGE TO PLATFORM by Matty Dalrymple and Michael La Ronn. You can learn more about the book at https://theindyauthor.com/platform.
During the interview, Mark and Dre talk about:
- The importance of the simplification process as a great place to begin
- The 80/20 rule and the less-than-smooth ways we have of not being able to drop the 80%
- How, over time, Dre has accumulated little pieces of wisdom that have ended up being part of the training and coaching that he does
- The first question that Dre often asks which is: What is your goal?
- The challenge of being inundated with so many messages which results in trying to work on more than one priority
- How Dre has always been a big reader and a bit of a closet computer geek
- The appeal of self-generated media and being able to articulate his ideas
- Putting videos on YouTube about the basketball he was playing professionally and how other players began to take advantage of his advice and coaching
- How even people who weren’t playing sports could benefit from those basketball videos, which led to Dre recognizing he could help people beyond athletes
- How a lot of Dre’s mindset stuff started to come out around 2009/2010
- Blogging his ideas and starting to put out his books
- How discipline is the most important hallmark of the professional
- The way people can fall off their structure and the importance of finding the structure that works best for you
- Coaches being one of the ways that people can find/apply the proper structure
- How a true professional holds themselves accountable to a structure
- Shortcuts as something that can come from the right coach
- The way that a coach can KEEP a professional athlete good
- Human beings doing better work when accountability is involved
- The importance of showing yourself the same respect you would show to a “boss” or some other supervisor or superior you report to at work
- How the two golden questions related to your goal (What do you want and why do you want it?) help you build that bridge to the structure that can get you there
- Knowing that he had always wanted to write a book and combining that with the fact he knew he already had an audience via his YouTube channel
- The reason Dre didn’t really pursue traditional publishing and decided to publish it himself in 2010
- Dre’s book Buy Me A Game (which is available as a free download)
- Publishing about 19/20 books between 2010 and 2017
- Doing an in person speaking gig in Atlanta all on his own dime and what opportunities that led to, including a New York publisher (McGraw Hill) who was interested in publishing a book for him. That book was Working on Your Game
- Why Dre wasn’t interested in reliving that experience again without the right offer/contract in place
- Adapting part of the traditional publishing editing process into his own procedure for self-publishing his books
- Why Dre prefers to have direct sales of his books on his own website
- How in business the most valuable thing you have is your customer list
- Dre’s book The Third Day: The Decision That Separates The Pros From The Amateurs
- How a professional shows up and delivers even when they don’t “feel like it” – that’s what makes them a professional
- The fact that most people don’t hear something you say – repeating it or exploring it in different ways can help
- And more . . .
After the interview Mark reflects on several of the points Dre brought up in the conversation, including re-leveraging your own IP by exploring a single topic into further detail and the fact that a professional always shows up.
Links of Interest:
- Dre Baldwin’s Website
- Work on Your Game/Dre
- Third Day (Book)
- Mark’s Kickstarter for ONE HAND SCREAMING: 20 Haunting Years
- Wide for the Win
- EP 378 – Multimedia Storytelling with Dominician Gennari
- Mark’s Stark Reflections on Writing & Publishing Newsletter (Signup)
- Buy Mark a Coffee
- Patreon for Stark Reflections
- An Author’s Guide to Working With Bookstores and Libraries
- The Relaxed Author
- Publishing Pitfalls for Authors
- An Author’s Guide to Working with Libraries & Bookstores
- Wide for the Win
- Mark’s Canadian Werewolf Books
- The Canadian Mounted: A Trivia Guide to Planes, Trains and Automobiles
- Yippee Ki-Yay Motherf*cker: A Trivia Guide to Die Hard
Dre Baldwin is CEO and Founder of Work On Your Game Inc. He has given 4 TEDxTalks and has authored 35 books.
Dre’s content has been consumed over 103 million times. His daily Work On Your Game MasterClass has amassed over 2,900 episodes and over 7.3 million listeners.
Dre had a 9-year professional basketball career, playing in 8 countries. Dre’s framework is the “roadmap in reverse” for professional Mindset, Strategy, Systems & Accountability.
The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Thank you for talking in your rambling section about doing things that don’t add to your income. It’s so easy as creators and writers to feel like everyone else has figured out how to monetize all aspects of creative work. It reminds me there’s nothing wrong with pursuing projects I love, even if other work would more reliably (and quickly) pay off in a monetary sense.
So much to say!! First, thank you so much for the shout-out for FROM PAGE TO PLATFORM (and thank you again for cramming the writing of the foreword into your unbelievably busy schedule)!
Also, it cracked me up when you said you had been doing the podcast for *only* seven years (not missing a week). : ) I was also interested in hearing that the podcast is still a labor of love for you rather than a significant source of income (if I understood your comments correctly), which is a sobering but important message for newer podcasters and those thinking of starting a podcast to hear.
During your personal update, when you said you shared the unedited interviews with your Patreons, I thought, “That’s a great idea–I’m going to do that, too!” I was still thinking through the logistical details, such as how I would ensure guests knew the content was going to be used in this way and how I would deal with having a guest decline to have unedited video shared, when I started listening to Dre’s *fantastic* thoughts on the importance of simplification. I quickly discarded the idea of adding this (very cool) task to my to do list.
I’m bookmarking this episode and committing to listen to it every quarter when I revisit my quarterly and yearly plans for my writing and publishing work.
Thanks to you and Dre for a fantastic conversation!