← Becoming UnDone® with Dr. Toby Brooks
Becoming UnDone® with Dr. Toby Brooks
135 | From The Professor's Playbook: All-Nighters, Strategic Planning, & Aristotelian Generosity
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I am stupid. Every time I stay up late, pull an all nighter or more commonly a most of the nighter, I realize just how self afflicting it is. This past Saturday yesterday I just had to get a new podcast episode done for Becoming Undone. By the time I was finished it was 4am Sunday morning and I had to get up at 7:30 for church. I've been awful to be around all day, just grouchy, crotchety, just awful because of that. And it made me realize that if I'm really honest, behavior like that is pretty selfish. Let me back up a little bit. I grew up blue collar, lower to middle class depending on the year and how the coal industry was doing. Quite honestly, my dad worked as a mechanic in a coal mine and when the mining industry was good, things around our house were good and when the mining industry was bad, my dad would get laid off in the winter months when the mine would slow down. Despite all that, I learned one thing early by watching my dad if you want something, you've got to work for it. My dad would earn time and a half of his hourly wage. I don't know what it was, but if he worked weekends, anything over 40 hours, he got paid 1.5 times that normal rate. So he pretty much worked every chance he got. He worked midnights too for most of my growing up. So if we happened to be at home at the same time, which was pretty rare, one or the other of us was sleeping. So with that inverted schedule and no time off on the weekends I can remember once going, I think it was five months without seeing my dad awake at the same time as me. That was the work ethic I saw though, and those perceptions about what it takes to earn a living. Honestly, they served me well as an athletic trainer too, where I had all the miseries of a 60 to 80 hour work week, but without all the added hassle of time and a half on the weekends, just that normal standard salary. When I finally gave up clinical practice in the college setting and went full time into teaching, honestly, I felt like I was working a part time job. I managed to start up a number of side hustles, but none was as long lasting and as lucrative as the eight years I served as the art and technical director for RPM Magazine, an automotive publication based out of Canada that at the time was read in more than 40 countries worldwide and produced more than 40,000 print issues each month after leaving at and being done no later than five o' clock every day. As a teacher, I used my nights and weekends to write feature articles and lay out the magazine. In total, I have written and published more than 500 full length features for car magazines, and I even served as a photographer for probably 50 or so. Each one meant more income. I got paid by the job, and at its peak, I was earning more money doing this side Hustle magazine gig, mostly on the weekends. Then I'd made as the head football athletic trainer at liberty, working 60 hour weeks, going seven days a week from July to December just a couple years earlier. The only hard part was the production schedule itself was usually really tight. The owner, who served as the editor in chief, he would upload the materials late in the week, and it was my job to turn it all around into a killer car magazine, usually in 72 hours or less. Most months that meant a Saturday all nighter, and more than once I went 48 hours or more with no sleep. I think there was part of me that kind of relished the bravado, the toughness, and frankly, just the idiocy of it all. I wish I could tell you that I was doing it in order to help others, trying to tie it into this week's virtue of liberality. I wasn't doing it to be particularly generous or miserly. We just needed it to keep up paying the bills and to pay for this insane project car that I was trying to get. Built. Like so many other things, the COVID 19 pandemic damaged the print magazine industry irreparably. RPM was highly dependent on paid advertisers to make their business model work. However, with so much uncertainty in the world, by April 2020, all but a handful of advertisers pulled out. The magazine went into crisis mode. We didn't produce an April issue at all, and by May, the editor decided to go all in on digital and in the process, slash all ad pricing in half or more just to try to keep the thing going. With that ad revenue now a trickle, the first thing he did was eliminate the print costs Right away. We made the pivot to digital to cut down on expenses. However, that wasn't enough. By June, he asked me to do pretty much the same amount of work for a 50% cut in pay. I initially reluctantly agreed, but after just one month, resigned. After all, I'd been promoted at the day job to be program director at Texas Tech, and I'd gone from a reliable $4,000 a month extra income as a part time magazine guy to $2,000, with all clues pointing to the insolvency of the magazine. Soon enough, it just seemed like a foregone conclusion that it was going to dry up and I was going to be left without a job. I opted to move on. The point is, no one could have possibly planned for such an incredible turn of events as all that. But when it all dried up, and so suddenly to boot, it made me realize just how naive I'd been to be living paycheck to paycheck above my means provided by that day job at Texas Tech. And without a quality strategic plan in place, not only was the magazine at risk when whole family was at risk. And that's what we're talking about today is strategic planning and liberality. So stick around welcome back to the Professor's Playbook, where we break down complex topics in athletic training, sports medicine, and movement science into practical, applicable knowledge. I'm Dr. Toby Brooks and today we're diving into a concept that often gets overlooked in the hustle of high performance environments, strategic thinking. I'm also going to kick this episode over into my main podcast, Becoming Undone. So if you're listening there, hope you'll enjoy this little excursion. It's a little bit nerdier than normal, but I hope you like it. Let's be real in the world of sports medicine, athletic training and performance science, we often live moment to moment, injury to injury, crisis to crisis. But what separates good professionals from the great ones is not just technical expertise or quick decision making. It's the ability to think strategically over time. That means operating with the end in mind, aligning actions with our values, and knowing how to invest our time, our energy and our resources for maximal long term impact. So what's that actually look like to be strategic in your role? Let's break it down. First up, we'll look at the Virtue of the week. Liberality. All semester we're zeroing in on a different Aristotelian virtue. So far the past two weeks we've discussed courage and then temperance. This week we start with a virtue from the high performance unit framework, liberality. Before anybody gets too riled up here one way or the other, I'm not talking politics, liberals and conservatives, although you'll likely see the connection here in just a minute. But according to Aristotle, liberality, also known as generosity, is the virtue that lies in that golden mean between two extremes. Prodigality, excessive giving or wastefulness, like the prodigal son, and meanness or stinginess, which is a deficiency in giving. Aristotle defines liberality as, quote, the virtue concerned with the giving and taking of wealth, and especially the giving. End quote. Some key characteristics of Aristotelian liberality is that it involves giving the right amount to the right people at the right time for the right reasons. It reflects a noble intent, not personal gain or showiness. It's sustainable. A generous person gives in a way that preserves their ability to give again in the future. And it's deliberate. And it's tied to wisdom, not emotional, impulsive or excessive. For Aristotle, liberality isn't just about money. It represents a deeper moral orientation toward wise stewardship of all resources, aligning our external actions with our internal virtues. And for us, it's not about money. Liberality is generosity in using any of our resources, our time, our energy, our expertise. It's not reckless giving, and it's not stingy self preservation. It is wise stewardship aimed at a worthy end. So let's look at those extremes a little closer. Too little. You're stingy. You withhold your time, your tools, or your wisdom. For me, lots of times this shows up as, I just want to spend time working on my stuff. Back in Lubbock, I had my shop and that's where I would retreat to. I wasn't being generous with my time. I was being a bit of a miser. On the other hand, too much. You're wasteful. You're throwing your time or your money at problems without clarity or purpose. Strategic thinkers, they know how to live in the middle. They know where to invest. They operate from a generous framework without burnout and without boundary crossing. So ask yourself, are you hoarding your energy? Are you wasting it on things that don't matter? Where can you be more generous on purpose? Now, let's shift gears a little bit. We're going to talk about the high performance unit, the HPU in sports medicine settings. Back in the day, everything was isolated. The athletic trainer didn't necessarily work well with the strength coach. There wasn't a nutritionist. There probably wasn't a sports psychologist. But in the modern age, we see these teams working together, and the beneficiary is the athlete. So let's talk about how this works. Systems. Every great team has three things. People process, place. You might be the best in the business, but if your environment is chaotic and your team can't communicate, you're not maximizing your impact. That's where your strategic planning comes in. So first we'll look at people. A truly elite interdisciplinary team has people who are experts in their domain, but they're also operating in what we call a shared mental model, an smm. It's a cultural agreement about how Things should run. It's not enough to just be good at your job. You gotta be able to work in sync with others who are good at theirs and to trust them. Secondly, process. How is information gathered? How's it shared? How are decisions made? How's follow through ensured? In this model, someone like a sports scientist that sees some data that's concerning about an athlete can share that with the medical professional who can then make a return to play or a limitation on practice decision. Strategic teams have documented processes and you don't leave things to memory or to chance. You've got a plan and you adapt based on data. Lastly, place environment matters. Does your physical setup help or hinder communication and execution? Can you collaborate easily or are you siloed in separate offices, never crossing paths? The best places I've seen do this work together physically as well as psychologically. Where you do the work can be just as important as how you do it. So we've talked about the people. Let's talk about the framework. Goals versus systems. Let's get into one of the most powerful concepts in strategic planning. The fact that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Everybody loves to set goals, but goals are outcomes. They're the results that you want. Systems are the habits and the structures that lead to those results. Frequently I say strategic in purpose, relentless in pursuit, better every day. Systems are that strategic and purpose. If I know I want to get somewhere, I start by reverse engineering it from there. The outcome is based on the relentless pursuit. I just do the work that I've already planned. You want to lose weight. Your goal is to lose £15. You reverse engineer it. What's my caloric deficit need to be? How much do I need to work out? What are some easy things I can cut? But your system is how you eat, sleep, move and track that progress daily. If you want to run a high performance program, then let's talk about those systems. You need communication, protocols, budget priorities, workflows, collaborations. We call this the aggregation of marginal gains, where small tweaks repeated over time can eventually create massive outcomes. It's what legendary coach John Wooden talked about as he was earning title after title for UCLA basketball. That's strategic thinking and it's playing the long game. So the challenge is this. Can you describe your system? If not, you probably don't have one. And without one, you're flying blind. All right, let's wrap it up. Bring it home. Strategic thinking isn't just for CEOs or head coaches. It's for all of us. It's about aligning your daily decisions with the long term impact you hope to make. Hopefully we're operating from liberality. We want to be generous, but we also want to be wise in the process. Hopefully you can optimize your high performance unit. The people, the processes and the place. And you know, it's great to set goals, but I'm more concerned with whether or not you're building systems. So your challenge for the week. I want you to audit your system. Pick one area where you're flying by the seat of your pants. Maybe it's your homework. Maybe it's how you're tracking injuries. Maybe it's how you spend your own budget, how you communicate with coaches or others. Now design a simple system to make it better. It doesn't have to be fancy, it just has to be intentional. Strategic thinkers don't just do more, they do better. That wraps up another episode of the Professor's Playbook, this episode brought to you by Becoming Undone. If you found today's episode useful, be sure to subscribe, share and leave a review. You can connect with me at linktr EE, Tobybrooks or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback helps shape the direction of the show and I'm always thankful for your insights. Thanks for tuning in. Till next time, be purposeful, be relentless, never stop learning, and above all else, listen to your stinking professor Sa.