159 | The Art of Discipline: Dre Baldwin’s Blueprint for Success

About the Guest

Dre Baldwin, also known as Dre All Day, is a former professional basketball player turned entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker. With a nine-year career in professional basketball, Dre has transitioned into a highly influential voice in mindset development, discipline, and mental toughness. He is the founder of “Work on Your Game,” a company providing tools and techniques for personal development and success. Dre has authored several books and conducts workshops focusing on confidence-building, entrepreneurial pursuits, and performance improvement.

Episode Summary

In this insightful episode of Becoming UnDone® with host Toby Brooks, former professional basketball player Dre Baldwin shares his extraordinary journey from an overlooked high school athlete to a successful nine-year professional basketball career. Dre explains the drive and discipline needed to achieve his childhood dream of playing at a professional level despite facing numerous challenges. This episode offers an in-depth look at how Dre transitioned from being an athlete to establishing himself as an entrepreneur, leveraging his sports discipline to succeed in the business world. 

Dre delves into the mindset and execution strategies that underpin his philosophy, articulated through his company "Work on Your Game." Drawing parallels between his sports career and entrepreneurial ventures, Dre discusses the importance of discipline, mental toughness, and personal initiative in achieving long-term success. He emphasizes the power of building confidence through consistent effort and dedication, stating, "When you don't want to do the work anymore… you stop feeling the sense of loss when you're not doing it, you know it's time to transition." This episode is not only an engaging story of persistence and transformation but also an inspirational guide to developing a future-ready mindset.

Key Takeaways

• Pivot with Purpose: Dre Baldwin effectively demonstrates how one can prepare for and transition to a new career while still thriving in a current one.
• Discipline Over Confidence: Baldwin emphasizes that discipline is a precursor to confidence, dispelling the myth that confidence is the starting point of success.
• Embracing Change: Instead of fearing change, Dre sees it as a vital component of growth and encourages others to prepare themselves for eventual transitions.
• Resources in Rejection: Dre discusses how initial setbacks with basketball teams fueled his drive, shaping his future in both athletics and entrepreneurship.
• Mentorship Matters: By implementing advice from mentors and gaining results, Dre illustrates the importance of being proactive in personal and professional development.

Notable Quotes

• "When you don't want to do the work anymore… you stop feeling the sense of loss when you're not doing it, you know it's time to transition."
• "Confidence is often the result of action, not the prerequisite for it."
• "Discipline is not a personality trait. It's a behavior descriptor of action."
• "You can like LeBron, but you cannot relate to LeBron."
• "When you did what I told you to do… that validated that the information I was giving out wasn't useless."

Resources

• Dre Baldwin's Company: Work on Your Game
• Dre Baldwin on Social Media: Dre All Day
• Books Mentioned: 
• "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki
• "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill
• Host Toby Brooks' Socials: Toby Brooks, PhD on Linktree

Immerse yourself in this episode to uncover more about Dre Baldwin's journey and gain insight into the intricacies of transitioning careers while maximizing personal growth and discipline. Stay tuned for future episodes bringing you more transformative stories and powerful insights.

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Dre Baldwin): Foreign. This is becoming undone. Got around to basketball around age 14, which is around ninth grade. I didn't make my high school team until my senior year. And that one year I sat the bench. Mostly. I averaged two points per game. So getting out of high school, I didn't have options as far as being an athlete. I had options as far as being a student. So. So I knew I was going to college, but it wasn't for sports. So whatever school I ended up at, this is my idea. I'll just try out for the basketball team wherever I go.

0:00:35 - (Dre Baldwin): So I wasn't picking colleges based on Division one, Division two, it was just, wherever I go, I'll just try out Penn State. Admont just happened to be a provisional Division 3 college, meaning you can play sports there. And they were on their way to D3, but weren't even full fledged D3 yet. And you can only play two years of sports. Yeah, it was. Basketball was definitely a big part of it because the main thing I wanted to get out of college was playing basketball. I knew by that point, by the time I started college, that what I was supposed to get through the classroom and a degree and learning like a professional career, not in sports.

0:01:10 - (Dre Baldwin): So I ended up getting kicked off of the team, out of the program in the middle of my junior year, not because I couldn't play, but because when a new coach comes into a place, the same thing as when a new CEO replaces the old CEO in a company, they sometimes clean out the incumbents because they want to bring in their own people, people who are aligned with them, who they brought in themselves. So I ended up out of the program.

0:01:33 - (Dre Baldwin): I would get a job at Foot Locker. That was my first job out of college. I was an assistant manager at Foot Locker. Worked there six months, then got a job at a gym called Bally Total Fitness. So I worked at Bally Total fitness for about six months. This takes us into the summer of 2005. So the summer of 2005, I'm trying to figure out, how do I get in? This is Dre Baldwin, and I am Undone.

0:02:06 - (Toby Brooks): Hey, friend. I'm glad you're here. Welcome to yet another episode of Becoming Undone, the podcast for those who dare bravely risk mightily and grow relentlessly. I'm Toby Brooks, a speaker, author, professor, and performance scientist. I spent much of the last two decades working as an athletic trainer and a strength coach in the professional, collegiate and high school sports settings. And over the years, I've grown more and more fascinated with what sets high achievers apart.

0:02:29 - (Toby Brooks): And how failures that can suck in the moment can end up being exactly the push we needed to propel us on our paths to success. Each week on Becoming Undone, I invite new guests to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. I'd like to emphasize that this show is entirely separate from my role at Baylor University, but it's my attempt to apply what I've learned and what I'm learning, and to share with others about the mindsets of high achievers.

0:02:55 - (Toby Brooks): I'm glad you're back. This episode of Becoming Undone is about learning how to build the next version of yourself before the current one even disappears. My guest today is Dre Baldwin, a former professional basketball player, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Work on youn Game. For nearly a decade, basketball was his profession, his pursuit, and in many ways a central part of his identity. But while most athletes wait until retirement to figure out what's next, Dre was quietly building his future long before that playing career ended.

0:03:26 - (Toby Brooks): In our conversation, we talk about the unlikely path that took him from an overlooked high school player to a nine year professional basketball career, the discipline required to keep pursuing a dream when success was far from guaranteed, and the entrepreneurial mindset that eventually helped him transition from athlete to business owner and thought leader. Along the way, we explore confidence, fear, resilience, and the difference between chasing validation and pursuing purpose.

0:03:49 - (Toby Brooks): If you've ever found yourself standing between one chapter of your life and the next, wondering what comes after the thing you've always known, this conversation's for you. I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with former professional basketball player, entrepreneur and founder of Work on youn Game, Dre Baldwin in episode 159. Let's get into it. Hey. Greetings friends, and welcome back. Becoming Undone is the podcast for those who dare bravely risk mightily and grow relentlessly. Join me, Toby Brooks, as I invite a new guest each week where we examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place.

0:04:21 - (Toby Brooks): Today's guest is Dre Baldwin, former pro basketball player, best selling author, entrepreneur, and one of the leading voices in mindset, discipline and mental toughness. From going undrafted to building a global brand around confidence and performance, he spent years helping people learn how to truly work on their game. Dre, welcome to Becoming Undone.

0:04:41 - (Dre Baldwin): Toby, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.

0:04:44 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah, I. I really want to compliment you first of all. And I want to do this publicly because increasingly, as the show has grown, I get lots and lots of reach outs from Folks, sometimes it's their media personnel. You recorded, like a five minute personalized YouTube pitch. And it was so well done and just impressed from the jump with the approach that you take. And I'm sure you'll kind of get into that as we.

0:05:09 - (Toby Brooks): As we go on, but, man, that was awesome. I really do appreciate that.

0:05:13 - (Dre Baldwin): Oh, thank you. I'm glad it worked.

0:05:15 - (Toby Brooks): Here we are, for sure. Well, I always start at the beginning. What did you want to be growing up and why?

0:05:21 - (Dre Baldwin): When I got around to really thinking about it, first thing I wanted to be was an athlete. And why? Because I knew I wasn't going to do anything that required being a really diligent student. Even though I think I'm fairly intelligent, I was. Not that I didn't apply myself that much as a student. I was intelligent enough to finish school, graduate, went to college, got a degree, all that. But anything that required that type of. Type of work you had to do to be a good student, I didn't want to do that. I knew that wouldn't. That wasn't for me.

0:05:48 - (Dre Baldwin): Even though I come from a family of educators, my sister's a professor to this day. To this day. I got introduced to sports as just an outlet, you know, you have. You have kids? Kids, Toby?

0:05:57 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah, I do. I have two.

0:05:58 - (Dre Baldwin): Okay. So males, young males need energetic outlets. So I got introduced to sports and played a couple things, and once I got around in basketball, I said, okay, maybe this is the thing that I can do. Good thing is, it was a time when the Internet was not the Internet, so I couldn't look around and see how much the odds were actually stacked against that happening. So I was living in my ignorance. I was able to cultivate that idea, or really it was a dream into something that became real.

0:06:27 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah, I love that. I love how you framed that positively, that today we have this kind of thief of comparison that might rob us of our big dreams. If I'm at the start of the race and I look around and I see everyone who's doing so much better than me, there's a. There's a real human tendency to protect ourselves. And say, maybe I don't even start. But you didn't have that. So you end up playing high school basketball, I presume, and you end up playing Division 3.

0:06:58 - (Toby Brooks): Talk me through kind of that process and. And, you know, weighing your options of NAIA or Division 3, Division 2, Division 1, that. That kind of thing. And. And where was Dre during that process?

0:07:10 - (Dre Baldwin): Well, Toby, if you say that I was weighing my options, you're giving me too much credit. So let me tell you why high school. I started playing basketball because I played a little bit of football. Never got around to, you know, even when you put the pads on. And my family just couldn't afford the football equipment. So I never really played football. Then baseball for a few years. My dad would coach. He still actually coaches youth baseball to this day.

0:07:33 - (Dre Baldwin): But I wasn't really talented at baseball. I was good enough that I could play no local leagues, but I wouldn't have even had I played high school. I would have sat the bench because I just wasn't good. Got around to basketball around age 14, which is around ninth grade. I didn't make my high school team until my senior year. And that one year I sat the bench. Mostly. I averaged two points per game.

0:07:53 - (Dre Baldwin): So I tell people, Toby, that if you score two points per game in hockey or soccer, you're in the hall of Fame. You score two points per game in basketball, you're nothing. So getting out of high school, I didn't have options as far as being an athlete. I had options as far as being a student. I told you I was a good enough student. I had intelligence. I did good on the SATs. I did pretty good on those. I went to a magnet high school and had solid grades, so I would get material from colleges based on my student profile.

0:08:21 - (Dre Baldwin): So I knew I was going to college, but it wasn't for sports. So whatever school I ended up at, this is my idea. I'll just try out for the basketball team wherever I go. So I wasn't picking colleges based on Division 1, Division 2. It was just, wherever I go, I'll just try out. So the funny thing is, I was offered a 50% scholarship to Morehouse College, which is an HBCU in Atlanta, Georgia. And my parents were excited about that because I had all these letters from different colleges, but nobody was offering me any.

0:08:49 - (Dre Baldwin): No financial support, except maybe no federal grants, things like that. And Morehouse, 50% scholarship said, okay, now this makes this decision easy. Then I looked up, okay, Morehouse plays. I believe it was Division 2 at the time. I said, all right, I'll try out at Morehouse. Problem was, my parents, when they did math, they said the other 50% that needed to be paid for was a little bit too much. And a lot of people don't notice. But HBCUs are not cheap.

0:09:11 - (Dre Baldwin): So Morehouse's tuition, I believe, right now, is about $50,000 a. So my parents said, we can't afford that other half. And you are not going to get enough grant money to cover that other half or financial aid. We'll be in debt for the rest of our lives if we send you to Morehouse. So that's not going to happen. Now. I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I have been. I got like a. When you do college admissions they give you those fee waivers. So any school that sent me a fee waiver that you can apply for free, I applied. So I got accepted to like 13 colleges.

0:09:40 - (Dre Baldwin): One of them was Penn State University. And again I'm from Pennsylvania. So in state tuition is extremely low and I had the grant money so it wouldn't have cost me much to go to Penn State. And Penn State has like 23 campuses besides the main campus. I got accepted into the main campus straight out of high school. But my parents idea was how about you go to a local campus which is Penn State Abington right outside of Philadelphia. Go there for a year or two and then you can see what your options are from there. So that's what I ended up doing.

0:10:07 - (Dre Baldwin): Penn State Abington just happened to be a provisional Division 3 college, meaning you can play sports there. And they were on their way to D3 but weren flash D3 yet and you can only play two years of sports. So that's where I ended up going my freshman year. So as luck would have it, I ended up going to this small pond of a basketball program and I was a starter my freshman year. So that helped me build up my resume and help me build up my confidence because I needed the game experience which I had not gained yet to that point. So that's how I ended up playing college basketball first at Abington after my freshman year I would go up to the campus during the summertime when I was not taking classes, just to use the gym because Abington's campus is about 20 minutes from where I lived. I lived at home. They didn't even have dorms at the time. So this is commuter campus, 13th grade pretty much.

0:10:56 - (Dre Baldwin): And that was the first time I had access to an indoor gym in my life. So I would go up there just to use the gym and I would just practice by myself. None of my teammates ever came to practice. Just me in an empty gym by myself. Beautiful gym by the way. And one day I was walking across the campus to the cafeteria to get some food because I hadn't eaten at home before I left the house. And Penn State atmonton campus is very small. There's only four buildings, there's two classroom buildings, there's a cafeteria Library and there's a gym. So I'm walking to one of those other buildings, not classroom, and this guy approaches me and he says, hey, man, what position do you play? Now I'm looking at this guy, crazy, because I don't know him, and I know he doesn't know me. And Ambington's campus is very small, and this guy's a black guy. And on the campus that small, Penn State. I know who all the black people are. So I know I didn't know this guy, and I know he doesn't know me. So I'm like, what do you mean?

0:11:41 - (Dre Baldwin): How you even know I play? I had on basketball gear, but it was not like I was carrying a ball. And we're in the cafeteria. So he's like, I'm just asking. So we start a little conversation and eventually he pulls out a business card. He works at Penn State Altoona. Now, I knew this from my research. Penn State Altoona is the second largest campus in Penn State's system, besides the main campus. And the main campus, of course, is Division one. Most people know the football team. And Penn State Altoona was full fledged Division 3, which to me meant to four years of eligibility athletically.

0:12:11 - (Dre Baldwin): So he pulls out his card. He works at Altoona. He's in the admissions department, but he's also the head basketball coach. Now, this guy was not there looking for me. He was there doing his admissions department work. But he saw me. He later on told me this story. He said, when I saw you walk by, you looked like the kind of player that I knew I needed on my roster for the following season. He didn't know who I was, and he wasn't even sure I could play. Because in basketball, so many people can look like they can play, but they can't play.

0:12:36 - (Toby Brooks): This is a remarkable story by any account, but to me, it's even more remarkable if you know the end like I do. So, spoiler alert. Dre would go on to play nearly a decade of professional basketball all over the world. However, he didn't play basketball in high school until his senior year, and even then only averaged two points per game. Then, after walking on at Penn State abingdon, a provisional D3 school at the time, he finally started to see some minutes.

0:13:02 - (Toby Brooks): However, due to the school status he knew going in that he would need to transfer somewhere else in order to finish out his four years of college eligibility. Luckily for Dre, after that freshman season, a chance encounter with the admissions director, head basketball coach at Penn State Altoona opened up an opportunity to transfer. And even though the coach had never seen Dre play, Dre looked apart enough to get an invite to transfer.

0:13:26 - (Toby Brooks): Sometimes it takes a bet on ourselves to make a dream a reality. Sometimes a little luck or divine providence and intervention can come in handy, too. For Dre, it was a bit of both. But his journey was far from settled, and the adversities had only begun.

0:13:42 - (Dre Baldwin): He was basically just taking a risk, a leap of faith that maybe this guy can actually play. And turns out, I could actually play. He recruits me on the spot, and I end up going to Altoona. And that's where I finished out my collegiate career. Penn State, Altoon.

0:13:54 - (Toby Brooks): Wow. Just the likelihood of that interaction, and it changed the entire course of your life, I'm sure.

0:14:00 - (Dre Baldwin): I mean, y.

0:14:01 - (Toby Brooks): If that chance encounter doesn't happen, who knows? So I really appreciate you sharing that story. I have to wonder, at 18 years old, only playing one year and in limited minutes as a senior in high school, like, what were your dreams athletically? I know you mentioned, like, you were just going to go to college and try out, Was there any thought at any point that this would turn into a career?

0:14:28 - (Dre Baldwin): Yes, that was a belief. It wasn't even a thought. It was a belief. And as I said, the good thing is, give everybody a timeline here. I graduated high school in the year 2000, graduated college in 2004. So at this time, the Internet exists, but it's not the Internet. You can't see what everybody else is doing or who everybody else is. So, again, my ignorance was actually a benefit because I wasn't able to see how small these chances were.

0:14:53 - (Dre Baldwin): So I believed I could go play pro. Maybe I can get good enough over these next four years upon high school graduation that I can get drafted to the NBA. The 2004 NBA draft, which didn't happen, but then I found out about. Of course you have overseas options, where. Which is where I ended up playing. So for me, it was, whatever school I go to, I'm going to try to play there, and then I'll play. I'll build my game up. I'll get some good stats, resumes, highlights, et cetera, and that'll bring the scouts, and then I'll end up in the NBA. So that was the idea.

0:15:24 - (Toby Brooks): Graduating high school, vision and the audacity. I mean, looking back at it now, you can see just what, you know, what those odds were. But. But at that point in your life, you're certainly, you know, you're. You're enamored with the opportunity. I'll share a bit. I mean, this is my interview of you, not vice versa. But I ended up at a D3 school, Anderson University in Indiana. And the way I ended up there, I was actually a junior college transfer.

0:15:50 - (Toby Brooks): So in some ways similar. Didn't play at the junior college, but said, I'm going to give this one last try. And so I looked for schools that had my major that I hadn't heard of, because my thinking was if I hadn't heard of them, I could maybe play for them. And so I end up at Anderson and it was, you know, kind of the same similar story. It's a private school and I thought I had a grant that would cover what the rest of my academic wouldn't. And I found out in July that that was actually capped at 2,000. So kind of the same thing. Like I end up showing up on campus. Unlike you, you made a wise choice financially and not going to Morehouse.

0:16:31 - (Toby Brooks): I actually didn't have a choice. I show up on campus knowing I can't afford to stay for the spring and I'm kind of stuck. So I certainly appreciate the financial considerations that are part of that decision making process.

0:16:46 - (Dre Baldwin): My parents made that decision, not me. But yeah, I'll take credit for it.

0:16:49 - (Toby Brooks): Understood.

0:16:51 - (Dre Baldwin): Yeah.

0:16:51 - (Toby Brooks): A lot of athletes build their identity around performance and around sport. If we were to ask 19 year old Dre, you know, use a few words to tell me about yourself, basketball would probably bubble towards the top of that question. What happened internally for you during this process in terms of your identity? Who was Dre Baldwin in those undergraduate and maybe even early on in the professional career?

0:17:15 - (Dre Baldwin): Yeah, it was. Basketball was definitely a big part of it because I. The main thing I wanted to get out of college was playing basketball. I knew by that point, by the time I started college, that what I was supposed to get through the classroom and a degree and learning, etc. And where that was supposed to take you like a professional career out? Not in sports. Most 99% of people don't play sports for women or even try.

0:17:39 - (Dre Baldwin): I knew I didn't want to go that route. And the reason I knew I didn't want to go that route is because I saw my parents every day go to work. That's where I'm sure we'll get into this discipline, showing up every day. I got that from seeing my parents do it, but not they didn't play sports. My parents are not even six feet tall. I'm six four. And I saw the adults around me, teachers, family members, parents, et cetera. They talked about Work as if it was a necessary evil, not as something they were excited to go to.

0:18:07 - (Dre Baldwin): So I knew that, okay, the whole point of going to school is to get a degree and then you'll be a little bit better than your parents. But that means I'll just get a job that I'm a little bit less dreading on Sunday nights, having to go to Monday morning. And then I'm supposed to do that for the next 40 to 60 years and then I retire. I didn't want to do that, but at the time, again, I told you I graduated college in 2000.

0:18:29 - (Dre Baldwin): What other options do you have? And I didn't know any entrepreneurs at that time. And also what I did understand roughly about entrepreneurship is that you need money to start a business again. The year 2000, you did. Good thing that happened. And this is more answering your question in context. While I was in college, I saw this bulletin board posting one spring, it was near the end of the semester and it said, do you want to make any extra money in the summer?

0:18:53 - (Dre Baldwin): Now, even though I'm playing college ball at that time, there's no name, image and likeness business opportunity. So you could not earn money as an athlete based on being an athlete. That was a violation which would ruin your eligibility at that time. So it was the exact opposite now. So I needed to make some money in the off season, so, or in the summer. I responded to the bulletin board post and it turns out that there was some guy who didn't even go to school there. He was doing network marketing. Most people have heard of it, multi level marketing, whatever you call it, I didn't build a business there, but I did go to a couple of the meetings. And in those meetings I learned some things, many things about business that were not taught to me in class at school.

0:19:30 - (Dre Baldwin): And I have a four year business degree and they were not teaching these things in class that were being taught at these hotel meetings. And the guy's talking about different ways of earning money and how they don't teach these kind of things in school. He was absolutely right. And the other thing he was talking about was personal development. And as a phrase I never heard before, I was always a big reader, but I never knew there was a term for the material that was just about building yourself up on a personal level from the inside out.

0:19:56 - (Dre Baldwin): And he mentioned, they mentioned all these books. So you go to one of these meetings, most people listening have probably been to one and they say if you're going to build the business, you got to build yourself because you can't build a business anymore, and you build yourself. And that made sense to me. He said, you're going to lead other people. You got to lead yourself first. So you need to invest in personal development.

0:20:12 - (Dre Baldwin): Go buy these books. And they would mention these authors like Jim Rohn and Brian Tracy and Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar, Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale. I never heard of these people, but I remember the names. And also, I was a broke college kid. I could not afford books. They were selling the books right outside the room. I couldn't afford them, but I just remembered them. So I get home, I get back to college, and I go on ebay.

0:20:32 - (Dre Baldwin): And this is again, I'm dating myself here. Ebay was where you bought stuff before Amazon was the place. And I bought two pirated copies of books, Word documents of two books that I remember. One of them was called Rich Dad, Poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki. That book introduced me to the mindset of an entrepreneur.

0:20:49 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah.

0:20:51 - (Dre Baldwin): Planted a seed in my mind. This is probably about 2002, halfway through college. The other book I bought was called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. That book was the personal development that showed me that there's a way you can consciously alter your thought patterns to alter your actions, alter your outcomes. Those I just kept in my mind when I read Kiyosaki. I said, okay, here's something I can do as a job.

0:21:12 - (Dre Baldwin): That's not sports. That is not what I see the adults around me doing. That looks like he actually. Because if you. You read that. Sure. So in the book, one of the things that Kiyosaki explains in this allegorical account is that his real dad was a guy who went to school, got good grades, had a career, and then he got dropped late in his career, and he was stuck. He had nowhere else to go. His rich dad was his best friend's dad. This guy was an entrepreneur, a school dropout, but he owned his businesses. He seemed to enjoy going to work, and he was happy about life in general, despite the fact he didn't follow the normal path.

0:21:44 - (Toby Brooks): I love that Dre is describing a book that was also important to me in my journey toward entrepreneurship. Rich dad, Poor Dad. I was first introduced to the book by our equipment manager at Liberty, Robert Berggraf. I was the head athletic trainer at Liberty and 2003, and Robert was our newly hired equipment guy. I was living on around 30k a year at the time. So was he. Both of us had families to support.

0:22:07 - (Toby Brooks): So while we were working crazy hours in D1 football we were also in desperate need of additional income just to keep our households afloat. Robert suggested the book, and I read it in, like, two sittings. Since then, I've read some pretty scathing reviews of the author and his teachings. Three of his businesses have filed bankruptcy. Critics have pointed out inaccuracies in some of his stories and questioned portions of his financial advice. And maybe that's the point. Sometimes we dismiss an idea because the messenger's flawed.

0:22:36 - (Toby Brooks): But if we did that consistently, we'd have to throw out a whole lot of wisdom. The reality is that most of the people who influence us are imperfect. Coaches, teachers, parents, authors, entrepreneurs, present company included. Every one of them has blind spots. Every one of them has failures. The question isn't whether the source is flawless. The question is whether the lesson is useful for me. And I'd venture, guess for Dre, too. Rich dad, poor dad wasn't a roadmap to financial freedom. It was a permission slip to think differently. Growing up, I'd been taught to work hard, get good grades, find a stable job, and be grateful for my opportunities. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of that.

0:23:16 - (Toby Brooks): But Kiyosaki introduced me to a concept that was completely foreign at the time. The idea that money could work for you instead of you always working for money. Did I immediately become some brilliant entrepreneur? Not even close. But a seed was planted. A different possibility emerged. That's often how transformation begins. Not with mastery, not with certainty, just with a new idea that refuses to leave us alone. Looking back, that book didn't change my financial future nearly as much as it was changed my mindset.

0:23:50 - (Toby Brooks): It challenged assumptions I didn't even realize I was carrying. Whether you're talking about entrepreneurship, leadership, faith, relationships, purpose, any of that, that's usually where growth starts. Somebody introduces us, a new lens through which to see the world, and suddenly we realize that there might be more than one way to live our lives. For Dre, the encounter got him thinking differently about a future as well.

0:24:15 - (Toby Brooks): A life both with and without basketball.

0:24:19 - (Dre Baldwin): So in the book, it. The way he explains it, and very, very cleverly by Kiyosaki, is that the entrepreneur seems to enjoy life, whereas the employee seems to hate life. And he didn't say it in so many words, but when I read that, I thought to myself, okay, here's another way to have a job or career in life outside of sports was 99% of people don't do that. Looks enjoyable. I'm going to do this. I didn't know how, where, when, what. Because Kiyosaki is talking about real estate. If you read the book, I wasn't in real estate. I'm in real estate. But it kept that. That seed planted in my mind.

0:24:49 - (Dre Baldwin): So when I went to the network marketing meeting, I said, well, hey, maybe it's network marketing. It was not network marketing, but I kept the idea in my mind. So later on in the story, as we go on here, that's what that seed right there eventually germinated later on after college. So to answer your question, yes, it was athlete. And I said, I'm going to play sports, but when I'm done sports, because I know sports don't last forever. Even if you make it, it doesn't last forever.

0:25:12 - (Dre Baldwin): You're 35 and retire. What else am I going to do with the rest of my life? I'm going to do this entrepreneurship thing that this guy is talking about. And again, I had no idea how I would do it or where I would get in, but I knew this is the route that I want to take because I don't want to do the traditional thing because it doesn't look appealing to me.

0:25:27 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah.

0:25:28 - (Dre Baldwin): On top of the fact. One last point here to answer this question. In school, by my junior and senior years, when you get to focusing on your major, as they call it, so you're in the same classes with all the same people, because everybody who has that major, we're all in the classes. So same people in every class. And I noticed that there was a big difference between me and them. They actually came to class, took notes, bought the textbooks, listened in class, didn't fall asleep in the lectures. All right. These are all opposite of what I was doing. I would fall asleep in class because I'd be out partying and doing other things.

0:25:59 - (Dre Baldwin): I tried to get by without buying the textbooks in my senior year, for the most part, I did do that. And I saw they were, like, very diligent in doing the work. And I said, these people are going to be perfect employees of somebody's company when they get out of school. Right? They are. This is what school prepares you for. And the network marketing meetings start putting this in my head. And they were right.

0:26:17 - (Dre Baldwin): School prepares you to go work for someone else. That's. Sit down, shut up, wait till somebody tells you what to do and do it. Not a negative thing. My parents did it, and again, they set a great example for me, but that's not what I wanted to do, especially when I saw there was another option. So I knew. I said, if I go into the workforce and Try to compete with my classmates. I'm going to lose. Not because they're smarter than me or better than me, but because they actually want to do this. And I don't want to do it.

0:26:41 - (Dre Baldwin): And I don't want to set myself up for doing that for the next 40 years. There's a losing proposition. It's a wrong game to be in. So when I read Kiyosaki and went to those network marketing meetings, I said, this is a lifeline for me because sports is a one in a million thing. I might make it, I might not. But even if I do, it's a very short window. What comes next is going to be that. So in my mind, it was athlete, entrepreneur, and that's it.

0:27:03 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah, I appreciate that insight. There's a lot of honesty and vulnerability there as you share. And one thing that bubbles up as you're talking about your journey is just the bravery. The guy who hadn't played basketball until his senior year, and then you try out to play collegiately, you're working on your craft. There's gotta be a seed of fear in there somewhere. For most folks at least. And I also hear you talk, and in looking at your website and a lot of your other stuff, like discipline is a common theme that I see in a lot of your work.

0:27:35 - (Toby Brooks): So what would you say is the relationship between discipline and fear? Do disciplined people learn to master their fear or do they just learn to do it? Afraid.

0:27:46 - (Dre Baldwin): I never thought about it from that angle, so it's an interesting question. So the discipline is how I define it. Showing up every single day and doing what you're supposed to do under consequence, with corrections for breaking, deviating from the process. And where does fear come into that? I think fear comes into it in that same way that a combat fighter trains for a fight because they're afraid of getting beat up.

0:28:10 - (Dre Baldwin): So the fear of getting beat up is what makes you train harder so that you don't lose. So the discipline for me, of, okay, let me learn as much as I can about this entrepreneurship thing or do what I can do to make this basketball thing work is because the only other option besides those two was, okay, let me go do what I see my parents doing. They don't seem to enjoy it. I don't want to set myself up for a lifetime of that. So it was probably that bubbling underneath the surface, but it wasn't consciously thought about.

0:28:36 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah, that's a great perspective. So you end up finishing your collegiate career. NBA doesn't come calling. But as I read your Bio now nine year pro. So talk me through that transition from college to professional basketball and maybe walk us through the first few years of that journey.

0:28:56 - (Dre Baldwin): Sure. So first thing that happens is that guy who randomly recruited me on campus at Penn State Abington, he recruited me to Penn State Altoona. He was the coach of the basketball team at Altoona. I played for him for one year. That was my sophomore year. He gets replaced after my sophomore year with a new coach. So new coach was a former NBA player by the name of Armin Gilliam. Anybody who knows basketball in depth may remember him. He was a high draft pick in the late 80s and played in the NBA for about 13 years.

0:29:24 - (Dre Baldwin): Now I remember he played 13 years because in practice, anytime a player challenged him, he would yell at them and say, I played 13 years in the NBA. Who are you to challenge me? So I remember him saying that all the time. So I ended up getting kicked off of the team, out of the program in the middle of my junior year. Not because I couldn't play, but because when a new coach comes into a place, the same thing as when a new CEO replaces the old CEO in a company, they sometimes clean out the incumbents because they want to bring in their own, their own people, people who are aligned with them, who they brought in themselves.

0:29:56 - (Dre Baldwin): So I end up out of the program based on the I got lost in the shuffle.

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0:31:23 - (Dre Baldwin): Didn't play my whole senior year of college stated Altoona didn't play. So in my mind, I'm looking at the guys on the team, many of whom are my friends still to this day. And I'm thinking to myself, well, they're my friends, but I still believe I'm a better player than them. But I've always had this ability, or at least I think I do, to step back and look at myself objectively. And objectively, I'm a person who I reference the sports world a lot because the sports world is judged by a scoreboard, which is objective and impartial, and it's non emotional.

0:31:51 - (Dre Baldwin): And by the scoreboard Dre talking to myself. These guys are on the team and you are not. So right now, they're all ahead of you. So if you think you're better than them, you can't just say it. You have to prove it. Well, if you're in college playing and you're not on the team and your college career is over and these guys are playing, how could you possibly prove you're better than them? It's not like you can play in college anymore. Your eligibility is up. And again, it's not like it is now. Where you can play to your 27 is over. I'm done.

0:32:19 - (Dre Baldwin): So what can I do? Well, there's only one other level of basketball at this point. That's the probes. So that was my. The fuel in my gas tank, so to speak, Toby, to make it pro. Like, I need to prove that I am better even though my college career didn't even go the way that I wanted to go. Well, how can I do something that supersedes the disappointment of the college outcome? I had to make it to the pro level. So that was my motivation, if you will, to make it pro. And the discipline behind that was showing up every single day, doing the work, and eventually trying to get myself in. So to answer your question, out of college, 2004, nobody's calling for me to play pro in the NBA. Nobody's calling me from overseas. Nobody's calling me at all. My phone's not ringing. Might as well not have one. I would get a job at Foot Locker. That was my first job out of college. I was an assistant manager at Foot Locker. Worked there six months, then got a job at a gym called Bally Total Fitness. You remember them?

0:33:10 - (Dre Baldwin): So I worked at Bally Total fitness for about six months. This takes us into the summer of 2005. So the summer of 2005, I'm trying to figure out how do I get in? Actually, I knew what I needed to do. I was going to go to an exposure camp. So for those who don't know what exposure camp is, it's an event made for athletes. They have them nowadays in every sport where you believe you can play at the next level, whatever it may be, college, high school, pro, whatever, but nobody knows you yet. So you go to the exposure camp and you play as a way for the scouts and the decision makers to say, oh, this guy, he can play. We didn't know who he was before, but now that we see him, okay, he's somebody. He can play at the next level.

0:33:46 - (Dre Baldwin): So I went to one of those events. This one was for basketball and for guys who want to play pro and at that event. These are pay to play events. So you pay for these events. These are not just open, they're basically job fairs for athletes, for those who don't know the sports world very well. But you're not just talking to, handing out resumes. You bring your sneakers and you play and you prove that you're good and you're playing against other guys who also have the same idea as you.

0:34:08 - (Dre Baldwin): I believe I'm good enough for the next level, but right now my opportunities don't show it. So let me go prove it. So imagine 200 guys who all think they're good enough to play pro basketball all in the same gym trying to prove it with and against each other. Because basketball is five on five. So you're playing on teams with guys who are trying to prove the same thing you're trying to prove. So it's a tricky type of situation.

0:34:26 - (Dre Baldwin): I go to one of those events, cost me $250. I had to negotiate. First of all, the event was in Orlando, Florida. I'm from Philadelphia. If you look on a map, that's about a 16 to 19 hour drive, depending on traffic. All right, we drove, me and a couple of my teammates who had the same ambition as me, we rented a car in Philadelphia, drove to Orlando on a Friday afternoon. The event started Saturday, 9:00am we got there Saturday, 9:00am so we drive down to Orlando.

0:34:50 - (Dre Baldwin): $250 entry fee. I paid the entry fee in cash. I remember reaching out to the event ahead of time by email and said, hey, is it okay if I pay in cash at the door? And they said yes, because they were saying on their website, you pay by credit. Card or by bank account. I didn't have a credit card or a bank account, but I did have cash. Paid the 250 at the door. Two day camp Saturday, Sunday. We leave on Sunday, get back. I had to be back to work on Monday. Anybody who's ever worked in retail and bally Total fit is basically a retail retail gym sales.

0:35:17 - (Dre Baldwin): Nobody gets the weekend off. Nobody gets off Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I had to negotiate with my boss to get Friday, Saturday, Sunday off. And I told him I'll make up the days. I'll work as many days necessary to make up the days. So I go to Orlando, play pretty well at the event. A couple scouts approach me and you don't. I didn't get signed right there on the spot. We got back in that car on Sunday and had to drive back to Philly. I had to be at work 9am Monday morning. So I barely slept that weekend. You get a scouting report?

0:35:45 - (Dre Baldwin): The event does a scouting report on every player. So the scouting reports came out a couple weeks later. I had a positive scouting report. And then you get the footage. So the footage you pay for extra. It was about 20 bucks for the footage. Now, mind you, this is 2005. YouTube does not yet exist. This is a VHS tape. You remember those told me. So they mail you in the mail a VHS tape. They mailed me my VHS tape with all my footage on it.

0:36:11 - (Dre Baldwin): This is all I have. So I got the scouting report that says this guy's pretty good. And I have a VHS tape with proof of what I did at that camp. Now I have a way to sell myself because my college career didn't sell me, obviously, because here I am. Now I have something I can sell myself with. Because the other thing about playing D3 is that you're playing against guys who are not professional prospects, they're not pro talent.

0:36:32 - (Dre Baldwin): You're playing. They're D3 guys. So me going to this exposure camp was a way of proving that I can play against pro caliber talent and do well, which I did. Now how do I get the rest of the world to know about this besides the people who saw it? I go on Google, which did exist at the time. And I looked up basketball agents because agents for those who don't know the sports world, they're the go between, between the players and the jobs.

0:36:56 - (Dre Baldwin): So if you want a job, but nobody at the job knows you, the agent knows the job and the agent knows you. So I needed an agent. They could be my middleman. I Google basketball agents. Any basketball agent who had A email address. I emailed them. If they had a phone number, I cold called them. Literally cold called basketball agents. I called 60 agents whose numbers I found. 60 I spoke to. I told them here's who I am, here's what I have. Because now I have collateral. Because some may be wondering, well why don't you call them last year when you graduated? Well, I didn't have anything to show.

0:37:25 - (Dre Baldwin): I was just talking. Now I got proof. Video Scouting report, third party. Of the 60 I spoke to 20 of them said okay, show me what you have I E. Send me that tape. Now this is a VHS tape. For those who are younger. You can google what that is. A physical version of YouTube, you got to hold it in your hand. I had a double decker VCR at home. Again, y' all can google that. You don't know what it is. I will go to this drugstore called Eckerd, I'm not sure they even still exists.

0:37:50 - (Dre Baldwin): And I will buy a 10 pack of blank VHS tapes. And I would make copies of my VHS tape at home. So I would make copies and then I would mail the copies out to the agents. I wouldn't send anybody to master because I need that master tape. Of the 20 who I mailed the tape to, mind you, this is on my own dime and I already told you how I was living. I'm living at my parents house, working at Valley Total Fitness, going to work to get my check because I need the money.

0:38:11 - (Dre Baldwin): No bank account, no credit card. Of those 20, I sent it to one of them I was able to reconnect with after on follow up and he said I will represent you. He became my agent this July of 2005. By late August 2005 he found me a deal. I signed my first contract in Kaunas, Lithuania in August 2005. That's how I got on. So that was the first year. And I'll take you through the first couple here. Played there briefly, it was only there for about two months.

0:38:39 - (Dre Baldwin): Come home, I get a job working at a grocery store overnight stocking the shelves. Now at any point, at no point in my life, Toby, did I ever feel depressed. I've never been clinically depressed, never went to a doctor, took medicine or anything like that. But if there was ever a point I was close to depression is working overnight at a grocery store stocking shelves. Has any of you ever been to a grocery store? Now all that stuff that gets bought every day, that doesn't get replenished by robots, those are actual humans. Work there from 10 at night to 7 in the morning, just taking stuff out of boxes and putting it back on the shelf. That is the most depressing period of my life was stocking those shelves.

0:39:18 - (Dre Baldwin): Good thing. Didn't last long. I didn't even make it a full pay period. You know, you get a job, you work like three weeks before you get the first check. By the time the first check came out, my agent called me again. I had another job and I got a job. Playing for this traveling basketball team was like the Costco version of the Hong Kong drivers who called me, but that's better than the grocery store. So I go play for them, play for them for about half of this going into 2006.

0:39:43 - (Dre Baldwin): So early 2006 through about the summer of 2006, I'm there, one of my teammates and let me explain this traveling team, they were based in Colorado. We would ride around a 15 passenger van. There would be about eight of us. And a 15 passenger van fits 15 kids. Now if you have a five year old, you can fit 15 of them in a 15 passenger van. Not a bunch of six, five basketball players not fit in a 15 passenger van.

0:40:07 - (Dre Baldwin): We drove around the entire western part of the United States. So whenever I tell people I've been to every state in America is because of this team. Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, everywhere in Texas. We're driving all around and we would play games in cities that were not near big cities because these places never get a chance to see the NBA. So we were like the best thing they could get, basketball wise.

0:40:30 - (Dre Baldwin): Now, mind you who we're playing against. I don't know if anybody knows anything about these type of teams you're playing against. Like the local weatherman who's on TV every day, the principal of the high school, some guy who scored 30 points a game at the high school 20 years ago. Now he's 40, he doesn't play anymore. So it would be cool for the local people because they see people they know and then they're playing against these star basketball players, which is us. It was really what, what they call show basketball. So again, it's like the Globetrotters. There are players there who can play, but a lot of it is choreographed show.

0:41:00 - (Dre Baldwin): So we do dances and we do chants and we'll set up alley oops and dunks and we'll grab the rim and block your shot. So it's not like a serious game really, but it's all show, but it's all fun and they're paying you. And again, I was working at the grocery store stock and shelf. So this is a much better deal.

0:41:15 - (Toby Brooks): Absolutely.

0:41:16 - (Dre Baldwin): I do that for about half the year. One of my teammates, because on our off days we would sometimes go find a gym and just play regular basketball. One of my teammates was a player who played in Mexico. Like he literally played pro ball in Mexico. And when we would play normal basketball on off days, he saw me playing and one day he and I were roommates on the road because we didn't get our own hotel room.

0:41:39 - (Dre Baldwin): One day after we had played, he said to me, dream, I didn't know how you actually played because we're doing this show basketball stuff. But now that I saw you play for real, I see you can actually play. This is just an insight from him. He said, I see you can actually play. He said, look, my contract on this team is shorter than you all's contract. My contract's only three months. You're going to be here six months. But listen, when I go back to Mexico, because he had to go back to Mexico to play his real basketball job. When I go back to Mexico, I'm going to call for you. I'm going to call you, I'm going to connect you with my agent down there.

0:42:07 - (Dre Baldwin): He's going to send for you and you can come play down here in Mexico because I see you can actually play. I'll co sign for you to come play in Mexico. That guy, my guy, Gerald Burris from Memphis, if he's listening, he got me on in Mexico. So by the summer of 2006, I'm in Mexico now. I'm back playing normal pro basketball now. Mexico, whenever people ask me, Toby is my favorite basketball experience off the court because Mexico was completely, you had no idea what you're going to get every day. It's like Forrest Gump.

0:42:38 - (Dre Baldwin): You have no idea what's going to happen. We got robbed by cops. I had cops stop me with big guns. They had the big guns to go across the chest and man, I got like three different infections. one point I thought I was going blind. I got a food infection and it was just crazy off the court. The parties, the clubs, the people, it was just as great. Mexico was, at least at that time. It was crazy off the court for us in a fun way. Now I'm 23, 24 years old. I would do it again at that age, wouldn't do it at this age, but I would do it then.

0:43:09 - (Dre Baldwin): And that was Mexico by the end of that and I'll stop the story here, end of that. Mexico ends in the summer 20 2006. I'm back home to my parents house. I have not stacked up enough money to live on my own yet from these experiences back at my parents house. I have to go get another job. I'll go get a job working at a corporate gym called Philadelphia Sports Clubs. And that was 2006. Going into 2007, we had Chris Beard

0:43:33 - (Toby Brooks): at Texas Tech while I was there. And he had stories of his early coaching career, like driving 15 passenger vans full of basketball players. And you know, you Hear a major D1 coach, and that's just not a normal story that you hear about. You know, this is just someone that loves the game. And I'm no Chris Beard fan today, but. But at the time, it was so endearing just to hear how the love of the game just he. He refused to give up on that dream. Like wherever there was an opportunity, he was going to coach. And I hear kind of some similarities there.

0:44:07 - (Toby Brooks): Again, we're talking to Dre Baldwin, founder of Dre All Day and Work on youn Game, former nine year professional basketball player. Dre High achievers are often driven people, right? And, and maybe sometimes that comes from a good place and sometimes maybe it doesn't. What do you think was fueling this journey for you? Like what, what was the motivation behind why you were going to do whatever it took to make this happen?

0:44:33 - (Dre Baldwin): I had to prove my point. So the first one was what I mentioned a moment ago was not being on the team to finish my college career. I needed to prove for posterity's sake that I was better than the players who the coach had decided to keep. The second thing is, when I got out of college, this is a story I didn't tell. I come home from school in summer of 2004. My parents say, okay, well son, you graduated. Congratulations. What are you going to do now?

0:44:55 - (Dre Baldwin): I said, I'm going to be a professional basketball player. That conversation didn't go too well. And not because my parents were against basketball, but because they started asking me some very logical, reasonable questions that I could not answer. Like, okay, how are you going to do it? Do you have prospects? Do you have any opportunities? Do you have any offers? The answer was no, no, and no. I had no actual plan for this. It was just a dream.

0:45:17 - (Dre Baldwin): And now I'm a college graduate. So my mom was basically saying, like, listen, what? You're an adult. You're back home in our house, like you're eating food, you're using the electricity, like you need to get yourself a job. And she didn't say this in so many words, but start living like a serious adult. Now you're talking about being a pro athlete, but you have no prospects. So if you want to be living under this roof, you need to actually be doing adult things.

0:45:39 - (Dre Baldwin): Get a job. Go do something. At the time, I had braids in my hair. And you remember Allen Iverson, I'm from Philadelphia. I had braids in my hair. And she said, you need a haircut. And it was a. It was very. This is a funny conversation for anybody other than me. It wasn't funny to me. But at that time, those two instances, the coach at college and then my parents conversation, which again, they weren't trying to discourage me, they were just keeping it real, being honest.

0:46:02 - (Dre Baldwin): Those became the gas in my tank. So, yes, I had the talent, I had skill, I had ability to make it in basketball, but skill alone would not have been enough. There were thousands of guys with an equal level of skill. To me, it was the drive and the gas in the tank that kept me going. And that was. Those were personal things. Those were not skill things. Those weren't even basketball. It was personal that I needed to prove my point. So that's what kept me going.

0:46:24 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah, I love that. I know sometimes we can. We can come at accomplishment from really deep and dark places. Sometimes it's. It's simpler than that. For everybody, it's different. As I read through your stuff, I see you've built your career and your teaching and your work today on mindset and execution. What would you say is the biggest lie people believe about confidence?

0:46:46 - (Dre Baldwin): That it's the starting point. A lot of people think that, okay, let me go become confident or get myself confident or whatever they think the mechanism is to have it. And then once I have the confidence, then I can go perform, I can go sell, I can go put myself out there, and the world will accept me, listen to me, cooperate with me, and confidence actually exists. Toby, in the middle of the process.

0:47:09 - (Dre Baldwin): Now, the process starts with your. With clear principles, what you're about and what you're not about. Then it moves on to structuring. You create a structure that is based around your principles. Then when you follow your structure, you become disciplined in your behavior. Discipline is not a personality trait. It's a behavior descriptive descriptor of behavior. So your discipline behavior then leads to confidence. Confidence only comes in here. It's fourth in the process.

0:47:34 - (Dre Baldwin): When you have the confidence, which is based on the fact that you've done the work, that's the discipline. Now you go out and you perform, you produce results, and you get the rewards that you want. So a lot of people think confidence is the first step when it's actually the fourth step.

0:47:46 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah, I love that framing. I'd never heard it described quite like that before. That's really a cool way to look at it. We've got a world that's obsessed with visibility and personal branding. And as I hear you talk, like, a lot of bootstrapping and, you know, I'm picturing young Dre dubbing those VHS tapes and, you know, kind of willing your way to this dream. How do you stay authentic without a becoming performance?

0:48:10 - (Dre Baldwin): It's a great question. And for me, when I came across the Internet, or web 2.0, I guess what we call it, that's when the platforms came out that you could put your own stuff out. So I go Back to Yahoo. GeoCities, you remember them, and AOL Instant Messenger. I go back that far when those things came out to where you can just put out whatever you want and say it however you want to say it. I knew that was for me. I knew that was my lane.

0:48:36 - (Dre Baldwin): That, and I go back to the Black planet was the precursor to what we now have as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera, social media. And I knew before those things existed that I had a way of communicating how I see things that was unique and different from other people. I knew that even before the Internet, I could see it just in my conversations with friends of mine, classmates, teammates. And then when the Internet came out, I said, oh, there's a space where I can actually put this out, and I could have people who don't even know me get it.

0:49:06 - (Dre Baldwin): So I already knew. I started blogging in 2005. YouTube came out that same year. That's when I got on YouTube. And for me, it was never an agenda. Like, I need to say it this way, or I need these people to like it. It was, I'm just going to put it out as it is and as I am. And I know there are people out there who will understand this, because I knew what I was saying was right. I just knew it was right. I knew that this. Logically, what I'm saying makes sense.

0:49:29 - (Dre Baldwin): Some people don't want to accept it. That doesn't mean it's not true. And that's on the court, and it was off the court. I always have had that belief and that understanding and good thing about the Internet. Internet's not all perfect, but one good thing about it is that if you in your Physical space, you're around people who don't seem to get it. The Internet allows you to meet a whole bunch of other people and there are people out there who get it that you may never shake their hand.

0:49:54 - (Dre Baldwin): So that was the beautiful thing about the Internet for me.

0:49:56 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah. And that's the whole reason we're having this conversation right now. And I love that because it can be a lonely place. I mean, if you've got big ambitious goals and you feel like it's just you, man, it's hard to persist in that environment if you don't have that support of other people. And so like you said, for better or for worse, there's definitely plenty of negative that we could ascribe to the Internet and to social media. But I like to focus on how it's connected me to people who are like minded in that respect.

0:50:30 - (Toby Brooks): So you kind of walked us through the first few years. Let's focus on the end. I mean, I don't know if you had a specific goal in mind for how long you plan to play professional basketball. One thing about professional sports, particularly the minor leagues or some alternates where you don't have long term contracts is you never know. Is this, is this just one more game? Is this one more season? You couldn't have known at the start that you were going to have precisely a nine year career. So talk me through that.

0:51:00 - (Toby Brooks): Maybe that last season or even, even that last month or that last week, did you see the end coming and what was stirring within you and knowing that the end of your playing days were nearing?

0:51:13 - (Dre Baldwin): Well, just to give you the context of why it all makes sense is YouTube comes out 2005. I get on there, put out some basketball. Same stuff from that VHS tape, actually. Some clips. Players saw it, started leaving comments. I eventually got the idea, okay, this is an underserved audience of people who are just like me. They're just 10 years younger than me. They want to learn basketball, but there's nobody to teach them. They can go to the Internet and get the information.

0:51:36 - (Dre Baldwin): I work out every day anyway. I can just give them the information because they're asking for it. I wasn't doing it as an ego player to build a brand because those weren't even things. So YouTube's gone while I'm playing basketball. And I'm. Every year I'm in a different place. So I go from Mexico to Montenegro to Germany to Lithuania to Croatia and all these different places. By about 2009 through 2011, this was the pivotal point that led to the end, which was 2015, 2009, a couple of things happened. I read Tim Ferriss book. He talked about how to create a product on the Internet. I started creating training programs for basketball players, and people started buying them immediately from day one.

0:52:12 - (Dre Baldwin): That told me that I can make money off my knowledge. And I knew I could do that longer than I can make money off my physical talents. So that already set me on the path of intellectual property selling through the Internet, Internet entrepreneur, whatever you want to call it. Again, this is 2009, 2010, same time, Amazon releases, self publishing. Now you can put your own books up, same time. So that's the idea for a book. But what am I going to write about?

0:52:39 - (Dre Baldwin): Same time, the athletes started asking me, Toby, about the mindset behind what they saw. They see me in the gym every day training, but they would say, dre, I don't feel like training every day. I don't always want to work out. Neither do I. But I was doing it. What's the difference? That's when I started talking about discipline. How discipline leads to confidence, mental toughness, personal initiative. Keep going even when you face a setback. You got cut from your high school team. Well, me too.

0:53:02 - (Dre Baldwin): And a lot of these players, while they may like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, they can't relate to them because those guys were superstars since they were kids. Yeah, they saw me and they're like, oh, this guy wasn't a star. He was counted out. He was completely forgotten, not even considered. But look at him. He kept going. He kept trying. He was mentally tough. He worked on his game. And look at him. Like he can actually play.

0:53:21 - (Dre Baldwin): He's playing overseas, and he can explain it. So my audience became all of these people who, again, you can like LeBron, but you cannot relate to LeBron. And you can't send LeBron an email and get a response. You could email me and get a response. So this was my audience 2009, 1011. They started asking about Mindset. I started making these videos called the Weekly Motivation every Monday. Just talking about a little mindset thing. Three minutes, something like that.

0:53:44 - (Dre Baldwin): I did Weekly Motivation every week for 400 weeks in a row, Toby. That became the foundation for where I'm at now, because the athletes appreciated it. And they said, man, we like the way you explain things. You break things down. I realized that that was my real talent, not basketball. My ability to understand something, break it down, and feed it back to you in a way that you can get it even if you never played a sport. Also, what happened is People who didn't play ball started finding me. And I said, dre, I don't even play basketball. But the way you break down mindset, that applies to me.

0:54:13 - (Dre Baldwin): That told me, here's my audience after basketball. Yeah, now I'm selling you the program. I'm selling the programs. I started writing books about mindset. I have my training programs out there. I have a basketball audience, and I have people who don't play ball following me. All this is happening from 2010 to 2015. I continue to learn more about entrepreneurship and business because, again, I didn't really know. I had to learn it. Over time, I'm learning that by 2014, 2015, I'm thinking about what's next. Because every single year, I'm doing this hustle.

0:54:42 - (Dre Baldwin): My last deal ended. I didn't have any long term contracts. So again, people don't know overseas basketball, this is not. You're signed a five year deal for 20 million. It's not like that. No guaranteed contracts over there. You can have a contract, have two bad games in a row. You'll find out how valuable that contract is. Not a contract. What you get is a coach, class ticket back home. But anyway, every year I'm doing this hustle. But I don't mind because I'm playing ball.

0:55:04 - (Dre Baldwin): What. What else would I be doing? And I can still sell my programs and build my brand, quote, unquote, while playing. Because a long day at work as a basketball player is like two to three hours. We don't have long days. So you got plenty of time on your hands to build your brand. By 2014, I'm thinking about, what am I going to do next? So there's a couple things were happening here. Now, for those who don't understand, when you play overseas, you go there while you're under contract. When the season's over, they fly you back home.

0:55:29 - (Dre Baldwin): So I'm coming back home to Miami, which is where I live. And again, I'm an adult. I'm a man. I'm going out, I'm dating, I'm meeting women. And they're asking, what do you do for a living? I play basketball. Where do you play? I play overseas. Okay. So they, they understood, okay, are you leaving again? Where are you going? I said, I'm going here at this time. When you coming back? I don't know. You can't build a relationship that way, right? You can't build a family.

0:55:52 - (Dre Baldwin): So I'm having women kind of leave out of my life because I have this unstable living situation. I mean, I had a place to stay and all that, but where's he going? Was he coming back? He's leaving for six months. I just met him two weeks ago. All right, what are we doing here? So I'm thinking, what's the next thing? And also just the biological reality. You can't play basketball forever. So 2014, I'm at university of Miami playing pickup with a bunch of older guys. Not pro ball players, but they just play ball.

0:56:18 - (Dre Baldwin): And I'm sitting on the sideline with this guy. He's 7ft tall. He's a doctor. He didn't play pro ball. And I told him, yeah, I'm thinking about what I'm going to do next. And he said, what do you think you're going to do? And I said, maybe I'll be a professional speaker, but I don't know anything about the industry. Now. Why did I want to be a professional speaker? Because when I started making those mindset videos on YouTube and I start showing people not only my ability to physically do the thing, but my ability to articulate, that's when people started saying, like, dre, like, you might be better at this than you are at basketball.

0:56:45 - (Dre Baldwin): The speaking part. So I said, okay, well, professional speaker, I heard that's the thing. But I know nothing about the industry. This guy, seven foot doctor, he says, have you ever heard of Toastmasters? I never heard of Toastmasters. Actually, I heard of it, but I didn't know what it was. He was like, it's a place people go and practice speaking. Maybe you can learn about professional speaking there.

0:57:02 - (Dre Baldwin): I go to a Toastmasters meeting in south beach now. I find out Toastmasters is not really about teaching you how to build a business as a speaker. It's about actually getting better at communication. I was already pretty damn good. But I stayed at Toastmasters because the first meeting I went to, there was a football player who was about to retire. He was on the same path as me. He was leaving football and leaving basketball. He said, there's an event called the National Speakers Association. They have a conference every year where only speakers show up. They just. They just give people the game.

0:57:29 - (Dre Baldwin): He was going. I couldn't go because I had a prior engagement. He said, anybody I meet, I'll just give you their info. He gave me one person's info. That woman was a full fledged professional speaker down here in South Florida. Her name is Donna St. Louis. I cold called Donna because the guy didn't really introduce me. He just gave me a number and a name. I cold called her when I got her on the phone. I could tell she was sitting at a computer because I could hear her typing on the keyboard. She said, what's your name? She said, you have a website? I said, yes, dre allday.com. i could hear her typing it in, and I could hear the wheels turning in her head when she saw the website, because she sees, oh, this guy actually has done something. He's not just talking. He has.

0:58:02 - (Dre Baldwin): There's something here. And we start talking. She said, okay, we can meet. She's based in South Florida, so let's meet at Starbucks, such and such, wherever she is. And let me tell you what happened at the meeting. We're supposed to meet for 30 minutes. She's going to tell me some things about. I told her I wanted to be a professional speaker, but I don't know what to do, where to go, how to do it. She knew the whole game, so she's going to give me some tips on what to do. Get started. We're supposed to meet for 30 minutes. That meeting ended up being three hours.

0:58:25 - (Dre Baldwin): Now, the reason the meeting was three hours, Toby, is not because I dazzled her with my presentation. It was because she was talking. I'm sitting there, we're opposite each other at the table, and I'm using Evernote. I'm just taking notes while she's talking. And at one point, she stopped talking and said, is this useful to you? And I said, yeah. And I turned the computer around. I showed her my notes. I had taken, like, 10 pages of notes while she was talking, and she was, like, blown away.

0:58:47 - (Dre Baldwin): And I. Later on, I applied every single thing that she told me, and she explained to me some basic things, like, okay, you played sports, which is great. The professional speaking world loves athletes because you all teamwork, dealing with different types of leaders, showing up every day, doing your job, competing, and understanding that you have to achieve results. Every professional industry needs those same things.

0:59:09 - (Dre Baldwin): So they love athletes. But, Dre, you can't just go in there talking about playing basketball, because these people don't play basketball. You have to translate your sporting experience to a professional level that they can understand it. And I understood that mission, and she became my mentor, not because I took notes, but because I applied every single thing that she said.

0:59:28 - (Toby Brooks): I love this insight here, and it's worth exploring a little bit further. Mentoring is a wonderful thing when it's undertaken by a skilled and experienced mentor and a hungry, driven mentee. I once made a horrible mistake in a meeting with someone I had reached out to for mentoring. I'D been reading something from Gary Vee, who has often said that taking notes leads to inaction. So proud of myself for having read this, I intentionally went to the meeting intent on listening as hard as I could. The guy I was meeting with was the chief people officer and a former officer in the Army. And we'll just say he was not impressed.

1:00:03 - (Toby Brooks): At the conclusion of the meeting, he sort of scolded me and said that he would agree to meet with me again on the condition that I brought something to write notes on. And with a few months later, I applied for a job in his unit. And I'm pretty sure that that omission and that gaffe on my part cost me any chance at real consideration. But not Dre. He furiously took notes, but more than that, he acted on the information that he was given.

1:00:27 - (Toby Brooks): We live in a world where information is more readily available than at any time in history. What's rare isn't somebody that wants it. What's rare is somebody who does something about it. For Dre, he viewed it as an opportunity to show his gratitude and to honor that mentor. And it's a lesson we'd all do well to learn.

1:00:46 - (Dre Baldwin): Later on, she said to me, dre, I met with 20 different people who wanted to be professional speakers at that same Starbucks for the same meeting. You were the only one who actually did the stuff that I said. And she said, when you called me, I almost didn't meet with you because I met with so many others, and they said they want to be speakers. And I told them what to do, and they did absolutely nothing with the information.

1:01:04 - (Dre Baldwin): So I was really tired of having these meetings. The only reason I had the meeting with you is because you had a website and you had some collateral already. You were already in motion. And then when you did what I told you to do, and this is a key that I want everybody to get. When you have a mentor, she said, when you did what I told you to do and got responses from it, you started to get results from it.

1:01:24 - (Dre Baldwin): That validated to me that the information I'm giving out wasn't useless. Yeah, that's how you pay back a mentor, because if you're not paying the money, you pay them in results because you become a success story of their information. So the things that things that she told me, I applied. And that's when I started doing the TED talks. I started doing the speaking gigs. I did 50 free speaking gigs. So I did not just go out and just start getting paid to give speeches. I did a bunch of free ones.

1:01:50 - (Dre Baldwin): And she told me, she said, dre, when you give a speech, the way you know that you're good is not because the audience stood up and clapped for you or they want to take your picture after the event. That's not how you know you're good. You know you're good when after the event, somebody comes up to you and they offer to pay you to do another one. It's the business results that you know that you're good. I did a bunch of free ones, and the free ones started turning into paid ones.

1:02:11 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah.

1:02:11 - (Dre Baldwin): And then it turned into, I don't need to do a free one. I go straight to the paid one. That's how I started to build myself up as a professional speaker. After basketball, all this happened again. This is about 2014, 15, when I was looking into getting out of ball. So that's the transition period.

1:02:28 - (Toby Brooks): So many things there to unpack. But I love that sentiment that we repay mentors through the results. That's not something I had encountered before, but I love that framework. I recognize here that it doesn't sound like you necessarily grieved the loss of basketball. Lots of times on this show, I will talk to athletes, even entrepreneurs, artists, and they will talk about the end of one season, and they will look back on that, and it was, you know, for someone that. That. That's injured, like, it's taken from them, and for someone that's not renewed on a contract, I felt like I had more in the tank, but I just didn't get an opportunity.

1:03:05 - (Toby Brooks): It sounds to me like it was a pretty steady transition from playing competitive basketball to doing what you're doing. And it was. It was all moving ahead, not so much worried or lamenting what lay behind. Is that. Is that an accurate depiction?

1:03:26 - (Dre Baldwin): 100%. And the reason why is because I didn't have a normal transition. So it wasn't a dead end. And then a start from zero. I started building my brand in 2005. I got serious about it, monetizing in 2009. So I was already building my next audience while I was still playing. I didn't do this on purpose, but it happened. It naturally occurred. So by 2014 15, I already see this opportunity over here in personal branding business, what we now call influencers and all that, it was growing faster and more steadily than my basketball career was going.

1:04:00 - (Dre Baldwin): So this is beating basketball. Let's just look at this logically. This is doing better than basketball. At some point, we got to walk away, and I kept having every year having to do that hustle, trying to get the next job and finding another agent and emailing teams. And one I was living in. I remember I was living in South Beach. And one week at this point, this 2014, I had not missed the workout.

1:04:23 - (Dre Baldwin): Zero. I had not skipped a single workout in since 1996. I decided, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take a week off. So this is not skipping a workout. I decided I'm constantly going to take a week off. I'm not going to go to the gym and work on my game, not going to lift weights. I'm not going to do any cardio, running. I was working out two, three times a day, every day, all that time. So I'm gonna take a weekend, not do that. I'll just take a walk in South Beach. I'll take my yoga mat and go do yoga in South Point. Park right at the water.

1:04:50 - (Dre Baldwin): I'll just do that for a week and just see how I feel. Because before that, Toby, anytime I missed a workout, I felt like I was losing something. I felt like I lost something.

1:04:58 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah.

1:04:58 - (Dre Baldwin): Like my day did not feel complete and I couldn't take a day off. I couldn't go on vacation. Like, I just didn't feel right. Mentally, emotionally, physically, it just didn't feel right. So I said I'm gonna take this week off and if I feel normal during and after this week is over, that was my decision. I took that whole week off. I felt fine. I said it's over. Because when you don't want to do the work anymore, because I explain this to athletes all the time. The work is not the games. The games are easy if you just want to play the games.

1:05:28 - (Dre Baldwin): If it was just the games, I'd still be playing. We wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd still be playing because I could play the games. It's everything in between the games that's the work of a professional. The stuff that you don't see, the stuff that's not on camera and, and when I didn't want to do that anymore and I didn't feel a sense of loss when I didn't do it. I knew it was time for me to walk away because I was never going to cheat myself. I wasn't going to cheat the game.

1:05:50 - (Dre Baldwin): And I don't want to be this person who plays but doesn't practice because that is going to lead to slippage. And I wasn't going to be playing in LA Fitness have some 19 year old who just Got off of work at Taco Bell, beating me at basketball because I didn't work on my game. That wasn't going to happen. I'm either going to be at the top or I'm not playing. So I walked away cold turkey. I played my last game. It was a.

1:06:10 - (Dre Baldwin): Because I had this influence position, brand position. I did a lot of brand deals. Nike, Jordan, finish line. There was a three on three tournament that they held in 2015. It was a $10,000 prize. We won. The last game was 11 0. We won that game. I remember that game. We won $10,000. And I have not played a single game of basketball since. And I just walked away and went into building my business and that's where we've been ever since.

1:06:33 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah, I love how you frame that. As an athletic trainer and a strength coach, oftentimes I would say the games are the reward. As a professional, it's easy for me to get excited about a Saturday football game. It's not as easy for me to get up at 4:30 in the morning on a Tuesday for team workout. That's where the grind is. And once you fall out of love with that, it takes game over. Yeah, it's it. That's it.

1:07:01 - (Toby Brooks): Well, Dre, I, I really appreciate you joining me today. Before we wrap this thing up, I've got just a couple left. Talk to us a little bit more. I mean, we kind of left the story at 2015, but you obviously are very active today as a speaker and as a coach. Talk to us about what, what you're doing today.

1:07:20 - (Dre Baldwin): Yeah, so I did the speaking thing for about five years to around 2020 when we had the, the COVID and the shutdown and there were not really events. And at that same time I was starting to get disenfranchised with the speaking business just because you're only as good as your last gig. It was basketball all over again. You got to get a gig, Gig's over. Go get another gig. I said, I'm doing the same thing.

1:07:39 - (Dre Baldwin): So I wanted to build something that was more in house. And that's when I started focusing on what we have now is called Work on youn Game University, which is more consulting, coaching, working in house with businesses and business owners. So that's my main focus these days. We have two main lanes. One is called the power presence. Power Presence is for individuals who want to build up their presence, their confidence, their discipline, the way that they show up so that they can lead themselves and others properly. And the other is execution reliability, which is about making sure that organizations and teams do not drift off the process.

1:08:10 - (Dre Baldwin): So what we were just talking about the athlete who stops training. First few games you still look good, but eventually the drift of the lack of training starts to show in game number 10, 11, 12. Eventually it catches up to you. Same thing that happens on sales teams in the organization. So execution reliability. It was all about making sure teams are not drifting off their process. So that's our main focus these days.

1:08:30 - (Toby Brooks): Yeah. And for listeners that are interested in your work, where can I send them?

1:08:34 - (Dre Baldwin): You can go to workonyourgame.com workonyourgame.com you'll see two buttons on that page, one for power presence, as I said, and other one for execution reliability.

1:08:43 - (Toby Brooks): Excellent. I asked this question of all my guests. I love the insight that it provides. Kind of personally, if we were to watch a montage of your life, what song would you pick to play in the background and why?

1:08:54 - (Dre Baldwin): Great question. Hustle's ambition by 50 Cent. Fearless America Gotta think for this gangster they love me Black chuckers, Black Scully leather Pele Pelle I take spit over rainbow I'm a fan who got that silver duct tape on my.

1:09:11 - (Toby Brooks): All right, that one's right at the serve. I appreciate that one. I dropped that into kind of a Spotify virtual mixtape of sorts for all my guests. And then that will also be included in the the webpage that I built for you.

1:09:24 - (Dre Baldwin): This is Dre Baldwin, and I am Undone.

1:09:35 - (Toby Brooks): I'm thankful to Dre for dropping in, and I hope you enjoyed our conversation. For more info on today's episode, be sure to check it out on the web. Simply go to undonepodcast.com ep159 to see the notes, links, and images related to today's guest, Dre Baldwin. You know, I think what I appreciate most about Dre's story is that it challenges the idea that confidence comes before action. So often, I think we tell ourselves that we'll pursue that dream job when we feel ready, when we're more certain, when we have more proof that success is possible. But Dre's journey reminds us that confidence is often the result of action, not the prerequisite for it. Long before he had evidence that a professional basketball career was realistic, he had a willingness to keep showing up and doing the work.

1:10:19 - (Toby Brooks): What struck me most in our conversation wasn't that he eventually played pro basketball. It was that he built an entirely new future while he was still living inside the old one. While most people wait until one chapter closes before they begin thinking about the next, Dre was quietly developing new skills, building new relationships, and forging new opportunities that would eventually become the foundation for the life he lives today. And there's real wisdom in that, because the reality is that every role, every title, every season of life eventually comes to an end. The question isn't whether change is coming. The question is whether we're preparing ourselves for it while we still have time. Trey's willingness to bet on himself, to persist through rejection, and to keep working when nobody was looking is exactly the kind of story that this show exists to explore. Because becoming Undone isn't simply about surviving the collapse of an old identity.

1:11:10 - (Toby Brooks): It's about having the courage to build something new before life forces the issue. Some quick updates about the show. We're currently at number six and number seven in the world on Apple for Self Improvement and education, respectively, creeping into the number 150s somewhere in that neighborhood on Apple's top 200. If you'd like to keep tabs on how we're doing in the podcast rankings, you can head on over to UndonePodcast.com

1:11:36 - (Toby Brooks): and cheer me on. And if you enjoy the show, the single biggest thing you can do to help is to share an episode with a friend, or leave a rating or review. Every one of those helps more than you know. This week's Teal of the Week is once again the Tahoe Night Monsters of the echl. That's right. If you listened last week, I wore it then, too. If you're not familiar with the Tahoe Knight Monsters, that's understandable. They're one of the newest franchises in pro hockey, which means they're still building new traditions, creating memories, and establishing that new identity. And honestly, there's something I really appreciate about that.

1:12:11 - (Toby Brooks): Because every meaningful endeavor starts just like that. Before there are banners or championships or decades of history, there's simply a group of people showing up and doing the work, building something that doesn't fully exist yet. I've often said that the environment influences performance, and for whatever reason, Teal has become part of mine. Maybe it's branding, maybe it's habit, maybe it's autism.

1:12:34 - (Toby Brooks): The jury remains out, but today I continue to proudly wear my Tahoe Night Monsters gear, and that's enough for me. Coming up on the show next week, I'm excited to bring you a conversation with Dr. Tyler Lesher. Tyler's a former head athletic trainer for UCLA men's basketball, former NBA and G League performance coach, now works with professional athletes as a performance therapist, known online as Dr. T Lesh. Our conversation explores performance resilience, recovery, and what it really takes to help elite performers sustain excellence over time. I think you're going to really enjoy that one. And then after that, I've got another exciting project coming up that I can't wait to share with you, so stay tuned. This and more coming up on Becoming Undone.

1:13:16 - (Toby Brooks): Becoming Undone is a night trap creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks Intro and outro music by Mark Payne. Tell a friend about the show and follow along on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn at becomingundonepod and follow me at obrooksphd on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out my linktreet, linktr.ee tobybrooksphd. Listen, subscribe and leave me a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts. Till next time, everybody. Keep getting better.

1:13:48 - (Toby Brooks): Ra.