Episode 126 - Dre Baldwin, Expert on Discipline, Building Confidence, and Mental Toughness

Date: 2018-07-02 | Duration: 43:32

Topics

What’s the biggest obstacle to discipline? Succeeding against perceived odds The mental state of “I’m gonna make this happen” Dre’s skill stack approach: More skills…more options Wanting vs. deciding to take action Effective self-promotion Transitioning from doing nothing to doing something

Dre Baldwin contact Info:
Website:   https://DreAllDay.com
Twitter:     @DReAllDay 
YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwHgkC8tsH6r0hQjCw_raYw

I fund my Periscopes and podcasts via audience micro-donations on Patreon. I prefer this method over accepting advertisements or working for a “boss” somewhere because it keeps my voice independent. No one owns me, and that is rare. I’m trying in my own way to make the world a better place, and your contributions help me stay inspired to do that. See all of my Periscope videos here… https://www.pscp.tv/ScottAdamsSays/1nAKERDOwylGL Find my WhenHub Interface app here… https://interface.whenhub.com

Transcript

[0:07] Pom, pom, pom, pom, pom, pom, pom, pom! Hey everybody, come on in. It’s a very special Coffee with Scott Adams. Before I tell you what all the fun is going to be about this morning, it’s time for the simultaneous sip. If you know, the simultaneous sip is the best sip of the day, and if you don’t get it early, well, somebody else is going to get it. Are you ready? Simultaneous sip, everybody.

I am delighted today to be talking with Dre Baldwin. You can find him on Twitter @DreAllDay. Dre is an expert on discipline, motivation, and mental toughness. These are all the things that you want to know, and this is my favorite topic.

[1:07] Dre is coming to us from Miami. I’m connecting to him using the Interface app—that’s the app that my company makes. It’s called Interface by WhenHub. You can connect to experts and experts can make money or, in this case, making WHEN tokens, which we hope will be on an exchange to turn into money real soon. Let me introduce Dre Baldwin. Dre, say hi to everybody on Periscope. I’m hoping our sound is pretty good. I’m using a new technology here, using my iPad behind me and broadcasting from my phone. Dre, what is the biggest problem that people have with getting disciplined? What do you think is their biggest obstacle?

[2:10] The biggest obstacle to being disciplined is that it’s not fun for most people. They don’t see it as something that’s—it’s not that people don’t know what discipline is. Everybody knows what it is. This is something that I don’t remember where I said it, but somewhere, either writing or speaking, I talked about it last week: if you have a job and you show up every day and you keep your job, you have discipline because you show up every day to do your work. If you have kids and you’re raising them, you’re disciplined. If you go to school or you play on a sports team or you’ve done anything—you have a garden that you maintain and the grass stays cut—you have discipline. So it’s not that people don’t know what it is or that they don’t have it; it’s just there are certain areas of life that it’s painful for some people to apply. Actually, I think we all have those areas where it’s painful for us to apply that. That’s the challenge.

Before we get into some of those details, you used your own concepts here to succeed in basketball, is that right?

[3:12] That’s right. The shortest version is: I started playing basketball from Philadelphia. I started playing basketball at the age of 14. The environment that I come from, there’s no grass at the playground field. Not many of us—some people play football, but not many. There’s a tennis court that nobody used. There’s a baseball field that the grass doesn’t get cut; I did play a little bit of that. There’s no swimming pool. We didn’t know any other sport. The only thing that most young men do is go to the basketball court, at least in our early teens.

I started playing at age 14. I didn’t have anyone teaching me. I have a sister; she doesn’t play sports. I’m six feet four inches tall; my father is five-seven, five-eight Navy, so he didn’t play basketball. There are a lot of kids in the neighborhood playing. There were only maybe three coaches in the neighborhood. I wasn’t under their wing, so I had to teach myself. This is in the mid-90s—no YouTube, no programs online, no Instagram.

[4:12] I just went to the court and just started trying stuff just to see what would work out. Eventually, it started to work. I finally made my high school basketball team as a senior, where I averaged an unbelievable two points per game. That’s at 18, where most people are gonna be saying, “You can be successful in life, but it probably won’t be in sports.” Me at 18, graduating high school, two points a game. But five years later, I would sign my first professional basketball contract. That was in Lithuania. You’re looking at me saying, “He’s a basketball player who you probably never heard of,” because my whole career was played out overseas, outside of the United States. I played for nine years internationally, and while I was doing that, I started making programs, making YouTube videos, and that’s where I became known. I got more known through YouTube than I did for my actual playing.

What was the point at which you thought, “I could do this professionally”?

[5:15] That’s a great question. Around age 15-16, Scott, I started believing because I saw how quickly I was developing. I was actually getting better at basketball despite the fact that—and there was a whole lot of irrationality in this—I tried out for the high school team in 9th grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, and got cut the first day. There are several levels of the tryout; I never made it past the first level of tryouts. Cut every time. But I was improving, so I started to believe. I wanted to be a basketball player. I’ve always had this dream of being rich and famous because that was always the thing that I wanted. That’s what I saw. All the people who had success, that’s what they had. I figured my path would be through sports. Around age 16, I started thinking that maybe I could become a professional, but it was very vague—a dream, a goal, but I had no path, no plane.

[6:16] Then at the age of 18—this was the summer after high school graduation, that summer between high school and the start of college—that’s the summer where I knew I was actually good at basketball. Players ask me, “Dre, what does it mean to be good? How do you know you’re good?” My definition of good is: at that point, I knew that you could put me on any basketball court anywhere in the world with anybody, and I would have spectators by the end of the day playing out there. That’s when I knew I could actually become a pro. It wasn’t until years later that I learned what the actual path would be, but I had the belief that I could do it by age 18.

Was that irrational, do you think? Because you couldn’t have possibly known it would work out for you, but did you feel you had something special?

[7:16] It was absolutely 100% irrational belief that I could become a professional basketball player. There’s a funny story I’ll tell you. When I graduated from college—I went to an NCAA Division 3 school—I have a degree from Penn State. Penn State, just like every other state school, has several campuses across the state. I went to Penn State Altoona which is Division 3, whereas the main campus is D1 with the football team and all of that. I went to a D3 school. I did not put up eye-popping stats. I did well, but my stats were not—I didn’t blow anybody out of the water. I didn’t even play my senior year; I got kicked off the team by the coach my junior year.

When I got home from college, my parents were asking me naturally, “You’ve got a college degree now, son. What are you gonna do?” I said, “I want to play professional basketball.” You can imagine how ridiculous that sounds. You didn’t make the high school team until you were a senior, you didn’t even play your senior year at a D3 college, and now you’re gonna become a professional athlete? What sense does that make? It didn’t make any sense. My mom just tore into me.

[8:17] “You went to school for four years. I’ve sacrificed all my life for you and your sister to get a good education. Now you want to play basketball? Listen, you need to get a job. You need to get yourself a car. You need to get an apartment.” At the time, I had braids in my hair, cornrows, and she said, “You need to get a haircut.” These were all the things that my mother couldn’t believe I was thinking. It was still irrational even to that point. I was so angry from that conversation—I didn’t lash out at my mom—but I was so angry that someone could look at it and just smack me in the face with that “reality.” That emotional drive from that day pushed me to guarantee that it was going to happen. Yes, 1,000% irrational belief that it could work.

Did you have some parental influence? Were one of your parents in the same mental state as you, which is “I’m just going to make this happen”?

[9:18] No, absolutely not. My parents were much more practical, on the realistic side. My mother was really the one who laid down the law, Scott. She was the one who made the rules and enforced the rules and did most of the talking. My father was there, but he kind of met her as she steered the ship. I don’t even know what he really thought about it because she was on such a roll that he kind of just co-signed it. But I would say the discipline that I have developed since then definitely 100% comes from my mother.

I’ve got to ask you a mom question. Did your mother tell you you were going to be successful at something, or did she assume you were going to be successful? Or was that really not part of the conversation?

[10:21] It wasn’t part of the conversation. My parents—I’m 36—were born in the early 60s. This was before I had internet. There was the whole “The Plan,” I like to call it—The Plan in capital letters, like a proper noun. This is: go to school, get some good grades, go to college, get a degree, get a good job, a car, a house, get married, have 2.5 kids and a dog, and live happily ever after. Just be a little bit better than your parents. I think that’s what my parents wanted my sister and me to do. They never explicitly said it, but when I told her I wanted to be a pro athlete and I saw her reaction, I figured, “Yeah, that’s pretty much what she wanted.” My sister did exactly that, and I did kind of the opposite.

What was your major?

Business, with a focus in management and marketing.

What I like about this is that you were building a skill stack. So even if the basketball didn’t work out the way you wanted, you still had lots of ways to go. You could still get there on multiple paths.

[11:21] Now let’s get to what the viewers probably care about the most. They’re really happy that you’re motivated, but they’re wondering, “How the hell could we be like that guy?” They’re thinking, “How could I feel that confident about what I’m doing?” What techniques do you coach people into to get them in the right mindset if someone’s looking for confidence?

The first thing I would figure out is what is it that they’re looking for and why are you actually looking for it? Then try to uncover what they really want. Usually, Scott, I’m sure you know people tell you that they want something, but that’s not really what they want. That’s what they say they want, but there’s something under that. If we were just saying someone wants to be confident on the surface, the number one thing that person has to do is create the outcome. The first thing you need in your mind is the outcome. It was the same with me and playing basketball. I’m 16, not making the basketball team, and I said, “I want to be a pro basketball player.”

[12:22] All I had was the starting point and I had the ending point. I had no idea of what was gonna happen, but because I had that vision, that vision was propelling me forward in order to get what I wanted. I guess it’s a rough version of the Law of Attraction. The number one thing is: What is it that you actually want? That has to be what you really want, not what sounds good on the internet, but what you actually really want—something you may even be embarrassed to tell people because the reality of the facts in front of you says that doesn’t even make sense, similar to my situation.

I like to make a distinction between what people say they want and what they decide to do, because they’re different. When you decide, you’ve gone beyond thinking one thing; it doesn’t get you as much as deciding to go get it. Did you visualize yourself in the future? Did you write down what you wanted? How did you get on that?

[13:23] I graduated high school in the year 2000, so I didn’t know what visualization was. I didn’t get introduced to personal development until maybe 2002. I didn’t know there was such a thing as visualizing. I didn’t know about writing down goals. Eventually, every New Year’s, I would write down my goals. I would do that and visualize what it is that I wanted to achieve. Then around 2002-2003, I heard this radical idea that instead of writing down goals for each year, how about writing down goals for the next ten years or for your whole life? I did that, and I remember writing down the goal that I wanted to one day have a website called DreBaldwin.com or Dre something that was going to be about me, by me, for me.

[14:26] That eventually became Dre All Day, which eventually became the brand. I was doing a rough version of visualization before I even knew what this whole realm of personal development was. What I tell people is: personal development is making yourself better and more valuable on purpose. A lot of people don’t do it on purpose. I was doing it somewhat on purpose and somewhat by accident, but now that it is available to everyone, I think it’s a requirement for anyone who wants to go.

On top of visualizing what you want, tell us a little more about technique. Some people can visualize, but then they’re not doing anything about it. How do you connect the visualization to the actual actions?

Once someone has a clear vision of what it is they want to achieve, the next thing is you take some actions. The challenge is: “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I don’t have any ideas.” I get emails and DMs from people saying these exact things every single day.

[15:27] Here’s what you do at that point. You don’t know what to do? Come up with some ideas. I got this idea from a guy named James Altucher. Are you familiar with James?

Oh yeah, yes of course.

James talks about the “idea machine”—coming up with ten ideas per day. I started actually doing that a few years ago. It becomes automatic where you just start coming up with ideas easily. These are not necessarily good ideas; they’re not necessarily actionable. None of them may actually turn into anything. But if you do ten a day, that’s over 3,000 ideas a year. If you come up with just ten ideas for “I want to be a basketball player,” what are ten things that I could do that could make me become a professional athlete? Who can I talk to? Who can I DM? Who can I email? Who has a YouTube video out there? Who’s at the park across the street? What about this guy who lives next door—he looks like a basketball player, always has Jordans on.

[16:29] What are ten things you can do right now and ask the questions to those people? Somebody’s going to know something that is gonna lead to something. Taking action is the number one thing that you do, and your actions do not have to produce results. They don’t have to be sound; they don’t have to be logical. If you take enough action, eventually you’re gonna run into the person who knows the person who knows the person, or someone who has the information. Another thing that I tell people: in 2018, it’s unacceptable to be clueless. It’s unacceptable to not know what you could possibly do next. It is illogical to say, “I’ve tried everything,” or “I don’t know what to do next,” when there are people like yourself out there sharing your knowledge and answering people’s questions every single day. We have books, we’ve got YouTube, we’ve got blogs. How could you not have another option, another resource, something else you can go to to figure out another way I can make this work?

Let’s summarize some of those parts before we go on because people are joining the Periscope as they go.

[17:30] You’ve got the visualizing what you want, the affirmations, and writing it down. You were building a skill stack, so you had options. You had a four-year degree in business management, so that gave you options, but your primary passion was to play professional basketball. You had the skill stack, you had the visualization, and then you did the James Altucher thing where you’re coming up with ten ideas a day. I would call that habit. There’s a real good book called The Power of Habit, which is exactly what I was hoping you would say, by the way. There’s a point in this where you have to turn the visualization into some kind of a habit. Your habit was that you consciously determined you were going to come up with ideas every day—lots of ideas.

[18:32] Then the next part was action. Probably the most important thing that people are going to want to hear is: How did you actually get off the couch? How do you do the first thing? It sounds like—and don’t let me put words in your mouth—but it sounds like you were taking action without a huge regard to whether this was exactly the right thing to do for the rest of your life. You were saying, “Try this, try this, try this,” just sort of opening every door and seeing what’s behind that door. Would you call that a system of just opening as many doors as you can until you find something?

Specifically about playing professional sports, there are these things called exposure camps. This is how I actually got into the pros. An exposure camp is like a job fair, Scott.

[19:32] But instead of putting on the suit and handing out your resume, you bring your equipment for your sport. I know they do this in basketball. You actually play against 200 other guys who want to play pro basketball. Understand that instead of there being fans, there are scouts, agents, coaches, managers, and team owners from all around the world watching you play. Your goal there is to impress somebody. You only got to impress one person. When I went to my first exposure camp in 2005, all I needed to do was impress one person. I knew from playing so much basketball: listen, you can score seven points the whole game, but that one play can be spectacular and somebody is impressed.

Hold on that point because I want to emphasize that. That’s such an incredible point. I find that what stops people often is an incorrect view of their odds. They think these are overwhelming odds; I can’t do this. But you were thinking that the odds were actually

[20:33] better than most people would think because you were looking at all these people and saying, “I only need one. I just need one person to say the right thing.” Let me give you—and I’m going to get right back to this—but when I tried to become a cartoonist, I sent out my samples to a bunch of different places and my attitude was exactly that. I only need one person to like it. And exactly one person liked it. Now later, get back to your story. You’re in the tryouts, you only need one person to like you, right?

I made some great plays there and somebody liked me. Basically, what they do is they make a scouting report after the exposure camp is over—it’s only three days. They write down the scouting reports for everybody who was there. They had video of everyone who was there and they put it up on a website. I took that scouting report—a link to a webpage—and I had the footage. This footage was on a thing called a VHS tape.

[21:33] That footage actually became my first YouTube video, which started a parallel story. But I called every basketball agent whose phone number I could find in the United States of America. I emailed them or called every one. Maybe seven or eight of them replied to my email or message, called me back, and were interested. For those seven or eight, I made copies of my VHS tape and physically mailed that tape to those agents. One of those eight agents called me back; he became my first agent. He got me my first deal to play basketball overseas. It’s similar to what you said.

I heard someone say that the entertainment industry—whether we’re talking about publishing books, cartoons, or basketball—is a “bandwagon business.” Nobody wants to mess with you when nobody knows you, but as soon as one person is on you and one person’s interested, now everybody’s interested. Now everybody wants to know who this cartoonist is or who this basketball player is. Now everybody wants to jump on a

[22:33] bandwagon. When you don’t need them, everybody wants you. When you do need them, nobody wants you.

Right. So then you have one person who liked you and then you’re off. You had a vision of the whole plan—you need to find somebody and then you would leverage that one thing to do more exposure. Was there the one agent or scout who first noticed you and gave you your break? Was there something they saw in you in particular that they called out, like a specific skill or quality?

I think so. My ability to jump, play above the rim, and dunk the basketball, basically. Anyone who’s watched a basketball game knows that a dunk is probably the play you’re gonna

[23:34] remember more than anything else that happens. Now the game’s changed a little bit; you’ve got the three-point shot, and people want to be Steph Curry. But back in my day, people wanted to be like Mike. They wanted to be Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan was dunking on everybody. I had this one big dunk at that exposure camp, and that whole gym just went crazy. After that game, one of the scouts came up to me and asked me a few questions. He was one of the guys responsible for writing the scouting reports. Because he saw it and was impressed by what he saw, that helped me get this glowing scouting report. Then when I sent it out to the agent, the agent saw the scouting report—he wasn’t at the camp, but he saw the footage and the scouting report and said, “I can leverage this. I can get a team interested and we can make something happen.” That’s exactly what happened.

When somebody sees a dunk, they’re seeing two things: they’re seeing the athletic ability, but isn’t there also something about the attitude that gets you there in the first place? By the time you’re throwing that ball through the hoop, you’re 90% attitude and 10%

[24:37] athlete at that point. That’s got to come through, doesn’t it? What parts do you pull out of your experience that you go to first when you’ve got somebody who’s just stuck? They can’t put all the pieces together like you did. What do you find is the main lever that gets somebody from doing nothing to doing something, which is the big change? The big change doesn’t even matter what you do; if somebody is doing something, they’re going to be more successful than the person who can’t get off the couch. How do you do that first “get off the couch” motivation?

The first motivation has to be them believing that doing something can actually lead to a result. What I’ve found, Scott, is that people say they want

[25:40] things, but they’re unwilling to take action because they don’t believe that taking these actions is going to actually produce the results. They just don’t believe that it’s going to work. If you believe something’s gonna work, you are willing to make call after call. If you have a book that you want to get published, you’re willing to go to every publisher. If you have a movie to put out, you’re willing to go to every studio and get rejected because you know there’s some value in this. If people don’t really believe in what it is they want to do, they’re not going to take action. It doesn’t matter what you say; it doesn’t matter how you try to motivate them or push them. If they don’t see it actually working, then they’re not going to take the action.

Now, if you’re able to get someone to start taking an action, you can get them to take an action that will produce a small bit of result. If they can see that, then you can build on that. But you can’t always move a person to that. Maybe if there’s a personal relationship—let’s say your kid or one of your best friends—you drag them to the gym and they start to get some results after a week, then maybe they’ll keep coming. But if you don’t know the person, or if it’s someone on the internet,

[26:41] you can’t make somebody take action. They’re not gonna do it. At some point, you have to have something that moves you off your butt to at least try what you think will work. But if you don’t believe it’s gonna work, nothing I say is gonna change that.

I had an experience that you reminded me of. When I first became a famous author, I was still actually working in my day job. My co-workers came to me—several of them—and said, “I think I would like to be a writer for magazines,” or “I want to write a book.” These were people who had never written a thing and did not have any special writing talent. They came to me and said, “I want to be a writer.” I encouraged them and told them how to find people. Here’s the weird thing: 100% of them succeeded. 100%. It was all because of that thing you said earlier, which is: people are not good at estimating the odds of success.

[27:42] Being a number-one best-selling author is very hard, but getting published somewhere and being a professional writer is a lot easier than people imagine. Working with editors and putting in some effort, they pretty much all found someplace to get published and got paid for it. Probably the first thing is that people are bad at estimating the odds, especially if they’re willing to try a lot of stuff.

I have a little tip that I give people: things that are gonna work out eventually always suggest themselves in a bad form. In other words, the first time somebody made a cellphone, it was always dropping and disconnecting and not working. But you could tell people still loved it and had to have them even with all the flaws. I’ve tried dozens and dozens of different

[28:43] business ventures, and I always just do the first thing. I say to myself, “What’s the first thing you do if you’re gonna write a book?” Well, come up with the title, write a first chapter, maybe get some chapter outlines. If you do that and you look at it and say, “My god, this is really interesting to me,” it’s pulling you along. That’s good. If nobody cares and if you don’t care, then you drop that one and go to the next one.

Do you find that the project itself has to pull you? That’s a big thing for me. There are all the things I could do, and I poke at them all, and one of them just grabs me and starts pulling me. I wait for that one because I can’t motivate myself to do something I don’t want to do. It has to pull me. Do you think people should focus like a laser or try a lot of different things? What’s better for motivation?

I think try a lot of different things and see what works. It’s hustling—having a bunch of

[29:44] different customers going at the same time and seeing what works. Even if it’s in one specific area, like you said, coming up with the title. Or maybe the chapter. Maybe coming up with a list of publishers who you’re going to call—get their phone numbers, get a contact name, get an email, and have a spreadsheet of it. Now you’ve got a little bit of momentum going, which you just created yourself.

I’ll tell you a quick story about pro basketball that goes right to what you said: the result is going to show itself even when it’s not actually working. The first exposure camp I went to was not the successful one. The first one was a tryout for a team in a small league called the ABA. I don’t know if many people even heard of the ABA, but this team was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—a small town. At an exposure camp, there are usually hundreds of guys who want to play basketball. At my first exposure camp, three guys showed up. It was me and two other players.

[30:46] One of the players bailed out ten minutes in because he was in such bad shape; he was doing a full-court drill and couldn’t even participate. But the coaches who were there liked my game a little bit. They could surmise from there only being three guys there, and they invited me to the next one and then to the next one because people weren’t showing up. Even in those failures, I saw a little bit of success. “Oh, these pro coaches actually liked my game after I got kicked off my team in college.” This was something. This was a string to pull. Those little successes, even in the failures, show something.

Sometimes I refer to that as the X-factor. There’s sometimes something you can’t put your finger on that makes something better than another thing. You were probably noticing that in your own game very early on—that there was something about you and basketball, your body, and the way you think that was just perfect for this thing. You probably saw the future in the “bad version” of yourself.

[31:47] We’re talking to Dre Baldwin, expert on discipline, motivation, and mental toughness, out of Miami. Dre, where can people find you?

On Twitter @DreAllDay. My Instagram is my name, Dre Baldwin, one word. On YouTube, just look up my name, Dre Baldwin. My website is DreAllDay.com.

You do speaking, coaching, and consulting?

I do speaking, coaching, consulting, and writing for corporations, organizations, and individuals.

He’s appearing right now on the Interface by WhenHub app where you can talk to experts. Give me a few

[32:48] examples of things that people just don’t think of. Something where when you tell people, “Here’s a key, here’s a technique,” they go, “Wow, I wouldn’t have thought of that.” Something that’s that little extra sauce that you bring.

You know how people want to be confident? You’ve heard the technique “fake it till you make it.” It’s a life motto for some. The thing about “faking it till you make it” is that once you decide that you’re going to “fake it” and be the pro athlete even though you’re still an amateur, or you want to be a millionaire even though you don’t have any money in your account,

[33:49] as soon as you make that decision to become that person, you’re not actually faking it. You’re actually in it. It becomes real because in the moment that I decide I’m going to present myself as this person who I wasn’t two minutes ago, once I decide to be it, I’m being it. It will last as long as you decide to keep making it last.

Human beings, we don’t have the brainpower to look at everything we see and ask ourselves, “Is he being for real? Is he faking it? Is this who this person really is? Are they trying to be something that they’re not?” We just have to accept things on the surface because we don’t have the brainpower to examine every little tiny thing. It’s kind of like that movie Catch Me If You Can with Frank Abagnale. He was going around places pretending to be something, and he was so convincing that people were doing whatever he said to do because he assumed the position so much.

[34:50] The problem people have with faking it till you make it is that they have it in their mind—80% of their mind—thinking, “This is not for real. People are going to figure me out. How long can I keep this up?” It’s because you’re thinking that; that’s the exact thing keeping it from working. If you sort of just dive in 100% into it and immerse yourself in that faking it, it would become so real immediately. You would see results so quickly that you would be astonished as to why you hadn’t done it before.

I’m thinking of writing a book about all the mental things that people do that are holding them back. One of them is that the worst advice I’ve ever heard is “be yourself.”

[35:51] If being yourself was good enough, you’d be done. “Hey, I’m just being myself; I’m poor and I’m hungry and nobody likes me, but I’m being myself.” My observation of life is that nobody is themselves. If it were just me, I wouldn’t have shaved, I wouldn’t be wearing clothes. Everything you do should be in the context of a society, a culture, and a family. You’re connected to all that stuff; you’re not some free-floating variable. Your variable is everybody. If you’re not doing something that other people like, you’re not succeeding. Ultimately, you need to make yourself into something that other people care about and want to pay for or want to be around, or else you’ve done nothing.

I also believe in the Dr. Laura philosophy that you are what you do.

[36:51] You’re not your mental thoughts on the inside; it’s what you do. You could be the worst person on the inside, but if you spend your whole day doing charity work and helping people, that’s who you are. You’re not those bad thoughts you had; you’re the person who’s actually doing stuff. So your “fake it till you make it” thing reminds me of that, which is that the faking is actually doing something. You’re actually doing it. The doing it makes it you. That’s who you are; you’re the person doing it.

I’m totally on board with that. But you seem to have a natural confidence, which I think I was born with as well. At six years old, I was sure something was gonna work out. How do you help somebody get comfortable with confidence? Is it just by observing their own success in small ways?

No, I don’t think so. I think the main way for someone to build confidence is to start with something that you’re actually good at. It’s like the skill stack. What skills do you actually have? Develop

[37:53] more and more of those skills. The more skills people have, the more options will be available to you because every day there’s some new way popping up for people to build success. The number one thing is to start with something that you’re actually good at. Are you good at speaking to an audience? Are you good at talking to a camera? Are you good at talking to people one-on-one? Are you good at writing? Are you good at being funny on YouTube?

Do the thing that you’re good at and then expand from there. Expand from where you’re actually getting results and keep going outward. Don’t try to force it. I find a lot of people are trying to force themselves to be good at things that they’re just not good at. They just don’t have the ability, the talent, or the natural inclination. I wasn’t good at basketball when I first started, but I had some talent.

[38:53] I’m tall, I can run fast, I can jump, and I’ve got long arms. Those are good things that could possibly work for a basketball player.

I often tell people that if they’re trying to build their personal talent stack—their collection of skills that make them unique—it’s good if they start with at least one thing they’ve got a natural advantage at. In my case, I’m a little more creative than the average person, but I added to that a mediocre drawing talent. Modest, but I could try hard to draw, and then I added writing and figuring how to make a cartoon and stuff. But I had to start with something that I was naturally good at.

[39:54] I’m right with you on that advice. We’re getting ready to close down. I like to keep these Periscopes under a certain time so that they don’t run too long. I’ve really enjoyed this. In the comments, give me some feedback about what you liked about this in particular. Dre, is there anything you want to say—a big point that I didn’t ask—that we would all be lacking if we had not heard?

The two things that we both touched on: one is that whole “fake it till you make it” thing. Once you have a clear goal of what it is you want to be, who you need to be in order to achieve your goals, assume that position and become that person right now. It will automatically change your actions, and that will change your results. The other thing is what you said: what you do is who you are.

[40:56] I often hear people say, “It’s what I do, but it’s not who I am.” That’s garbage. Whatever you do is how people are going to judge you. That’s all they can see—what you’re doing. If someone says, “Well, I work 80 hours a week in finance, but that’s not who I am”—that’s the only thing that you do! If someone’s describing you, that’s the only thing they can speak on. They don’t see you anywhere else; you’re not at the party or the birthday, you’re at work. What you do is who you are. If you want to change who you are, all you need to do is change your actions. To change your actions, you must change how you think of yourself, and you can decide to change that in any given moment. How long it lasts is 100% your choice.

There’s another piece of advice I give people, especially young people. I say: this is the most important thing you’ll ever learn. You’re not going to believe it, but sooner or later this is going to come back to you and you’re gonna believe it later because you’re gonna see enough examples. It goes like this:

[41:58] Everybody is faking all the time. Everybody is a little less confident than they want you to see. Everybody is showing themselves in a little bit better light than maybe they’re thinking on the inside. If you think that other people are more confident than you, you are simply mistaken because other people are insecure on the inside. Once you realize that, it’s really a level playing field. The mistake is to think that the things happening in your head—your personal insecurities—are somehow unique and that other people have it figured out because they’re acting like they have it figured out. But they’re acting. When you learn to act and “fake it till you make it,” then it’s a level playing field.

I love this conversation, but let’s not go too long. I’m seeing great comments here, so people are really enjoying this. Dre Baldwin, thank you very much for this. This was a tremendous time.

[43:00] I’m going to sign off of Periscope and then I’ll keep you on and we’ll wrap up over here. You want to say goodbye?

Goodbye everybody on Periscope. Scott, thank you for having me. I’ve been a fan for years, so I’m finally glad to be able to connect and talk to your audience here on Periscope.

Thank you very much for being here. Give me your Twitter handle one more time.

@DreAllDay on Twitter. D-R-E All Day.

That’s it for today. Bye for now.