Dre Baldwin Underdog

Foreign.

Welcome to the Mike Hartman Show. Mike is a performance coach and former Stanley cup champion with the New York Rangers. Topics on this show are focused around stories, mindset and champions. Mike will also go into details about helping you with your pain points and struggles and finding motivational solutions on how to have the mindset of a champion. Now, here's your host, Mike Hartman.

Welcome back to another episode. Today I have a very special guest who's actually going to share his story as I absolutely love stories like this. His name is Dre Baldwin and I was introduced to Dre, but you just have to hear and listen to what he has to say. I don't want to give away too much, but he started at the bottom, is an athlete, had a hard time making his high school team and all the way through. Everything that he does is through passion, drive, desire. He actually knows what it takes to be a champion as he has that champion mindset. I personally, we're not here to promote. People know me. We don't do really a lot of advertising, very, very little advertising on this show. But I actually went out and got two of Dre's books. I mean, he's written, I think, 27, 28 books. I don't, I don't know, somewhere along the lines, all to help out individuals, maximize their potential. Everybody, I hope you enjoy this show. Dre Baldwin, on with the show.

Hello to everyone on the Mike Hartman Show. It is great to meet you. Great to be connected with you. My name is Dre Baldwin and many people know me as Dre all day. And I am excited to be here on this show on Mike's platform, speaking to all of you who are, who will get a chance to hear about my background, my story, and my aim in sharing this with you is not just to entertain you with my story, because one thing that I know to be true is that no human being cares about another person's story more than they care about their own. It's for me to share with you some aspects of what I've been through, what I've done, what I've seen, what I've observed, and what I have developed as a result of my experiences and how you can actually use them in your own life and your business and your sport and wherever you're going. Maybe you're not even sure right now where you're going to be going next, but my aim is to take something from what I've experienced and something I want to give you here today. It might just be one thing. It might be 10 things hopefully it's a hundred things that you can go use in your own experiences, no matter where those experiences happen to take you. So I'm just going to tell you, I'm going to start from the beginning, where I came from. And as I go through this, I'm going to help you understand, I'm going to translate and help you understand some of the things that I did, some of the things that I learned, some of the things I inferred, even the mistakes that I made along the way and what I took from them and how I came to be who I am to this very day. So just to give you a quick background on who I am right now in 2022, maybe I shouldn't have said the date, my date, this episode, but anyway, I said it already. I am the CEO and owner of a company called Work on youn Game Incorporated. And what we do here is really simple. We take the mental tools to help an athlete get to the top 1% in the sports world, and we teach athletes how to take those same tools and apply them at work and in everyday life. Now, my background, working backwards here, is as a professional athlete. I played basketball overseas for nine years after I walked on at an NCAA Division 3 school, which is a level that any of you athletes or sports fans or enthusiasts or anyone who's around the sports world knows, or Division 3 athletes do not even dream about making a pro, let alone do they actually do it. But I was able to make it happen. So now let me go backwards to where I first started, now that you know a little bit of the ending. I come from the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, now live in Miami, Florida. And growing up, I was always into sports. Played the backyard sports back actually where I'm from, we didn't have backyards. We had driveways. So instead of grass, it was concrete. Same idea, just on concrete instead of grass. And. And we played touch football, kickball, you know, basketball. Somebody had one of those portable courts you could pull out of the garage. You put sand in the base of it. We did all of that by around the age of 9 or 10. That was my first time playing organized sports or my first shot at organized sports. My first organized sport that I went out for was football. And I thought I could be a really good football player because my favorite athlete back in the day, those of you old enough to remember, was this guy named Deion Sanders. And he. He's still out there now today, but he's a coach now. But back then he was playing football and baseball. So Football. I thought I could be Deion in football, but I never got a chance to really find out because my family couldn't afford football equipment. So I never actually played football, like the hitting and the tackling part of it. Then I moved on to baseball, and I played baseball for a few years because, again, Deion was my favorite athlete. He played football and baseball, and I had a little bit of natural ability that could help in baseball. I was always pretty good at running and jumping, even though it's not much jumping in baseball. I was good at running after the ball, after it went under my legs when I was playing in the outfield and maybe running the bases. If I could actually get on base, I wasn't good at hitting the ball. So after a few years of playing baseball, and I realized that I did not really have the skill set or the natural talents that would make me become anything more than mediocre in baseball. I finally moved on to basketball. Now, this is age 14, when I finally got to basketball. Now, age 14 is young, depending on how old you are right now. But it's actually pretty late if you're an athlete who's trying to go somewhere in sports. I'm talking playing college, let alone playing pro. You're just starting Sport at age 14. So I was already. I already had the odds stacked against me at this point. And when I got to high school and started trying out for the high school basketball team, the odds showed me exactly how much they were stacked against me. Because where I come from in Philadelphia at the time, my school did not have a JV team, and we did not have a freshman team. All we had was a varsity basketball team. It was one coach, no assistant coaches. So every boy in the school, at least where I'm from, at that time in the city, every boy thinks he could play basketball. So everybody's trying out for the basketball team. My freshman year, I tried out, didn't make it, got cut on the first day. My sophomore year, tried out, didn't make it, got cut on the first day again. Now, my junior year, I was ready to go. I was a little bit bigger, stronger. I was starting to grow into my body. I had a little bit of athleticism that I was growing into. I could dribble the ball a little bit better. My confidence was up, and if everybody moved out of the way and I got a running start, I could probably get a dunk or two every now and then. But that tryout my junior year, still didn't do anything. It was my worst tryout. Performance, actually of all three years put together up to that point, got cut on the first day. Again. So by this point, anyone who's listening to this story, even if you've never heard of me before, you could probably surmise, if I hadn't given away the ending at the beginning of this episode here, you would probably surmise, all right, this kid, whoever he is, maybe he loves basketball, maybe he'll make it the next year, who knows? But he's probably not going to go anywhere in basketball. You're not even on the team and you're a junior. My senior year, the happy ending is I did actually make the basketball team and made it through all the cuts, made the basketball team. But the problem was I sat on the bench that whole year, even though I was on the team. I was a senior, not even playing. I averaged two points a game my senior year of high school for the varsity basketball team. Now, those of you who know basketball know that two points is not a lot. I always tell people, if you're playing hockey or soccer and you score two points per game, you're a superstar, but in basketball, you're a bum. So I was sitting at the end of the bench in high school, and by graduation, again, any logical, reasonable person would have said, okay, this kid's going to be something in life, maybe, but it ain't going to be in basketball. So going to college, I knew I wanted to go to college because I just wanted to get an experience of getting out of my neighborhood, getting out of the town that I was from, seeing other parts of the world wasn't so much about education, I'm going to be honest, but also by this point, and actually it was around the age of 16, right when I, before I got cut from the high school team for the third time my junior year, I decided that I wanted to make a career out of playing basketball. Now, this sounds kind of far fetched, actually. Sounds very far fetched, actually, I'm being generous. It actually sounds kind of delusional that you haven't made your high school team yet. You're 16, you're about to get cut from the team again, and you're talking about, now you're deciding your career is going to be in basketball. Who's teaching this kid, who's raising this kid to even have this idea? But that's the idea that I had. So by the time I graduated from high school at age 18, I decided that I did want to play in college. So that's one of the main reasons I wanted to Go to college was to get the social experience, but also because I knew I wasn't good enough to go straight from high school to the NBA at that point. And at that time, that was still a thing that players were doing, but I wasn't good enough to do that. I only scored two points a game as a senior. So I needed that four years of seasoning to maybe get my game to where it needed to be to play in college. So I ended up walking on at a school called Penn State Abington, which is about 15 minutes outside of my hometown home neighborhood of Mount Airy in Philadelphia. And that school now is a Division 3 school. At the time, it was a provisional Division 3. And in that sense you could only play two years of sports. At the time at Penn State Abington, only two years. So a lot of my teammates, well, actually all of my teammates were either freshmen or sophomores. We didn't have any juniors or seniors at the time. Now right now, Penn State Abington is a full fledged D3 school. But then it was only two years. So I walked on at Penn State Abington. And. And for those of you who don't know what walking on means, it means you literally walk into the gym and try to earn your spot on a sports team. Nobody knew who you are, Nobody knows who you are. The coaches did not invite you, nobody was watching scouting reports on you. No one's anticipating your arrival. You just walk in and hopefully you're good enough to make it. I was good enough to make it, became a starter, actually, my freshman year at Penn State Abington, and I didn't set the world on fire there, but I played pretty well. So that season goes by, comes and goes. I averaged maybe 9, 10 points a game, something like that. And when the season ended, I didn't see any of my teammates anymore after the season ended. Now I'm a person who, even though I hadn't had much basketball success up to this point, I always been a gym rat. I'm the type person, if I wasn't in class, I was in the gym. I was in the gym working on my game by myself, playing pickup or whatever games we could come up with with whoever was in the gym at Penn State Abington. This is not a huge campus, so I was just playing with whoever was in there. And we only had one gym, so it was not like you could isolate yourself from everybody else. You just play with whoever showed up. Now I remember after that freshman season ended, there was a guy, and I don't remember this man's name, but I remember his face if I ever seen him. He started to drag me into the weight room. He would see me in the gym messing around with these random students from on campus who couldn't really play. And I'm out there dunking on them, scoring on them, not really needing to play hard to beat them. But I'm a gym rat, so I'm going to be in a gym regardless of who else is in there. But he would sometimes pull me off the court and say, man, come in here with us. And it would be him and these other guys. And they were a few guys, they were black guys, a little bit older guys. These were like adult students, maybe in their early 20s at the time, I'm only 18, 19 years old, but they would be lifting weights. And he saw the potential in me. And I remember this guy because he was from New York City. And at the time, to give you all a timeline, this is 2001, the spring of my freshman season of college. This is a time when this thing called the End One mixtape was really popular. Street ball was really popular. And I mean literal street ball. I don't mean playing in the gym and calling it street ball. I mean literally playing basketball on concrete, outside at the playground. And New York City was the hub of everything going on, basketball wise, when it came to street ball. And this guy was from New York City, so he knew a lot of. He personally knew a lot of these street ball players. And he saw the potential in me. He saw that I actually had talent and that I could play. But there were some elements that I needed. One of them being, I need to get stronger, I need to start lifting weights. So he would pull me off the basketball court, have me lifting weights. And that was one of the most important things that ever happened with me, was hitting the weight room because it made me stronger, it made me more confident and made the girls look at me a little bit more too. We can't discount that. And after that freshman season ended, I kept lifting weights on my own even after the school year ended. Because Penn State Abington, I didn't even mention this is a commuter campus. What that means is you actually live at home. Home. And you drive to school every single day. There were no dorms on Penn State Abington's campus. So that summer I was not even taking classes at Abington. But since I was a student and I had access to the facilities, I would drive up to the Abington campus every single day and work on my game in an empty gym by myself. Because There was nobody else on campus. Now I'm going to tell you why this matters. There's a reason why I'm telling you this part of the story. So this summer I'm driving up there, summer 2001, every day, working on my game by myself, practicing. Then I would go home, take a quick shower. I'd probably stop at Wendy's and get me something to eat. That's the way that I ate when I was 19. Don't eat like that anymore. But that's the way that's what it was then. And I would take a shower. Then I would go to my job. I worked at cvs, the convenience store that summer. In one particular day I drove up to the Edmonton campus and I had not eaten breakfast before I left the house. So I just parked my car next to the gym and I walked across campus. And Abington is a pretty small campus to the cafeteria. There's only four buildings on campus, two classroom buildings, the cafeteria and the gym. So I went to the other, the second building on campus, got me something to eat out of the cafeteria. And when I was walking out of the cafeteria with my food, this man just approached me and he says to me, hey man, what position do you play? And I'm looking at this guy strange because for two reasons. Number one, where I come from in Philadelphia, you don't approach people that you don't know and just start talking to them. So I'm looking at this dude like he's crazy. And number two, I know that this guy doesn't know me because as I told you, Abington is a pretty small campus. So I know everybody. And this guy's a black man and I knew all the black people, so I knew I didn't know this guy. And he's asking me what position I play. I'm looking him crazy like, okay, how do you even know that I play? Why are you even asking this assumptive question? He says, well, I'm just asking. So I start talking to him. I tell him I play guard and he starts chatting about what's your major? And this and that. He basically starts interviewing me and I don't even know who he is. Well, pretty soon he pulls out his business card, hands it to me and he is an employee at a different Penn State branch campus. He actually had two jobs there. One of them was, he was an admissions director at the Penn State Altoona campus, which is a campus that's about three and a half hours away from Philadelphia, about 30 minutes away from State College. The main Campus of Penn State University. For those of you who are not from Pennsylvania, Penn State main campus is where the football team and the State College and all of that. Altoona is 30 minutes away from there. Now, that was his first job, was admissions director. But he had a second job. This man's second job was that he was the head basketball coach at Penn State Altoona. So this guy was actually, I deciphered a few minutes into the conversation. He was recruiting me on the spot to be a player on his basketball team at Penn State Altoona, which at the time was a full fledged Division 3 school. Altoona was the. In terms of sports levels, was the second highest level campus in the Penn State system, because Penn State has actually 23 campuses in their entire system in the state of Pennsylvania. 23. Altoona was the only one that was full fledged D3. Besides State College being D1, Altoona was D3. Everything else was provisional at the time. So, in other words, this was a step up for me. I would be upping my level if I was to go from Abington to Altoona. And the reason I'm telling you this story is to tell you this. The only reason this guy met me that day, the cafeteria at the Abington campus, is because I was showing up every single day to work on my game on my own. He did not know who I was. I later found out. It was not like he was sitting there and he anticipated Dre's going to come in the cafeteria to get something to eat today. He was on campus on other business. He wasn't even there looking for basketball players. But he told me later that when he saw me walk by, he figured that I looked like the kind of player that he needed for his team the following year. And he said, listen, I just know basketball players. He's a basketball coach. So he said, I know basketball players. I know one when I see one. So when I saw you walk by, I knew you looked like the kind of player I wanted. That's why I approached you. It was only after our initial conversation that he went and actually found out who I actually was. He didn't even know who I was. So you can call that luck, you can call it serendipity, and I would call it booth, but I would also call it me showing up every single day to do the work on my own volition is part of the reason why this happened. So that's how I got recruited to Penn State Altoona. So moving on, the story that coach, I played for him one year at Penn State. Altoona, he ends up losing his job after my sophomore year because I went to Altoona my sophomore year, he loses a job, a new coach comes in. This new coach was a guy named Arman Gilliam. Now, Armin had played in the NBA for 13 years. We knew this. We all remember it, all my teammates from Altoona, because every time anyone disagreed with him in practice, he would shout at them, hey, I played in the NBA for 13 years. Now, Arman, he came in as a coach. He was looked like he was just trying to build his coaching resume. It was his first head coaching job, and Altoona actually ended up being his last coaching job. He didn't last too long in the coaching profession, and I didn't last too long playing on his team. Any of you who's played in college or played college sports and experienced a coaching change, you might know that when a new coach comes into a system, one thing that they do is they purge the roster of many of the incumbent players simply because the new coach wants to bring in their own people, not necessarily because the players can't play. So I became a victim of that purge and didn't even play my senior year of college at a Division 3 college. And this is after everything I told you about my high school background. So no one would have bet any smart money on me becoming anything in the basketball realms, especially professionally at this point. But I still had this delusional, irrational, unrealistic dream that I could become a pro athlete. So after I graduated from college, I worked a couple of, quote unquote, regular jobs. I worked as a. I worked not a personal assistant, but a assistant manager at Foot Locker. That was my first job out of college. Then I worked as a membership salesperson at Bally Total Fitness, which is a fitness gym. And after one year, I did that for my whole first year. Graduated from college, and in the summer of 2005, I saved up my money to go to an event called an exposure camp. For those of you who don't know what that is, exposure camp is an event where, at the pro level, where athletes, people like me, are who want to play pro, but we are not yet playing pro. And we don't have anyone checking for us or scouting or recruiting us. We pay money to go to an event that is organized specifically to have players like myself showcase ourselves in front of an audience of decision makers, coaches, agents, scouts, owners of basketball teams all over the world who are actually looking for talent. So if you believe you have talent, you pay. You go to this exposure camp, you prove Your talent and hopefully something good happens for you. So I went to this exposure camp in the summer of 2005. Now this camp was in Orlando, Florida. Now at the time I was still living in Philadelphia. So me and a couple of my college teammates who had also graduated, we drove from Philly to Orlando. That's about a 19 hour drive overnight, hopped out of the car and we went and played at this exposure camp. Now, at age 23, I could get away with that. Probably couldn't have done it now, but got away with it. Then I played pretty well at this camp. This camp was only two days. It was $250 in cash. Well, I paid in cash because at the time I didn't have a bank account or a credit card. So I paid in cash, played two days at that exposure camp and I did pretty well. I got a solid scouting report, I got good game footage because that footage was really important to me at the time, just to help you understand the context. Because in order for me to play pro, I needed some proof that I could play at a high level against other high level players. Now, mind you, I came from a Division 3 college. Most of the players who play Division 3 sports are not even dreaming about making it pro. These are not pro level players. So even if I had played well in D3, it wouldn't prove anything for my pro prospect simply because I'm playing against guys who are not pro level. So playing at that exposure camp was more valuable than anything I could have done in college, at least at that time and in this context. So that footage and that scouting report were my golden tickets to possibly, just possibly getting into pro basketball. So I took that footage and that scouting report after the exposure camp because I did not get signed to a contract on the spot. I went back to Philadelphia, back to my job at Valley Total Fitness. But on the side, I started cold calling. Y' all know what I mean when I say cold calling? I don't mean sending emails or DMs on Instagram. I mean literally picking up the phone and dialing numbers and cold calling basketball agents. I went on Google, every basketball agent who I could find who had a phone number and a name, I called them and I said, hey, here's who I am, here's what I have, here's what I'm doing, here's what I'm trying to do. I figured an agent would be to go between, between me, the talent and the jobs that were overseas, that I want to play these teams, that I want to play basketball for I had barely been out of the state of Pennsylvania, let alone had I been out of the country at this time. So I didn't know anybody overseas. So I figured an agent would know the person. So I needed to connect with an agent. So I called up all these agents. I called about 60 basketball agents in the summer of 2005. Literal cold calls. Out of those 60, 20 of those agents were, were interested enough or responded enough to say, hey, all right, let me see your footage, show me what you have, let me see what you got. And maybe they might be interested. I sent my footage to those 20 agents. One of those 20, yes, one agent of those 20 was interested in signing me and he is the agent who helped me get my career started. My first professional basketball contract was in Kaunas, Lithuania in the summer of 2005. So that's how I got my career started from the beginning. Now keep going here. Hopefully Mike doesn't bother if I go a little bit longer than what he expected. So I'm going to keep going this story. So that was 2005, started my career. I started a nine year pro basketball career that took me through eight different countries. I'm not going to tell you about every little detail of it, but I'll tell you how you can learn more in a second. So going back in the story, that video, that footage from the exposure camp that I went to, it was on this device called a VHS tape. Now I don't know if any of you remembers or knows what a VHS tape is. I know Mike knows what it is and maybe some of you know what it is. But those of you who don't, you can google it, or you can ask your parents or your uncles or aunts. They'll tell you what a VHS tape is. Anyway, to keep it simple, a VHS tape was footage just like YouTube. But instead of it being digital and intangible, it was actually a physical device that you could hold in your hand. A VHS tape. So that's where my footage was from, this exposure cam. Now I just told you a minute ago, this is the most valuable thing that I owned in terms of my basketball career. So I knew that I needed to keep this tape and I couldn't lose it, it couldn't get damaged, it couldn't get wet, I couldn't leave it in the sun, anything like that. So I needed somewhere this video would be safe. So I took it to an audio visual store. I got it transferred onto a data cd and I put that data CD into my parents desktop computer back in Philly And I uploaded the footage to this brand new website that I had just heard of. Mind you, it's still the summer of 2005 that would allow you to upload as much footage as you want. Upload, this is a new word, completely for free. It was called YouTube.com now this is how I had two careers going at the exact same time. Now for those of you who are not old enough to remember, in 2005 there was no such thing as social media, content marketing, personal branding. Again, the word uploading was a brand new term. None of these things were things. YouTube was not even a thing. Back then. If you are a person who was doing YouTube or blogging for a living, YouTube, you were a bum living in your parents basement who needed to shave, shower and get a real job. That's the way people looked at it in 2005. And again, those of you old enough to remember knows exactly what I'm talking about. Many of you are laughing right now while you're listening to me talk about this. So I put that footage up on YouTube and this did not become a thing. I didn't become some superstar overnight because I put a video on YouTube in 05. But a few months later I went to just check on the video just to make sure it was still there. It was just a two minute highlight clip of me from my exposure camp. And, and there were comments on the video from random people on the Internet. Now again, this is not a big deal for those of you listening now, but back then this was a foreign concept. Why would a random person who doesn't know you have something to say about something you put on the Internet? But these people would say things like, well, who taught you how to play? How often do you practice? Where'd you play at? What school do you go to? Can you make more videos? Can you make videos about how to dunk or about how to dribble or about how to play defense, about how to be quicker, about do you lift weights? And I realized that this was an underserved community of basketball players who were just like me. They were just 10 years younger. They wanted someone to teach them how to play basketball, but they didn't have anyone to teach them similar to me. But the advantage they had over people like me was that they could go to the Internet and crowdsource information. Whereas people like me. Growing up in the 90s, I didn't have anyone to get information from. I was on my own. I had to teach myself how to play basketball, which I literally did. But now I saw an opportunity to not only pay it forward and give the next generation of players the information and the guidance that no one had given me, but also I found out a few years later was that this was a whole opportunity to build a whole brand and a business around. So a few years go by, I'm still playing overseas. I played in several different countries. As I told you, around 2009, I found myself out of a job in basketball. I was a pro basketball free agent and didn't know when that phone was going to ring again. Now I'm in my mid to late 20s at this point, and I'm thinking to myself, man, I gotta get some control over my destiny, some control over when I'm getting a paycheck, you know, because I need to know where that money's coming from, how I'm gonna pay my bills, and make sure my phone stays turned on. So around this time, I just finished reading this book called the Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And the book was just. It explained a lot about just using the digital economy and using the Internet to build a business around and put money in your pocket. And I took one of the ideas from that business, from that book, rather, for a business, and I started creating basketball training programs for these same players who have been watching me on YouTube over the years. I built up a little bit of an audience by this point, and at this time, I probably had maybe 700 to 1,000 videos published on YouTube to date. I have probably about 8,000 by the time that you're listening to this, maybe more than that. And I started selling these training programs to these basketball players. And these were $4.99 programs. This was not some big complex project. This was something that I put together really in one day when I got the idea, put it out, and started selling them. And I remember the day that I made my first sale, and that's when I said to myself, I got the email that said, you made a sale. Somebody paid 499 for your simple to advance ball handling program for basketball players. And I said to myself, this is what I need to be doing. I won't be able to jump 39 inches in the air or cross somebody over or grab rebounds forever. But I can leverage my knowledge. I can sell my intellectual property forever. So I knew that was my future, even though I was still playing ball, because, mind you, this is only 2009, and I played basketball professionally until 2015. Now, another thing that happened in the same time frame was about a year later, 2010. A lot of the basketball players who were following me on YouTube, they would leave comments. And one thing that I always did, I always responded to the comments, even before. This was not a strategic thing. It was just something that I always did. Somebody left a comment on my video, even if they were being critical or asking a question that might have seemed critical, I would respond to them. I never had a problem with that. And I had built up in. I built up a following with these people, and these people had started to come to like me even though I was not on TV. I wasn't Kobe or LeBron James, but they were telling their friends. Word started to spread through word of mouth, like, yo, there's this random dude named Dre Baldwin. He's on YouTube, and he shows people how to practice basketball. So I had all of these. All of these fans and players from all over the world who were just watching me and telling their friends about me when they would come watch me play. Watch me train, rather, and learn how to play through my videos. And these players, once they found out about my background, because they would ask me, hey, where did you play at? What school do you go to? Who do you play for? And they found out about my background. Like, wait a minute, you only made your high school team one time. You walked on at a D3. You had to hustle your way in the overseas ball. And they could see that I could play because I was, I guess, what you call a late bloomer in sports. So a lot of these players, they really related to me. They related to me because for every. What I tell people all the time is that for every one LeBron James or Steph Curry, you got a thousand dray bald ones. Those people who are way under the radar. We're not even on the radar, let alone under it. We are late bloomers. Nobody's thinking you're going to make it in your sport, but you still have this unrealistic desire that you can. And I happen to have actually made it happen. So a lot of these players related to me. So they would ask about my background. They started asking me about my mindset. They would ask me things like, dre, why did you keep practicing even when you were getting cut every year? Or how do you have the confidence to show up and perform at tryouts when you know that whole year of practicing you're doing culminates in this one day of basketball tryouts? Or, why did you keep the vision in your mind? How did you keep the vision in your mind? You can make it as A player when you kept getting cut from the high school team over and over again, and everybody's telling you this is a waste of time and a waste of effort, like they're telling me, dre, how did you keep that mentality? So I realized a lot of these players wanted to know my mindset, the mindset behind the actions. Yes, they could see that I could run and jump and dunk and do a crossover, but they wanted to know the mentality behind it. So I started doing these videos every Monday called the Weekly Motivation. And those videos, I did the Weekly Motivation every week and every Monday. And I would share just a little, just a mindset tidbit, just a two to five minute video, a little selfie video. Before selfie videos were cool. Just sharing a little mindset tidbit. And it could be related to sports, but it didn't have to be. It wasn't about sports. It was just about Mindset four. I knew I was talking to the basketball players, but the way I would explain it, it could apply to anyone. And I soon found out that people who weren't even athletes were watching these videos. And they would say to me, dre, I don't even play basketball. But I like those weekly motivation videos because anybody can use that. Everybody needs that mindset in place. Even if they're an entrepreneur, a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, they never picked up a ball in their lives. So this planted a seed in my mind for what I do to this very day, in that I teach professionals from all industries how to take those tools from the sports world, those mindset tools, and apply them at work and in everyday life. So that told me what I would do when I was done playing ball. Mind you, this is only 2010. I still have five more years of basketball to play professionally. So that's how the seed got planted for where I am to this very day. So if we fast forward to today, I stopped playing ball, as I said in 2015, and what I do now is what I just explained to you. My company, Work on youn Game. I show people, professionals from all industries and most of my audience to this very day or most of my audience today, a better way of saying it, are not athletes. Maybe they are. Maybe they are. What's the word? Tangential to sports. Maybe they have played. Maybe they played in high school or college. Maybe they like sports. Maybe they play sports on the weekends. You got the weekend warriors. Most of my clients today, most of my audience today are people who are entrepreneurs, full time professionals, and people who find Me, through me, explaining the mindsets, me explaining the discipline of showing up every single day to do the work. The confidence to put yourself out there boldly and authentically. The mental toughness, keep showing up, doing the work, putting yourself out there, even when the success you've expected to achieve has yet to be achieved. And the personal initiative to go make things happen instead of waiting for things to happen. Those four elements, discipline, confidence, mental toughness, personal initiative. By the way, those are what make up the work on your game framework. When people hear me talk about those things, that's what draws them into me. So that could be a basketball player, it could be a teacher, an architect, a construction worker, a garbage man, person trying to figure out what they're doing with their lives. That's how people find me to this very day. And those elements that I took from the sports world is what I base my entire business around to this very day. So that's how I came to know Mike. And when me and Mike got to talking about who his audience is and how he has these athletes and up and comers and that underdog story of where I came from, as I just explained to you all over this last 30 minutes, he really connected with it and he said, my audience will love this and that's why I'm telling this story right here and right now. So of course, as with any other human on the planet, I could talk for hours about my own personal story, but this is not really about me. I shared all of this so that you understand who you're listening to and where I'm coming from. And I do want to offer you something. My newest book is called the Third Day. It is subtitled as the Decision that Separates the Pros from the Amateurs. And what the third day is. If I give you a quick anecdote, you think about it, the beginning of a year, every year, what happens in gyms. All of a sudden, everybody shows up to a gym. Why? Because everyone's made their New Year's resolution. They decide they're going to get in shape. This is the year I'm going to lose that £30. I'm going to get a six pack. I'm going to get back into the shape that I was in in high school or how I looked in my wedding photos. And for that first few weeks, everybody's in the gym, right? That's what we call the first day. Everybody's excited. It's a novel situation, is a new situation. Everybody feels good at the beginning of anything by the second day. And again it doesn't have to be a day, but it could be a month, a week, a period. By the second day, you got a. People are still showing up. They're still a little bit excited. Not as much as the beginning, but the situation still has that new car smell, as we would say. Now, by the third day already, you're noticing that a lot of those people who started showing up at the beginning of the year, they're already not coming anymore. Usually within the first six weeks, or some people even say the first 17 days of a year. All those people with New Year's resolutions are no longer. They're no longer so resolute in those resolutions anymore. They're not coming to the gym anymore. Already. Already by the third day. And the third day, what it is, metaphorically, again, doesn't have to be 1, 2, 3 in a row, but it's any situation in your life, in your business, in your sport, in a relationship, in anything that you've signed up for when you realize that the newness is worn off, the novelty of the situation is gone, and the only thing that's left is some actual hard work, some actual discipline, and some actual gritting and grinding that's going to have to be done. And in that moment, the third day is when each of us gets to decide. And yes, this is a choice whether you're going to show up all the way and give your best effort, or if you're not, if you're going to halfway show up, if you're going to quit completely, what are you going to do in that moment? Or are you going to show up all the way? And the reason why the subtitle is a subtitle is because every professional deals with the third death. I guarantee you I didn't ask Mike this, but I guarantee you Mike will concur. There are times he doesn't feel like recording for his show, but he still has to turn that mic on and do it. There are times in his career as a professional athlete, he. He didn't feel like practicing, but he had to practice. There are times when you, you, who's listening to me right now, there's something that you're all in on. You don't always feel like doing it. Parents, you don't always feel like dealing with your kids. Professionals, you don't always feel like going to the office. But we still have to show up and do that job. Why? Because that's the job of a professional. To show up all the way and give your best effort, regardless of how you are feeling. My newest book is called the Third Day. And here's the great thing about this book. Even if I've already sold you on it, I'll give you a copy of the book for free. Yes, I will give you a free physical copy of my new book called the Third Day. All I ask you do is to cover the shipping for the book. So the book's free. All you're going to do is cover the shipping. And all you need to do is go to thirddaybook.com that's spelled out thirddaybook.com the book is free. You're going to cover the shipping. And I got a lot of books. I've written 29 books to date. I've done four TEDx talks. I've published over 15,000 pieces of content. I got a lot of material out there. But I want to start you off with one simple thing. Go get your free copy of the Third Day by going to thirddaybook. Com. I'm sure Michael put links to everything in the description to wherever you happen to be listening to this and I look forward to hearing from all of you who have listened to me here on this show. I want to thank Mike Hartman one more time for sharing his platform with me and giving me this space. Hopefully he's not upset that I took a little bit more time than expected to go through this, but hopefully I gave you some value for every single minute that I've taken from you here today. And I appreciate you sharing this time with me and Mike. I appreciate you sharing the opportunity. And once you reach out to me, once you got the book, the Third Day also got a free text line. I'll give you the number. It is 305-384-6894. Again, 305-384-6894. You can actually text me at that number because every day, every morning I send out a free daily motivation text message to anyone, any in my texting community completely for free every day. So if you want to get that daily motivation text, just text me at that number. I will make sure I give Mike the number as well so he can put it in the show notes along with the link to get the free book the Third Day. And I look forward to hearing from you all tell me that you found me through Mike's show. And let's get to working on our games. My name is Dre Baldwin, also known as Dre all day. I appreciate the time.

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