Once upon a time, there was a young coach who thought he would fly up the coaching ranks.
In his first season as head coach, he sent emails introducing himself to coaches at the next level up. He heard back from 0.
During his second season, he sent emails to every D1 college in the country inquiring about volunteer assistant coaching positions. He got responses from 4 of 62.
During his first season away from coaching, he reached out to over 100 youth, junior and college coaches providing front-end value that might improve the coaches and players in their charge. 3 responded.
This isn’t a story for you to feel bad for that person.
It’s me by the way.
It’s so the people reading this, do some due diligence and don’t brush people off because their email introduction reads:
Dear Coach X,
My name is Drew Carlson, I am a former head coach in the USPHL…
And the logo on my track jacket at showcases looked like this:
Instead of this:
The game is changing…
The people and companies (outside of coaching right now) don’t give a shit who you are or what team you played for… They care about “proof of work.”
The way we network and hire should change too.
Let’s walk through a few examples of how we can better network and stop judging books by their covers.
The Crypto Way: Proof of Work
Watch the first minute of this video.
So what?
Proof of work doesn’t care if:
You’re a Ph.D. or high school dropout
Vegan or Carnivore
Caucasian or Asian
Been mining since 2018 or since yesterday
The Takeaway- If you have the skill set to get it done, you’ll be rewarded.
The Sam Hinkie Way: Sharing Your Work
Sam always told his network to send him links to interesting things.
One day, a friend shared a blog post with him. A few days later two friends shared a blog post by the same author. These blog posts started to be shared with him earlier and earlier in the day for about a week or so…
Then Sam found the author and went deep on everything he had written… Without even knowing him personally, he was sold on his “proof of work.”
Sam Hinkie was with the Houston Rockets as VP of basketball operations at the time. He walked into GM Daryl Morey’s office one day and exclaimed…
“I’m going to hire a kid I’ve never met in the next hour, I’m about to call him now.”
That day Rockets basketball operations had a new hire.
“He was leaking edge all over the internet… and we were going to employ him to stop doing that,” Sam said about this infamous story.
That kid could have been writing his blog in a penthouse in NY or his parent’s basement, and Sam didn’t care either way.
The Takeaway- The A-Players you should want to hire might not be your teammates from college or your sister’s brother’s cousin. They might be 23 and living in their parent’s basement or 55 and just became empty-nesters. People are leaking edge all over the internet right now. Go find a gamechanger.
The Beyond the Dog Way: Give Them a Chance to Run with the Ball
Last November, my girlfriend was hired as a dog trainer.
But she wasn’t their ideal candidate.
She didn’t have 3 years of niche dog training experience. She didn’t have her master’s degree in animal behavior writing her thesis specifically on dog training.
She was fresh off a Swine Nutrition master’s degree studying pigs. She had no career experience. But they saw she could “do the job.”
How?
After a few Zoom interviews, she drove down to Kansas City for a “ride-along interview.”
You follow a trainer along for the day and they immediately throw you in the deep end. With very little instruction they want to see how you interact with a dog, teach it to sit, etc.
Can you improvise? How do you handle the discomfort of not fully knowing what you’re doing?
That’s the first test. They are testing your “proof of work” in improv under constraints, with internal pressure because you’re not a “dog trainer” yet and you’re being asked to train a dog.
They can teach you to train dogs… That’s no issue, but how do you handle improv? Because life is improv. An event is presented and you must choose a response.
The Takeaway- You’ll never give someone a chance to run with the ball if you keep finding reasons to ignore them.
Are you Open or Closed to Opportunities?
The reasons to ignore me:
Lack of experience
Didn’t play at a high level
Has only coached tier 3 junior hockey
The team he did coach had a horrendous win-loss record
But find a reason to let me run with the ball like Wes did with a young coach:
Leave with This
The founder of Gumroad, Sahil Lavingia, says this:
If you want to find the top 1% of candidates, interview 100 people.
The same can be said for future coaching friends and colleagues.
Want to find the top 1% of coaching minds… Talk to more people. Then prune and only continue talking to the best ones that:
challenge you
help you build on top of your ideas
add value to your mission
When you improve the people around you, so do you.
Proof of Work
Look past the superficial, take 2 minutes to read one of their blogs before deciding to ignore them. Or take 5 minutes to chat with them.
They just might teach you something if you’re open to learning.
But that’s a whole different post.