Dre Baldwin Discusses His Book, Work On Your Game, And Becoming a Top 2% Performer

Success Profiles Radio

Dre Baldwin, a former professional basketball player and author of 43 books, shares his journey from being on the bench in high school to building a successful

Key takeaways

• High performers often underperform due to inconsistent execution and lack of disciplined habits.
• Identity shapes performance; success begins with who you believe yourself to be.

Main topics

• The power of disciplined execution in sports and business
• Overcoming underperformance despite high potential

Notable quotes

"If no one's calling you, you got to call them."

Conclusion

Dre Baldwin's story illustrates that success is built through consistent effort, self-awareness,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) It's time for Success Profiles Radio with your host, Brian K. Wright. Have you ever wondered if there's more to life than you're currently living? Then Success Profiles Radio is the program for you. Every week, we'll explore different aspects of success and how to apply them to your life. Guests will come from many different backgrounds, including expertise in leadership, business, relationships, careers, networking, health, overcoming adversity, and much more. Every show is a dose of inspiration. This is Success Profiles Radio. And now, here's your host, Brian K. Wright. Speaker 1 (0:41) Hello and welcome to Success Profiles Radio. I'm your host, Brian K. Wright, and it's an absolute pleasure to be with you here today. I'm honored that you chose to spend part of your day with me here, and this is going to be a fantastic and amazing show. I will introduce my guest shortly, and I promise we're going to learn a lot today, and we're going to have some fun too. I do want to take a minute or two to share some things I've been learning and thinking about lately, and I usually do this every single week. Believe it or not, Q4 will be here faster than we want to admit. Speaker 1 (1:07) If you are running a business, you need to have people in your pipeline. That means knowing who is most likely to become a customer in the near future. Not too long ago, I was evaluating who might be in my 100-day pipeline as I prepared to sprint to the finish line for the year, as well as the monetary value of that pipeline. It got me excited that while my goals for the year are still a little ways away, there's still a possibility that I can reach them. And I shared that with my coach recently, and he gave me a lot of encouragement. Speaker 1 (1:33) followed by some strategies that I can implement to make those goals a reality. And if you don't have a coach, you really should. A great coach will help you clarify your goals, help you develop a roadmap to reach them, serve as your cheerleader, and provide you with tough love when you need it. Knowing what your target is has to happen before you can ever hope to hit it. And if you have not downloaded and subscribed to Success Profiles Radio on Apple Podcasts or iTunes, please do that. Even leave a five-star review. That would mean a lot to us. We've done over 650 episodes, and our 15-year anniversary is coming up in... Speaker 1 (2:02) January. I can't believe how quickly that is coming. But go ahead and do that. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, iTunes. That would be awesome and amazing. And of course, download and subscribe. That would mean a lot to us. My very special guest this week is Dre Baldwin. Let me tell you about him. He's the founder of Work On Your Game, a performance operating system for entrepreneurs who refuse to underperform their potential. After going from the end of the bench in high school to a nine-year professional basketball career, he built his brand the same way he built his game. Speaker 1 (2:31) through disciplined execution. He has authored 43 books, delivered four TEDx talks, and produced over 3,600 episodes of his daily masterclass with more than 100 million pieces of content consumed worldwide. Today, Dre works with high-level coaches, consultants, and founders who want more than motivation. He helps them install mindset, strategies, systems, and accountability so their business scales with structure and their presence. commands the room. We have so much to unwrap and unravel today. So here I am with my very special guest, Dre Baldwin. Dre, how are you? Welcome to the show. I'm doing great, Brian. Thanks for having me on. Hey, you're so very welcome. So did you envision early on that you'd be where you are today? Yes, I did. I love this answer. Please tell us more. So starting out, my background is in sports, as you said. So I envisioned that I was going to... Speaker 1 (3:17) Make it in sports, whatever making it meant. And that led to my career when I was playing overseas. And then when I was transitioning out of basketball, I was already starting to do the things that you mentioned in that introduction. So talking about mindset that was pulled from my sporting experience and the things that you learned in sports that most professionals and organizations want, like showing up every day. Speaker 1 (3:38) performing the way you got to perform, being willing to compete, being mentally tough enough to deal with setbacks and being a go-getter who can kind of make something out of nothing. As an entrepreneur, you absolutely have to do that. So all those traits I needed as an athlete. And I realized while I was still playing that there were professionals outside of sports who needed those tools. I just had to figure out the best way to package it and get it out to those people. So I absolutely envisioned all of this and I envisioned more that hasn't happened yet. So the story is still being written. Speaker 1 (4:05) Oh, absolutely. In fact, I fully believe that for both of us, the best things that will ever happen to us haven't happened yet. Right. Absolutely. So how did you go from the end of the bench in high school to having a nine year professional basketball career? That must have been quite a journey. Yeah, it was. I mean, I started playing basketball pretty late. So I was about 14 was around the time you start high school. So I didn't make the team in high school until my senior year was while I was on the end of the bench. Speaker 1 (4:29) I was a what they call a late bloomer in a sport. And I was a late bloomer because I was a late starter. So you bloom usually after a few years of doing it. So a player who starts playing at age five, they may peak when they're 13. I didn't peak until I was maybe 18 or 19. Well, actually, I peaked later, but I was starting to get a lot better by the time I graduated from high school and went on to college. So I could feel myself still improving, even though I didn't have any proof that. Speaker 1 (4:53) I was anything, average, let alone good. But I went to college, walked on, played at the Division III level, which is not a level that produces professional players. But it made sense that I was there being my high school career was very humble, less than humble. I got better through my four years of college and I could feel that I was still improving. Yet coming out of a Division III, it's not like pro teams are knocking down my door. or ringing my phone off the hook. So I had to sell myself to get an opportunity to play pro. I had to sell myself to go get some footage and a scouting report to show that I was actually good because I had to go play against some pro level guys at these events called exposure camps. Then I had to go sell myself to an agent and get an agent to represent me to find a team internationally who would sign me. Speaker 1 (5:35) because the agents weren't calling me because they didn't know who I was at that point. And then even once I got into my career, Mariah, I still multiple times had to sell myself over again to get on another team or to get a different agent or just to keep the opportunities flowing because they were not. Most of my career was not inbound opportunity. Most of my career was outbound opportunity that I created out of nothing. And it's basically the same way that I operate in business to this day. I would wish that my phone would ring off the hook with all incoming opportunities, but I started to go out there and create them more often than not. Great. What country did you end up playing basketball in? Speaker 1 (6:07) Well, every year I was in a different country. So my first job was in Lithuania. That's the first country that I played in. First time I even left the country. The last place that I played in was in Slovakia. So in between, it was eight different countries, including the United States. That's absolutely amazing. So what did basketball teach you about running a business? Well, the first thing is if no one's calling you, you got to call them. Now, one thing that I tell people all the time, Brian, is. If I had been a better basketball player, then I might not have developed these entrepreneurial skills through my athletic career. Maybe I would still go into business after basketball. But a lot of the things that I do now as a business owner outside of sports, I had to do them inside of sports only because of my pedigree and where I came from, which, again, was not. Speaker 1 (6:53) super impressive my background. So had I been Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, I could have just played basketball and all I would have had to do was play basketball. But I had to market. I had to sell. I had to promote. I had to follow up. I had to learn copywriting because I'm sending emails to these teams and agents. I had to learn how to pitch myself. I had to learn how to do all these things because there are worldwide. A lot of people don't understand this. And the NBA basketball is about 500 guys, including the guys. Speaker 1 (7:19) On the fringes, the NBA's developmental league, you got another 200. And then overseas, you have probably less than 2,000. So overall, there are less than 3,000 jobs for an American-born male to play professional basketball. Now, how many men do you think think they're good enough to play professional basketball? A hundred times that or more. Right. At least 50,000 who really think they can get on the court and go play. And you got about 3,000 jobs. And mind you, not all 3,000 jobs turn over every year. Speaker 1 (7:47) A lot of players played one year and they play again, they play again. So every year, how many openings are there really? Maybe 500, less than a thousand openings every year. So to get into that space, I realized that because of my pedigree, I couldn't just play because nobody, nobody had said to that point, this guy's just so amazing. He has to play pro ball. I had to do something that will push my name to the front of the pile where, Hey, it might be. Speaker 1 (8:10) 800 players who are pretty close to me in skill where the average person couldn't say who's better than who is pretty close. We're all commodities. But if I could market and promote myself, well, they're going to notice me before they notice that guy. So I'm going to get the opportunity. That's the exact same thing that happens in business and in the sports world. Good thing about sports is that sports is a meritocracy. Generally, if you can get on the court or on the field or on the track, you can prove it in business. Speaker 1 (8:36) It's a similar thing. The difference is in sports has a scoreboard. So there's an objective judge as to who's better than who. In business, there is no scoreboard. It's a subjective judge as to who's better than who. That's the client. That's the customer. That's the company you're trying to do business with. The people get to decide who they like, who they don't like. At least in sports, you got a scoreboard that has to tell one truth. In business, you have no idea what the scoreboard is sometimes and you just have to figure it out. So it's a different game. Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 1 (9:03) Where did entrepreneurship come from for you? For some of my guests, it came from their family. I don't know if that happened for you or did you get your entrepreneurial influences elsewhere? Excellent question. Well, it came from my family indirectly. So my parents, I come from a two-parent household. My parents worked traditional jobs. My mom was in education. My dad, his passion was music. He would moonlight doing music, but his main job was working at a factory, manual labor. Speaker 1 (9:28) The thing that the reason I say came from indirectly because my parents and all the adults around me, Brian, talked about work as a necessary evil. I picked up on that, that, OK, I have to go to work tomorrow. It's Sunday. I have to go to work on Monday. Talked about work as something that you have to do because you're an adult. You pay bills. You're responsible. But I never heard an adult around me talk about work as if they were excited to go. It was I have to go. Speaker 1 (9:53) So I was thinking to myself when I'm in college, OK, well, I'm going to get a degree so I can go do that, too. Maybe just make a little bit more money. Is there a better alternative? In college, I got introduced to an opportunity that turned out to be network marketing, which I'm sure you and others have heard of. I did not build a career in network marketing, but I went to enough of the meetings that I picked up on some very valuable stuff. One is that they were talking about concepts of entrepreneurship that were not taught in school. And I have a business degree and these things were not taught in school, but they were taught in those meetings. Speaker 1 (10:21) And the other thing is they talked about personal development, which is something that I was always into, but didn't know it had a name. And that's how I really got into entrepreneurship, which was the entrepreneurial concepts they were talking about at those meetings. I took with me and kept them in the back of my mind while I was playing basketball and a personal development, which I was already into. But now that I knew there was a genre, I could dive deeper into it because now I had names and places and books to go look for. That's how it started. Speaker 1 (10:46) Absolutely. What would you say your mission is? We've got a couple minutes to our first break. My mission is really helping people with execution. We boil everything down, everything that we talk about, you and I, but everything that I talk about in this company, Work On Your Game, talks about is about execution. Because most people these days have enough knowledge to put together a strategy or a plan of action. And if you don't have it, well, fire up your favorite AI. It'll give you a clean strategy of exactly what to do. Speaker 1 (11:15) The challenge for most people is actually doing the strategy. I was hearing a person talk the other day, this woman, she was talking online and she was saying, well, I have a personal trainer. The problem with my body is I just don't listen to the personal trainer. There's nothing wrong with the trainer. The problem with my body is I don't do what the trainer says. And that's most people's issue is not they don't know what to do. It's just that they are not either not doing it at all or they're inconsistent. So the execution closes what we call that execution gap between what to do and actually doing it. Speaker 1 (11:42) Absolutely. We've got about a minute to our break. What is the highest value skill that anyone can develop? Communication and communication in all forms. That is one to one communication verbally, one to many communications, such as what we're doing right now. I mean, it's just you and I talking, but there are thousands of people going to hear this or standing on a stage, public speaking. Then there's written communication. And then there is the other side of communication, which most people don't consider, which is what you consume. Speaker 1 (12:11) Listening to what other people say is the other half of communication and is not only what people say is also what they don't say. Their body language, their energy, all of those things are a bigger part of communication and even the words. But most humans, when you mention the word communication, all they're thinking about is what they get to say, not what everybody else is saying. Absolutely. We're coming up against our first break. My very special guest is Dre Baldwin, and we will be right back. This is Success Profiles Radio. Speaker 1 (12:39) The mission is to motivate and inspire others to discover their unique talents and follow their dreams in life. This is Success Profiles Radio. Speaker 1 (12:56) You have probably heard about the Ring Video Doorbell app. It has a motion sensor that alerts your cell phone if someone is on your porch or rings a doorbell. All you have to do is tap your phone and you can see who is at your door and talk to them through a remote mounted camera and speaker. My husband thought this would be a good idea to have for our home. However, I had no idea he had installed it while I was out of town. Imagine how confizzled I felt when I returned home. Speaker 1 (13:24) went to unlock the door, and suddenly heard my husband's