Bo Eason, former NFL player turned playwright and speaker, argues that being the best is a choice you commit to fully. He credits his mother's "no Plan B" rule and describes four life declarations that guide continuous improvement by pushing beyond comfort zones.
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I think people should know how to be the best in the world at what they do. If you are going to be the best, then you've got to do one thing better than anybody else and that's improved. With the indoctrination that we're. That's coming at us through our culture, mediocrity is promoted mostly. You know, Larry Moss taught me that if I ever get comfortable that I am dead in the water. The only way to improve is to struggle to be the best safety in the world, to be the best chess grandmaster in the world, to be the best pole vaulter in the world, the best husband in the world. Father. It doesn't matter the discipline. Because I've done this four times. Here you come into the, into the earth and you're supposed to fit into this. These shoes called mediocrity. I don't think so.
So if you want to be the best at anything, you do, my advice to anyone is find a coach who will get you there. And the next person I'm interviewing is my good friend Bo Eason, who just came out with a brand new book, which is there's no plan B for your A game. Now, Bo has put in an enormous amount of effort into this book and today he's going to share with you his four step process for how this works and how it looks. What I love about Bo is he lives exactly what he preaches. He is absolutely congruent. So I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I like sharing it with you. All right, Bo Eason, nice to see you.
My friend Mike, what's up, man?
Well, I am here talking to you and you've got your brand new book coming out. Congratulations on that. Tell me about there's no plan for your. No plan B for your A game.
No plan B for your A game. That's what I saw my mom do. Me and my brother had dreams and she said, you know what? You got to have these dreams. And there was no option. There was just one option and that was it. And that's where the title came from. You know what's funny about it, Mike? I remember when me and my brother were kids, right? We wanted to be these professional football players, but.
There was no players around us. We didn't know any from our area. In our region, there was just no pro athletes. So parents of our friends would come over to my mom and dad's house and they would try to talk my mom and dad into me and Tony having plan B's. Go. You know, you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. You need a plan B for those boys because their hearts are going to get broken. And I watched my mom, like, physically throw these people out of our house, never to be heard from again. And that's when I knew that, you know, no option, less options, more success.
Very good. And one thing I will say about you. So we've known each other, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of better share of seven, eight years, something like that.
And I've watched you.
Evolve in ways and reinvent yourself. So here's my story of beau.
Professional football player, got to the NFL, then became a playwright, Broadway performer, and then built this platform, speaking and training. And I've said this to you before, and I'll say it again. I think you are, hands down the most amazing speaker I've ever seen. And every time I see you, you actually get better, which this is a world that easily stagnates and people reach a certain level and they stop evolving. So I'm curious through your lens, first of all, what's the big driver that keeps you thinking that way and moving that way? And I think that's the best place to begin, because first of all, you've done it over and over and over again without stagnating.
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, look, a big part of the book is this declaration piece, which I'm sure we'll get into. But, you know, every one of my declarations, which I've only had four in my life, they all have one thing in common. And all four of them say, I want to be the best safety, I want to be the best playwright, I want to be the best speaker. So the best is always a part of that. And if you are going to be the best, then you've got to do one thing better than anybody else, and that's improve. Right? So if you're going to think about that, if you're going to be the best at anything, and I don't care what it is, if you're going to be best at that thing, then you've got to improve day in and day out. And the only way to improve is to put yourself beyond your current capacity. So you've got to be actually outside of your own comfort zone. So even if you're great at speaking or great at playing football, it doesn't matter. You've got to get better if you're going to be the best. And that's just an ongoing process that I do. And then I've gotten comfortable with, like, I'M never kind of satisfied with where I am. I always think I can get better than that last performance. I can get better than that last game. I can get better than that last speech. And so I rehearse and improve. But that's got to be done outside my comfort zone. It's got to be done outside my own comfort zone. So I'm never quite comfortable, you know, and that. I think that being, you know, fighting for something and fighting for that improvement, I think that's where my drive comes from. Because he never quite satisfied. I think Martha Graham said it best where she said she was writing a letter to a dancer who wanted to quit. And she said, you know, you'll never be satisfied. You. You can only be. You'll only have this queer, divine dissatisfaction, this blessed unrest that keeps you going and makes you more alive than the rest. I've always kind of thought about that going through, you know, these improvement stages in any capacity that I've had.
All right, so that. That's actually super interesting to me and I'm curious.
So this dissatisfaction. Tell me a story about that. When? And I'm going to give you a couple options. One would be think of a.
Re a recent either speech or performance you had and tell me a story about the dissatisfaction, the unease you had and how you noted that and what you did. Or tell me a story about the book, because.
This is your first book, and writing a book is not easy, and I suspect that you put everything you had inside here and you actually wrote it. So pick one or the other. Or tell me both stories. I want to hear a story about your dissatisfaction and unease.
Yeah, well, that happened the whole three years of writing this book and bringing this book into existence, for sure. Dissatisfied. Almost every word. Going back, editing, changing rewrites. But I was trained. Mike, I think we've talked about this before by a guy named Larry Moss, as far as stage performance, as far as acting, the one man show that he directed of mine called Run to the Litter. So. So every time you get. This is how he trained me. Every time I got comfortable on stage, so I'd rehearse, I'd perform, and.
