The Half‑Truths Holding Athletes Back: Lessons from 30 Years and 120 Episodes

I reflect on turning 30 and break down the lessons that keep showing up across sports, coaching, and life: every decision has downstream effects, and you always have more choice than you think. We challenge popular one-liners about performance and replace them with a practical framework for identity-based decision making, role adaptability, and long-term success. 

• using a simple decision tree under pressure 
• asking what your future self would do 
• excelling in a role even when you dislike it 
• planning for adversity with a pre-mortem 
• using comparison as feedback without ego 
• caring less about noise and more about trusted opinions 
• accepting that talent matters and fit matters 
• treating emotions as data and choosing the next action 
• using outcomes as feedback without obsession 
• building adaptability across teams, levels, and careers 
• avoiding blanket advice and mapping consequences 
• thinking through transfer portal outcomes before acting 
• anchoring hard work to identity, not guarantees 

Tune in next week. We've got some really cool guests coming up. Check us out athleticfortitude.com. Download the pod, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Five stars only, baby.

Transcript

Turning 30 And The Decision Tree

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the show, everybody. This is episode 120 of the playbook, formerly the Athletic Fortitude Show. I am turning 30. By the time you have listened to this, I wanted to highlight the most important lessons from our most recent episodes, as well as some of the top lessons I've learned during the course of this podcast, but most importantly, over the 30 years of my life. Every athlete has a decision tree with every decision that they have to make. And one of the important elements of this is understanding that everything matters. And while that can feel overwhelming, that can feel like it creates anxiety or pressure, the reality is it should make you feel empowered, knowing that every decision that you make is going to have a trickle-down effect. And what I like to do is in its most simplest form, is when we are faced with some type of adversity is label it down to two choices. I either make the choice, I make the decision in alignment with the type of person, the type of athlete I want to be, or I don't and I choose to vote against the person that I want to become. And just a simple trick that you can ask yourself in these moments is what would the version of me that I want to be do here? What would my idol and role model do in these situations? And that can help spark that awareness of the decision at hand to know that regardless of circumstance, you have a choice. You have to make a decision. And there are downstream effects from that decision. And so when we think about the importance of circumstance, you don't want to be a prisoner of your circumstance. You want to take the actions that change your circumstances.

Excelling In A Role You Hate

SPEAKER_00 1:39

And so you don't have to like it. And I think that's a common thing. And talk about recent lessons or most important lessons from podcasts is a lot of the conversation I've been having with coaches and players in general is you don't have to like your role to excel in it. Just like you don't have to get rid of your anxiety to be able to perform well. And to stop resisting things and fighting things that you can't change because those things can be exhausting. And you think about, okay, well, what if I'm a starter and I get benched? What if I'm the star player? I go to a new team and now I have to fit into a new role. What happens when I go from being an all-state, you know, all national high school player? Now I step into the light as a freshman. I'm no longer playing. I'm no longer, you know, relied upon to score 20 points. I have to develop a new robust skill set. I have to go from zero to one. I have to learn how to play harder, play defense, pick up full court, dive for loose balls, set the picks. You know, I have to learn how to be a scout team player. And there's all these different moving parts that athletes aren't exposed to. And you have no idea how you're going to react until you're put into those moments. What you can do is you can begin to pre-mortem it, right? Plan for that adversity. If I'm put in this role, how am I going to react? What are going to be the tangible steps that I take every single day to not only excel at that role, but prepare me for the next role as well and to move myself up the ladder within my team or organization? And those are real things that are really challenging for athletes when you talk about relative adversity. It's situations that people aren't accustomed to being into. And in order to maximize your athletic career and your athletic window, young athletes, college athletes, and professional athletes are going to be exposed to these things and they need to have some type of plan on how they're going to address it and how they're going to handle it both mentally, physically, emotionally, tactically. What do those things look like? How are we planning in advance and how we position ourselves for success? I think an easy one is to look at Josh Hart and the NBA right now. You know, he at some point was the best player in his demographic. He goes to college, still a really, really good player. Then he gets the NBA, and now he has to serve a specific role. They're never going to ask him to score 20 points a game, but he has to do all the little things right. Last year, we saw TJ McConnell talk about it with the Indiana Pacers. You know, his famous quote is playing hard as a skill and learning and understanding what role that you're going to fit into and how you impact winning. There's certainly better and higher performing players that theoretically are better basketball players than either of the two names I just mentioned, but they're not playing or they're out of the NBA because they didn't have the ability to curate their ego and position themselves or put themselves in position to have long careers. Because the truth of the matter is, depending on what sport you're you're playing in, there are so many people who can do the relative things that the best players do. They just can't do it at that level and or at that consistency. And so you need to find a way within your unique skill set to position yourself somewhere else within the ecosystem of that team. Now,

When Advice Becomes A Half Truth

SPEAKER_00 4:53

there in performance lies a lot of half-truths. And there are a handful that I've participated in in the past that I now, for lack of a better term, can't stand because it's not painting the full picture of what it means to be an elite-level athlete. And when we subsidize or democratize certain lessons and apply to a broader base, the importance of these messages gets taken for granted or taken loosely or taken falsely. And so a simple one in the social media age is don't compare yourself to others. Surface level, that sounds like good advice. The reality is comparisons is one of the most powerful tools that you can use. You have to look at your competitive peers and use that as feedback. You have to understand where you stand within the landscape of your sport. And you just don't look at it from a jealousy or ego standpoint. You look at it from opportunities to learn. What are they doing that I'm not? What are they excelling at that I can improve upon? What am I maybe really good at that they're not? And I can compliment them if they're teammates or within your organization. And understanding those elements of comparison, it can become a weapon for you as opposed to being a hindrance. And anything, too much of anything, is going to bring down performance. But when you utilize it right, comparison in this instance, it's just going to help you get better. And so it is really important to compare to others because you have to know where your social and your physical standing are relative to your sport. And it's at all levels. I don't care if you're a professional athlete, collegiate, or high school athlete. You have to be able to look around your peers and build out awareness. What is everyone around me doing well? What do I need to work on? But also what do I do really well that these other players can't do? And then I can make that my unique superpower. You can't do that, or you can't have the necessary awareness without doing comparison. It's just, it's not possible. So by laying out a blanket statement, don't compare to others, you are naturally inhibiting your growth as an athlete. Another one along these same lines. Stop caring what people think. Well, to a degree, yes. But you certainly need to care what people think. It's what keeps you from being an asshole. It what it's what keeps you from being self-centered. You need to be able to serve people around you. Therefore, you do need to care what other people think. It is feedback on the perception you have of yourself. If the perception you have on yourself is so wildly different than the people that you care about most, then there's a disconnect there and a change in behavior needs to happen. And you can't have a change of behavior without caring at what other people think. Caring, it's caring less about the people who don't matter and caring more about the people who do matter. Because then you can get that feedback loop of how to change behavior in alignment with the goals that you want and the person that you want to become. And so you want to be indifferent to people outside of your circle or outside of your team or organization, but you want to be hyper-focused on those important people and what they do care about and how they view you and how they view your decisions. You don't want to surround yourself with yes men, and you certainly don't want to restrict and block yourself off and isolate from all other feedback. So you should care what people think. You just need to be intentional about whose opinion you care about and be able to develop the skill set and robustness to stop caring about the people's opinions who don't matter.

Talent Matters And So Does Fit

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Talent doesn't matter, just outwork everyone. This is another one. We can't just remove talent and just act like it doesn't matter because it's a lie. It is you can't lie to yourself in this business. You can't lie to yourself as you climb the ladder. Talent absolutely does matter. It's not everything, but we can't pretend it doesn't exist. And it's more about maximizing your talent window. And I talked earlier about hey, finding yourself, removing the ego, and positioning yourself within an organization to serve a role that impacts winning because every role matters. If you're not the most talented, like some of the other NBA players I've talked about earlier, who found roles on championship run teams, teams that won the championship and are now going to have and have had really long careers, they found a way to maximize their talent window within specific demographics of a team organization. And like I said, you don't have to be the most talented to have a long career, but talent does matter and you can't ignore it. Because if you do just ignore it, then people like the Josh Hart's of the world, the TJ McConnells, they would never be around if they just if they thought that they were the most talented all the time or that they could just be better than the most talented by working hard. It's just not that simple. Performance is not an XY variable. Because I work hard, I perform better. There are so many different variables that you need to do. Hard work is necessary, but not sufficient. It's one of my favorite things, Justin Sewa says. And so we have to understand that talent matters, hard work matters, recovery matters, intellectual capacity matters, likability matters. And all you can do is position yourself for success along that ladder, but you strictly, you cannot, you cannot ignore that talent matters because you're going to run into things, you're going to run into people where you have to know that they're probably more talented than you. And yet you still have to find a way to compete, maneuver, and give yourself an opportunity to win or stick around. That's one of the hardest parts of that conversation. It's not the only thing that matters, but it 1000% matters because even if you're not the most talented, you still have some level of talent and you're probably more talented than a lot of people behind you. And so you can't ignore it. It's just, it is part of sports. Get comfortable with it. Get comfortable with the awareness around your own skill set, which comes from some of the other things we've already talked about. And then build and execute plans within those demographics.

Stop Controlling Emotions Start Using Them

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Control your emotions. That is a big cliche. Okay. Again, sounds great on the surface level, but the reality is you're never going to be fully control of your emotions. You should feel devastated. You're going to feel devastated. You're going to be furious. You're going to feel the kind of sadness that sits in your chest for days. Good. That means that you care. That means that you're human. That means that you're an athlete with purpose and intention. When losing hurts, when getting benched, hurts. Those are good things that you feel that. If you were agnostic to it, I would question your competitiveness as an athlete and as a person. And so we need to stop thinking about this in terms of controlling our emotions, but more so in what do we do with our emotions when they come? How can I be productive within this framework? Only to control them, I need to be productive with them and understanding that they are data. Now, yes, obsessing over your emotions is not healthy, but you're not broken. Okay. And the goal is never to feel nothing. We do, we are, we are beings. We are human beings. We are always going to feel. It's just about making the next right decision. So stop fighting the inevitable. Stop fighting the resistance of feelings and emotions, of things that hurt, things that suck. Because that's human, that's part of competitive athletics. You're going to feel that over and over and over. It's just about what is the next best thing I can do? What is the only thing that matters within my decision? I talked about decision trees earlier. You have a decision right now that's either going to move you forward, move you backward. Rarely do decisions keep you stagnant. We want to always be progressing forward, even if it's marginal. And so understanding within the realm or within the bucket of those emotions, we have to make decisions within them to progress forward. And then detach from outcomes. Now, to a degree, yes. Right. We want to be able to separate outcomes. But outcomes do matter. Results matter. And pretending that they don't, right, is just a convenient story that we tell ourselves to avoid accountability. Now, yes, I agree. Obsessing over the outcome, obsessing over the scoreboard does kill performance. But you have to look at it as feedback. If what you're doing is working, is my process working? Am I noticing tangible gains? Are the outcomes and results starting to turn in my favor? Because people only care about the process because it leads to better outcomes. If processes didn't lead to better outcomes, nobody would talk about the process. And so this conversation has gotten diluted because we have learned from the people at the top that the process is what matters the most. And they are 100% right. But the only reason that the process matters the most is because it leads to better outcomes. And so we have to start utilizing those outcomes as proper feedback for what we are trying to accomplish. And so the, you know, these half-truths that happen within within the realm of performance really dictate and change whether or not we fulfill our level of achievement success as athletes. And so we have to understand that these conversations are very nuanced. They are not black and white. Blanket advice, talk about lessons I've learned. Blanket advice is not great. And you have to apply nuance to your situation. You have to apply the details. Most of our greatest strengths can also be become our greatest weaknesses. Just had this conversation with an athlete the other day is the things that make you great oftentimes are the things that make you fail. And you think about perfectionism, right? Perfection is in itself is not a bad thing. It's when perfect becomes the enemy of great. You don't need everything to be perfect, but that drive for perfectionism is going to lead you to a wild amount of success. It's about implementing the levers to turn that back, to turn down that dial. You know, I've had Mitch Abrams on here, you know, four or five times talking about the different levers within the realm of anger, right? Anger is a performance enhancer, but if it overboils, then it becomes a performance restrictor. And we have to understand that too much of anything probably isn't great. And we need to have the processes and the levers to be able to channel shift in and out of different mindsets, in and out of different emotional states, control our actions within the framework of those emotions and make the next best decisions. And so that is, you know, the these half-truths about performance really change between the elites, between the good, between the people who are just just there and just interested.

Adaptability In Modern College Athletics

SPEAKER_00 16:00

One of my favorite, you know, conversation points that I've had recently is talking about just the relative landscape of college athletics. And I've talked to a number of different people. I've had coaches on here, I've had directors and organizations talk about very similar concepts and different approaches. But the reality is the key theme or the core theme in those is the concept of adaptability. And you have to build a robust skill set to be able to navigate different spaces in athletics, whether you're a coach, whether you're in the front office, or whether you're a player. It is an ever-changing dynamic of player coach front office relationship. And you have to learn where you fit within this ecosystem and you have to maximize your skill sets within that window and be open to changes and building new new skill sets. And I talked about, you know, in my most one of my more recent episodes with Josh Chambers about the ability to go from zero to one. And whether you are a coach or a player, you have to be able to go to zero to one like this over and over again. There's been a lot of things that you've done for an extended period of time that have led to immense amounts of success. Now, all of a sudden, because of the change in landscape, new adversaries, new rules, those same things aren't going to be as effective. And you have to learn new skills to then re-put yourself into positions of success.

unknown 17:19

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

In the basketball world, I just used this example moments ago. You can score 20 points a game. Well, so can four other guys on the team. There's only one basketball to go around. What else can you do well? Can you position yourself and learn the concept of playing better defense, dabbing on loose balls, setting screens, you know, being the guy that is, you know, constantly moving, that is the energizer bunny? Whatever the rules, if you're in football, you're a guy who was all state receiver. Well, can you go in and can you be the receiver who can block an 11-12 personnel? Can you be the receiver that doesn't come off the field because you know your assignments to a T, may not get the ball every time, but can you be the guy that can be dependable and relied upon? And there it's it's different within every landscape. And then if you're a coach and you've done it the hard way, you've been hard-nosed, you've been old school, can you develop a little bit of new school? Not that you have to get rid of your old school, but can you develop a new way to relate to your players? Can you develop new ways to recruit when you are going against teams with higher budgets? What are you talking about? How are you positioning the identity of your football team in the types of players that you want to attract to your school? How can you communicate that in an effective way? Talking about that with Coach Narduzzi, his authentic self attracts a certain level of player at pit, which has enabled them to continue to produce at a high level what we call these Diamond in the Roughs players who come in, they don't have a ton of hype, they don't have a ton of stars, yet they turn into 10-year NFL veterans. And a lot of them end up going in, you know, to the Hall of Fame. Aaron Donald, most prominent example, under-recruited kid, comes in, developed, goes to the NFL. And you look at a number of these guys, Kenny Pickett, first round quarterback. The ability to find the guys with the right makeup, you have to present your program and organization in the right way. That is something Pitt has found a really good recipe for doing. And it trickles down to the high school level. I had Greg Berge on here, or Greg Burgeon here. He is one of the most successful high school basketball coaches in Minnesota state history. The number of times that they've been to the state finals, well in the state finals, can't remember off the top of my head to any account. He has done an elite job of developing young men and putting them in positions to succeed and teaching them the characteristics of what it requires to become a better human and to become a better basketball player. And that has changed and evolved what that conversation looks like, what the relationship looks like with the players, what the relationship looks like with the parents. And so you have to evolve in your thought process, in your communication style, and how you interact with people.

Why Blanket Advice Can Mislead

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Now, a couple other important lessons that have come from the podcast, recent readings, you know, you know, over the course of my life, you know, turning, turning 30, a really important one is you can't take blanket advice. Recently I was in a, you know, witnessing a conversation, someone telling um, you know, athletes, don't get married young. Go out, have fun, do what you have to do. And being someone who got married, I got engaged before I graduated college. I've only been with my wife, you know, my entire life. We're high school sweethearts. We got together when we were 15 and we've, you know, only been together since. And the best things, unequivocally, in my life, have come from my wife. And I would not change a thing. I have no desire to have some wild, crazy life where I go out and, you know, travel the world by myself or, you know, go, you know, different clubs or parties or date scene. Like that is the worst advice anyone could have ever given me, even at a young age. And I think about that in terms of how you apply it to different domains of life is anytime someone gives advice, says, Oh, you should do this or you need to do this. The reality is that is only an expression of their own reflection of how they view themselves and the decisions that they made and the relative happiness or unhappiness that they may be experiencing. And when you are receiving advice, you have to understand where you are, who you are, and how that advice relatively applies to you. And it's the same thing when you enter a transfer portal. It's the same thing when you are deciding do I retire, do I not? You have to really have a deep and robust awareness around the way you think, the way you operate and who you are to be able to understand and apply new levels of advice. Because if you're someone going into the transfer portal and you want to evaluate the transfer portal, There's no shoulds. I don't, I don't believe in anyone should do anything. I believe that there are consequences downstream from decisions. And so if I look at this and I want to enter the transfer portal, there's a range of outcomes that could potentially happen by me entering the transfer portal. I had this conversation with an athlete, baseball player. They want to go in and they want to climb up a level. They want to go power four. It's like, okay, we've had a lot of success where you currently are. We have not dominated the level to the ways that we want. We haven't been all conference. You know, we aren't, you know, conference MVP. We've had a really good, successful career. We have one year left at this. We may want to play professional baseball. Totally understand that. What if we enter the transfer portal? Here's the potential range of outcomes. We may enter the portal, get no offers. Our previous school may pull our roster spark. We may have nowhere to go. That's worst case scenario. Move up a ladder. I may get picked up by a powerful program. I may go from being an everyday starter batting early in the lineup to never playing, maybe get a pinch hit here or there. That is another potential range of outcome. And then obviously you can climb your all the way up to the top. Hey, I transfer up. I have a lot of success. I go and perform the best of my level. And then I go into the MLB or whatever it is. You have to make peace with each rung of that decision tree, that range of outcomes. You have to make peace that each one of these is a possibility. So that when I make this decision and I step into the transfer portal, I have at least made relative peace or acceptance that I may not get picked up and this may go horribly for me. Because what you don't want is for that, if you do make that decision, that to catch you blindly and off guard. And now all of a sudden you spiral out of control. And so there is no blanket advice. There is no anyone should do anything. There are consequences downstream from decisions. And we need to understand within our decision framework what are the potential outcomes and which outcomes am I more so willing to pay the price for? And that is something that's not talked about enough, especially when it's giving or receiving advice. There's an art to it. And normally that art comes from one, understanding yourself, most importantly, but two doing your best to understand who's in front of you, what position are they in, and what do they maybe need to hear. Another thing is, and I talked a little bit about this earlier.

Agency Identity And Hard Work Reality

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Do not let your circumstances dictate your actions. Enable your actions to change your circumstances. And I look a lot over the course of my life and I'm very open on the show on injuries that I've had. I had a whole podcast on divorce and my experiences, my parents divorcing at a really young age and how that impacted me as a person and an athlete. Right. And I think about any outlier, and I think about anyone who's, you know, and there's levels to this game. I'm fairly, you know, convicted in the where I fall in this ladder of, you know, outlier excellence. But by all measures, I look at me and my siblings, the way that our lives transpired at a young age, we should have been relative failures in terms of, you know, low moral, you know, low morals, low emotional stability, low on the, you know, socioeconomic scale. And me and my siblings all have surpassed those and then some. We didn't let the circumstances of our situation from a young age that were uncomfortable, not easy, dictate our actions. We made the actions that changed our circumstances. And, you know, there were a lot of breaks that we got, a lot of good luck, a lot of blessings that a lot of other people did not get. And so I want to be fair to that. But in the realm of agency and decision making, you have to take the agency in your life that, regardless of whatever your circumstances are, that you have choices to make within them that can change where you're going. And, you know, Dr. Julie Gurner, you know, one of my favorite guests, I love getting her on every single year, talks about that. As long as you are healthy and have an average IQ, there's really no excuses. And that's not to be unfair to your situation, but there are people who have been in your exact situation who succeeded. And so to minimize the excuses that you save for yourself, again, whether that's harsh or not, it's a it's the reality is you have decisions to make. Decisions can either change your likelihood of success, put yourself in a better probability of success, or you can make decisions that are contrarian to that, that contrast where you want it, you know. And I've used this probability of success a number of times. I've talked about things being sufficient but not enough. It's not an X, Y variable. And it's a space I've been diving into for about a year now. It's just hard work, okay, and its place in society, its place in success. Hard work will never ever guarantee success. And that's the reality. You could be the hardest worker in the world, and you may never obtain the relative success that you are looking for from the realm of ambition, your ambition of what you want to achieve. Now, you cannot ever achieve it without the hard work. But there are a number of different variables that are going to factor into whether or not that you have the success that you're looking for. But you have to do the right things anyway, because it's a byproduct of who you are. And when I talk about identity in the importance of identity, who everything is downstream from that. Who you are is gonna dedicate is gonna dictate every decision that you make. Who you are is gonna dictate how you handle every scenario that you're in, and it's gonna create a cyclical feedback loop. Identity uh causes decision, decision reflects identity, decision confirms identity.

unknown 28:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

And it's this big cyclical feedback loop that's gonna continue to compound and accelerate and move you into the type of person that you are and the type of person that you want to become. And the confirmation that you need as a person is that you did everything within your power, okay, to achieve success. And sometimes it just doesn't go your way. And that's okay. Now I do have a relative belief. You do the right things, you iterate enough, and you work hard enough, things are gonna eventually work out. In some capacity, you will find some level of success. It just may not be the type of success that you're looking for, and just the hard work in itself isn't gonna guarantee it. And so we can't go into it thinking, I'm gonna work so hard and I'm gonna get what I want. Because then sometimes you work as hard as humanly possible and don't get what you want, and you look back and you say, What was all that for? And that's why I related again back to identity is downstream from who you are. And I just recently read a study about Navy SEALs, and the ones who make it through are not the ones who are the strongest, most athletic, elite athletes, outliers. They're the person who made decisions because it was a reflection of their identity and who they are. And that is directly what they tied it back to as to how they made it through. And it is something I've believed in my core for several years now. And it is something I continue to believe even at a deeper level. The more I study it, the more I learn about it, the more people I work with, the more athletes I work with, the coaches I speak with, the front office members I speak with. Everything is downstream from identity. Every single living thing that we do is downstream from identity, your agency level, your ability to handle adversity, your ability to handle success, how you communicate, how you treat people, all those things are downstream from

Aging Gratitude And What Comes Next

SPEAKER_00 29:53

identity. Thank you guys. I'd be lying if I said turning 30 didn't feel weird. Someone who takes, you know, great pride in, you know, being strong and healthy. Not that I'm not at 30, which would be a ridiculous thing. It's not like I just drop off of a wall, but just the general concept of aging is something that I struggle with. But what I get excited about is all the new things that I get to learn as I move through decade and decade in life and all the new experiences I get to am going to get to have with the athletes I work with, but more importantly, with my wife and kids, and how exciting those opportunities are. But it's been a pleasure to share in episode 120 of the playbook with you guys some of the things I've learned from recent episodes. Additionally, um, you know, some of the things that that I've taken over the course of my life in the course of the show. So thank you guys for tuning in. Tune in next week. Uh, we've got some really cool guests coming up. Uh, check us out athleticfortitude.com. Download the pod, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Five stars only, baby. Appreciate you guys.