That someone else… Is a ‘boss cow’
A Level 1 Coach gets his stamp when a ‘boss cow’ pulls him up to relevance. When he takes an unreasonable bet on a cow at the bottom of the herd’s dominance hierarchy.
These are my two dogs, Quinn and Brooks:
Australian Shepherds. They are bred to herd sheep though they would fool you in this picture.
With their angling, barking, and a decent amount of training, they’d be capable of taking sheep from the pasture and running them back into their pen.
As a Level 1 Coach, you have a similar job to Australian Shepherds, but your job is actually most similar to his job…
This is a cattle dog. If you guessed their job was the same but with cows, you’d be $1000 richer on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’.
This dog may recognize that one cow in the herd is different. It’s the ‘boss cow’.
A boss cow? Drew, are you really gonna turn this one into a relevant coaching lesson?
Just getting warmed up, but yes.
What is a Boss Cow?
Once in a herd, cows develop a social hierarchy. There are even what are called “boss cows” at the apex of this social ladder. These are the cows that push their way through to the feed bunk no matter who is in their way. No one is getting seconds until these queens of the corral have had their fill.
One study identified three different social structures within a dairy herd: a milking order, a leadership-followership pattern and a dominance hierarchy. This suggests that the social dynamic isn’t just a social ladder, but rather a more complicated web.
Social dynamics affect:
the order cows enter the milking parlor twice a day
who follows whom in the field and around the barn
who gets pushed out of the way when push comes to shove
The boss cow says who is ‘worth a shit’ in the herd and who isn’t. And all the other ones listen and follow whatever the boss cow says.
See the connection yet?
At Level 1, you can confidently guess you’re not the boss cow.
You’re the opposite. You’re at the bottom of the coaching hierarchy.
And due to this thing called memetics, it doesn’t matter what you say, how truthful what you say is, and how game-changing your ideas could be… Nobody, and I mean nobody cares what you think.
The phone doesn’t ring.
People don’t want to talk to you.
People are not offering you jobs.
People aren’t making idols out of you…
Nothing is happening to a nobody in the ‘status games’ that coaches play.
Unless the boss cow ‘memes’ you into existence of course…
Memetics and Why the Walter White Razor Doesn’t Compute w/ Most People
The memes you think of are new, internet memes, but let’s go back to the source of memetics. A quick Wiki summary will get you up to speed nicely:
Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene,[1] to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism". All evolutionary processes depend on information being copied, varied, and selected, a process also known as variation with selective retention. The information that is copied is called the replicator, and genes are the replicator for biological evolution. Dawkins proposed that the same process drives cultural evolution, and he called this second replicator the "meme". He gave as examples, tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and technologies. Like genes, memes are selfish replicators and have causal efficacy; in other words, their properties influence their chances of being copied and passed on. Some succeed because they are valuable or useful to their human hosts while others are more like viruses.
Memetics is why groupthink exists in humans and hierarchies exist with cattle.
The other cows look to the boss cow for:
Where to go
Who to follow
What to do next
Boss Cows are the gatekeepers of ‘who is next’ and the meme creators of the coaching industry. The boss cows tell you who has ‘status’ and is ‘worth listening to’. They see all of the minions of coaching competing against each other for a platform and pull one out like the crane machine in Toy Story…
The Boss Cow is the crane. He decides who gets to ‘go on to a better place’.
If I and ‘Person B’ are the same age, tweeting the same things, stating the same truths and have the same ideas about how to improve the game of hockey, but Person B gets noticed by a Boss Cow and is offered a job pulling him out of Level 1, Person B gets:
More Twitter followers when the press release drops
More Internet money because the herd is about to pile in on them and their personal brand
More blind faith that what they are writing is unequivocally true
More fandom (people make idols out of them which makes their following grow even larger)
Mind you, him and I are still saying the same things, writing the same stuff, and have the same ideas of how to improve the game.
One guy gets a spotlight and a sold-out venue to speak to and the other guy is yelling into a megaphone downtown and nobody is listening.
This also happens literally overnight. For Person B:
The phone rings
The job interviews flow
People are in your DMs for advice or to connect
People will make an idol out of you ( “he’s all knowing, all seeing, every thing he says it true and incredible”)
That someone else… Is a ‘boss cow’
A Level 1 Coach gets his stamp when a ‘boss cow’ pulls him up to relevance. When he takes an unreasonable bet on a cow at the bottom of the herd’s dominance hierarchy.
The Walter White Razor does not apply to the coaching herd because the boss cow creates the memes, they make the ‘Who’s Who’ List. However, it’s a separator if you choose to be different.
What You Can Do?
Your job at Level 1 is to be the cattle dog. Attract as many Boss Cows as you can to your internet personal internet farm.
Write things that provoke thought and provide value (even if nobody sees it)
Be helpful to other coaches in your space. Teach positive-sum by being positive-sum.
And finally, wait patiently. Your time is coming, it’s just not your turn yet.