Grow A Coaching Tree

0:04Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

0:43Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of the things I've been thinking about and writing about is this idea of coaching trees, that your success isn't measured just by what you accomplish, but what you help other people accomplish. Like, I hope I am a positive reflection on Robert Greene. Obviously, he's done so much, but one of the things he's also done is helped me go on to do what I have done, right? And when you look at great sports teams, it's where the assistance to that coach, what they have gone on to do. And I wrote about this in Right Thing Right Now, but I was thinking of that because when I had Rupi Kaur on the podcast, she's the bestselling author of Milk and Honey, I sat down to read her book, which my wife had read and it sold a bazillion copies.

1:39It's very popular in The Painted Porch. And actually, she has a poem about exactly this, that the title of the book illustrates this idea. This is the poem. I'll read it to you. Of course, I want to be successful, but I don't crave success for me. I need to be successful to gain enough milk and honey to help those around me succeed. Anyways, I thought that was beautiful. She has a new cool 10-year anniversary edition of the book, which we're selling at the bookstore. You can follow her on Instagram at RupiKar and check out her website. But that made me think of the coaching tree chapter in Right Thing Right Now.

2:20And I thought I'd set that up as today's episode. So let's do a deep dive into that idea. How do we not just become successful at what we do, but how do we help others be successful at what they do? Who have we opened doors for? Who have we given a push in the right direction? Who have we encouraged? Who's success have we fostered? And that's what this chapter is about. And to me, that's a really important an idea when we think about justice. Justice isn't just, again, what goes on in a law court. It's not just about what's legally allowed. It's not just about not being an asshole, but it's about being a good person who does these kinds of things, not for the credit, not because the benefits redound onto us, but because it's the right thing to do.

3:11So here we are digging in to how to grow a coaching tree from Right Thing Right Now. And if you want a signed copy of the book, you can go to store.dailystoic.com.

3:26Grow a coaching tree. By all time wins, Greg Popovich is perhaps the greatest coach in the history of the NBA. When one adds to that his number of championships, five, his number of winning seasons, 22, his unbroken streak of playoff appearances, 22, his winning percentage, 0.657, his Olympic gold medals, two, and the fact that he did it all with one team, he may well be the greatest coach in the history of the game of basketball. But there is another metric besides wins and rings, less considered but more important, that should make the case for him as the greatest coach in sports, his coaching tree.

4:05In sports, a coaching tree is defined by the coaches and players and executives that a coach has discovered, hired, and mentored, and what they go on to do in their own careers. Greg Popovich's coaching tree is so extensive, as one sports writer put it, that it's actually more like a coaching forest. In the course of becoming the longest tenured coach in all of the major professional sports leagues, Greg Popovich would take under his wing multiple Hall of Fame players like Tim Duncan and Tony Parker and Manuj Nobly, who not only made up one of the greatest dynasties in the modern NBA, but stayed in San Antonio and became leaders in their community.

4:43At one point, nearly 30 % of all the coaches in the NBA had worked for or played under Popovich. And his protégés have independently won 11 championships as head coaches and one G League championship. Five times someone from his forest has been named the NBA coach of the year. Of the current 23 black head coaches and GMs in the NBA, seven spent time under Popovich at the Spurs. Becky Hammond, the 2022 WNBA Head Coach of the Year, spent eight years with the Spurs, where she was the first female assistant coach in the NBA and the first to serve as an acting head coach after an ejected Popovich designated her his replacement.

5:27And she won two straight WNBA titles as a coach, too. And if one were to begin to trace out the coaching trees from the coaches in Popovich's coaching tree, you would touch nearly everyone in the NBA and NCAA basketball. It was this thought that struck Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, during the 2022 finals, which pitted two coaches whom Popovich had coached, hired, and mentored against each other. The Spurs were more than just a basketball team, Silver said. They were practically an academy for future coaches and team executives. If Popovich was running an academy, a nonprofit mission-based educational organization, these accomplishments would be quite impressive.

6:11The fact that he managed to do this while operating at the highest level of a cutthroat game where he's actually helping, if not producing, the competition, this is something he has done outside of his commitment to winning, both as an ideal and as an expectation of his employment. This is not the old boys club either with a bunch of people scratching each other's backs or one leader making identical replicas of themselves. No, it's the act of opening a door, extending a ladder to a diverse group of unique leaders, different types of athletes, coaches, and executives as they each reach to fulfill their own potential.

6:48So as you look at your career, it bears asking, who have you given a shot? Who have you helped get ahead? More revealing how similar to you or unlike you were these people. Yet far too often we are more interested in how to get someone to give us a shot, or how to get another one, or a bigger one, or a better one. We think that by thinking about others, we jeopardize ourselves as if life or work was zero-sum. Highlander syndrome says there can only be one. No, there is room for all of us to succeed, far more to succeed than currently are.

7:30I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school, and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although, here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey, because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound, if you have Prime, with Organic Birds at$299 a pound. and they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

8:08Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with competence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

8:20George Marshall advanced in his career, was able to get to the top of his profession and do well there, precisely because he understood that his job was to help other people, to build an army full of talented officers. While other generals fought tooth and nail for their own advancement, wrote letters to their superiors lobbying for promotions or choice assignments, Marshall was advocating for promising young men like Omar Bradley and George Patton, Walter Kruger, and most of all, Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he nurtured into history-defining talents. His coaching tree, you might say, was the oak upon which the Allied victory depended.

8:57In this life, of course, we are measured by our accomplishments as individuals. We strive to realize our potential and do our best. But after a certain point, this means only so much. What matters more, what matters over a longer horizon, is who we have helped to succeed along the way. To be clear, it's not just sports where a coaching tree counts. Socrates bought us Alciobides and Xenophon and Plato. Plato, in turn, brought us Aristotle and Aristotle Alexander. Emerson not only generously supported the literary scene in New England, but actively encouraged talent wherever he encountered it. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, Emerson gushed in a letter to a struggling Walt Whitman in 1855, which Whitman promptly added as a blurb in front of his then undiscovered self-published masterpiece, Leaves of Grass.

9:47Without Emerson, the careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Ellery Channing, Amos Bronson Alcott, and later William James, Emerson's grandson, and Alcott's daughter, Louisa May Alcott, would have gone very differently. Generosity is the seed of a great coaching tree. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in addition to his work as an abolitionist, helped mentor and publish the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Frederick Douglass encouraged and mentored Ida B. Wells, whose anti-lynching work, as well as her work for women's suffrage and in helping to found the NAACP in 1909, were brilliant extensions of the legacy of Douglass, a man born into slavery in 1818.

10:27Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy is also burnished by the fact that John Lewis went on to become a congressman. Andrew Young became ambassador to the UN. Diane Nash won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Denzel Washington paid for Chadwick Boseman to go to college. Walker Percy was adopted by his uncle Will, and then he in turn was a quiet mentor and teacher to the biographer Walter Isaacson. Percy also discovered and helped publish, posthumously, John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. George Carlin met a young Gary Shanling in a comedy club in Arizona in 1968, and after he read Shandling's Jokes Notebook said, I think you're funny if you're thinking of pursuing it.

11:10Shandling, in turn, would mentor the director Judd Apatow, Kevin Nealon, Adam Sandler, and Sarah Silverman alongside a generation of comedic talent in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. And what of the people these trailblazers never met but whom their work influenced, whom their example inspired? This is true multi-generational impact, an infinite web of butterfly wings flapped, of lives changed and better futures written. That's the thing. Not all of us have the power to change or improve the world within our own lifetimes. By supporting, encouraging, and influencing others, including our own children, our efforts can live on.

11:48Mentor, patron, sponsor, ally, teacher, master, guru. Inspiration. There are so many names for it because it's a role defined by so many different roles. But what matters is that we are the candle that lights another, which lights another, which lights another. Because through this, whole worlds are illuminated and delivered from darkness.

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