[00:00:00] I want to talk about this book I just finished. It's a Nick Saban, the Alabama coach.
[00:00:06] For those of you who don't know, he's considered maybe the greatest college football coach of all time.
[00:00:12] Just for his program building and recruiting and whole total package and reinvention he's had and changing the offense.
[00:00:19] There's a bunch of cool things. So I thought it related to trading so I'm going to pull up my book notes here.
[00:00:24] I'm going to read a lot of my book notes I had because I think a lot of the stuff crosses over to what we talk about.
[00:00:29] So the first thing I want to point out is recruiting. He was a master recruiter and he believed that was the one way to win or get an edge in college football.
[00:00:38] So he spent all of his time building processes, ensuring that everyone knew that recruiting was like the main event in Alabama.
[00:00:46] It was from the secretary to the janitor. Every time you answered the phone, every time you did anything,
[00:00:52] you were basically preparing the showroom, which was anywhere on campus that a recruit would go in order to bring somebody in.
[00:00:59] So that was kind of like priority number one. And anytime you hired anybody, it was always like that was the first thing that they knew that they would have to do is pay attention to recruiting
[00:01:10] and the business of what were they doing that could relate to that overall goal that the organization had.
[00:01:16] And the other thing that happened after recruiting was building this discipline culture.
[00:01:23] So he basically had to inspire all the like you call them the alphas, like the main the strongest player at each main position group to buy into the system and then push the leadership down the chain that way.
[00:01:37] So some of this relates to trading. I'll get to that. Some of it is just the book.
[00:01:40] But then he got into this thing called the Pacific Institute and he hired these folks who have offices, I think in Seattle and somewhere else, who other coaches have used to come in and do mental visualization
[00:01:50] and basically see the life that you want to live or the plays you want to make ahead of time before you do them.
[00:01:58] So they visualize doing the making the right block, making the right cut, how it would feel to win and kind of putting yourself in the emotion of already doing it before you do it,
[00:02:06] which we could definitely use that in trading. I do that sometimes in trading.
[00:02:12] He talked about process orientation, about how this is a really big one for trading.
[00:02:17] So when he was at Michigan State before he went to Alabama, he had he had a heck of upstart program coming in.
[00:02:24] Michigan State was a good, good big time program, but they weren't they weren't Ohio State or they weren't Michigan.
[00:02:29] So when they when they went into play Ohio State, Ohio State was number one and Michigan State was was having a decent season, but they had just come off like a 500 season.
[00:02:37] And none of the players really thought they could beat Ohio State.
[00:02:40] And they got down 17 to three. But he said that all they focused on nonstop from this Pacific Institute learning group that they brought in had focused on little groups of seven second processes.
[00:02:53] So they thought if you look at a game, there's all these seven second bursts that they divided the game up into.
[00:02:58] That was like making the one right block or the one right read or the one right cut when you're running or breaking off your route or whatever it was for each position.
[00:03:06] And he focused on those seven second moments. It would add up to a really good game.
[00:03:11] And you didn't even think about if you were going to win or not.
[00:03:13] You would just think about doing each little moment good.
[00:03:16] And then at the end of the game, holy shit, you won the game.
[00:03:19] And how that process orientation of breaking things up into a really small package, I think is such a cool way to do it.
[00:03:26] It's such a great insight that I've used that before in a lot of things.
[00:03:30] You know, there's like the saying that small stones move a mountain and you hear all this stuff.
[00:03:35] And when you're struggling, it's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:03:37] But honestly, that's I think this is a really powerful one where if you do just focus on those little things, they add up to be big things.
[00:03:45] And there's books like James Clear's book on habits and other things about doing one push up and then five push ups.
[00:03:51] And all of a sudden you're doing 100 push ups and it feels like nothing because you focused on one little thing each day.
[00:03:56] So I think this process of not even like building habits, but just doing things the right way.
[00:04:03] And that's why a lot of times we talk about you're going to do this trade, but if you did it a thousand times, you probably wouldn't make money.
[00:04:09] So then why do it one time?
[00:04:11] And that's kind of part of that mentality of just win each little moment.
[00:04:15] And if you do that, there's a big, you know, there's a big prize that comes later because you're consistently doing the right thing again and again.
[00:04:22] And if the process doesn't work, then you can find a new process.
[00:04:25] If you're, if you're not, if you're trying to think about the big end game, it's just overwhelming.
[00:04:30] You get defeated and the mental negativity floods in.
[00:04:33] So I found that that was interesting that he uses that.
[00:04:37] I'm looking here. Here's another one that was interesting.
[00:04:42] Attention to detail. He was obsessed with every detail.
[00:04:45] So even drawing on the chalkboard or the whiteboard when he would do a play, every circle was clear and precise.
[00:04:52] Every line was straight.
[00:04:53] He would really take time to do it clearly.
[00:04:55] So anyone who had an eyesight problem or learning disability or anything, everyone could see anyone who walked in could see exactly what he was doing.
[00:05:02] And he believed that everything needed to be done.
[00:05:05] His dad had a saying that if you can't do it right, if you don't have time to do it right, you're never going to have time to do it over, which is like one of those simple but funny things that really focused on.
[00:05:19] That they had of doing things right the first time and making sure you thoroughly do it, because if you do, it saves a lot of time than having to do it over.
[00:05:26] And I thought that was interesting. Super obvious again.
[00:05:30] And like a lot of these things, but just really good to hear to go about my trading process and think about where I can implement some of these things.
[00:05:38] Here's the big one that I took away to this is the kind of the grand finale of the whole book that I wanted to talk about today is alignment.
[00:05:46] So I've done podcasts on alignment. But if you think about if you think about kind of where you stand in your life success wise, relationships or trading or whatever else, if you're not lined up to the right spot, you tend to find ways to fail or not do well or to be fighting uphill.
[00:06:04] So some examples.
[00:06:06] There's that book. I forget what the book is, but it studied the best CEOs and a lot of them were all tech CEOs in the 90s.
[00:06:12] Well, they were in the right wave. They rode the wave of tech in the 90s into 2000s, early 2000. Right.
[00:06:18] But there's probably a lot of Ford Motor CEO or sorry, a lot of motor CEOs like Ford and GM and Chrysler or whatever other shitty businesses that were barely keeping alive at that time because the winds weren't blowing their way.
[00:06:31] But those CEOs might have been even more effective operationally, but didn't really get studied or recognized because it was a shitty business at the time.
[00:06:39] And there's not a lot of money in it. It was unsexy.
[00:06:43] So if you think about trading and kind of back to the Alabama thing that Nick Saban did is he went to the NFL and he brought his hard nose discipline style of the NFL.
[00:06:54] And these guys were like, fuck off, buddy. I don't want to hear you telling me I'm 28 years old.
[00:06:59] I have a family. I make $25 million a year.
[00:07:02] I don't want to do pushups and run till I puke and stay after practice and all the, you know, that discipline hard nose culture that he built at Alabama with kids who were 18, 19, 20 years old who kind of needed a father figure and things like that sometimes.
[00:07:15] So that was one big thing that he couldn't really translate. You could maybe translate that back in the day in the NFL, but it gets harder and harder with athletes today.
[00:07:23] And it's just you kind of have to have a different personality in the NFL.
[00:07:27] The other thing probably even bigger was recruiting. So he built that recruiting machine in Alabama just all over the top recruits and his wife is really good at schmoozing and charming and being kind of the queen of the operation.
[00:07:40] Gifts to the NFL. His wife has no purpose because no one cares about the coach's wife in the NFL like they do in college.
[00:07:46] She was the queen. They said in the NFL, it didn't matter.
[00:07:49] So he lost that asset as a helper. And then in terms of recruiting, there is no recruiting because it's the draft.
[00:07:55] So if your team doesn't do well here at the top of the draft, if you do well, you're at the bottom of the draft.
[00:08:00] So he was kind of always irritated with that. But that was another one of those things where great.
[00:08:05] Now my two biggest strengths are gone. So back to trading for me.
[00:08:10] It's being curious. It's trying new things. It's jumping on like playing with crypto when it's early jumping on the stuff when it's early, just sniffing around and jumping on the stuff.
[00:08:18] And generally being that kind of person and having to make that be a player in my trading.
[00:08:23] And at times I struggle, but that is something that kind of carries me through because it's just the way that I am.
[00:08:29] It doesn't you can't really be the way you're not.
[00:08:31] And all of us have ways that we are things that we're predisposed to doing that are going to be unique strengths.
[00:08:37] I really feel strongly that if you don't find things to leverage those, you're probably going to struggle relative to the other part of yourself that is like that.
[00:08:46] And I think that's the biggest takeaway.
[00:08:48] And I've always thought that. But it really hammers it home in the book when when he basically flopped in the NFL two jobs.
[00:08:55] He was with Miami and he was a coordinator, I think, with somebody else.
[00:08:59] I forgot now, but in both jobs didn't work out for him.
[00:09:02] And he was back to Alabama then he also coached LSU and won a title there.
[00:09:06] But it was just that machine he built and he fit college football.
[00:09:10] And that was it. So it's like where where do we fit?
[00:09:12] Like, where can we if we're struggling or where can we figure out where we're strong and line up with it?
[00:09:19] How can we do something that we like?
[00:09:21] We get out of bed and we love to do it because they said he had he was really sick.
[00:09:24] He had tons of energy and that comes from an infectious desire to do what you want.
[00:09:29] Every day you rip the sheets off and you get out of bed and you can't wait to do your work because you're in the right spot for you.
[00:09:35] And that wasn't by accident. He spent a lot of time, just a lot of time trial and error, I would say, to get to that spot.
[00:09:43] It wasn't just like, oh, he's the luckiest guy.
[00:09:45] He did a lot of he ate a lot of shit to get to that spot and to make mistakes and find out where he wasn't going to be successful.
[00:09:52] So credit to him for continuing to push that. But I think a lot of us are on that journey and it's an important part of the journey.
[00:09:59] And the other thing is just he talked about excuse me,
[00:10:03] he talked about just going going down that road when things aren't going well and feeling totally down and out because he got fired from an NFL job for being a position coach early on.
[00:10:12] And he was so down and out and he had to kind of start from the bottom and work his way up.
[00:10:16] But once that infectious enjoyment of doing the job started, time kind of went by quicker and it was just slowly stepping one thing, one thing on the other, one thing on the other.
[00:10:25] And all of a sudden he's moving up the ladder. He's a coordinator.
[00:10:28] He's a position coach in the NFL again.
[00:10:31] Then he's back to college and boom, he's got himself a program at LSU, eventually goes to Alabama and climbs up from there.
[00:10:36] So it's finding like that one thing that feels better than what you just had.
[00:10:40] And I think a lot of times for some of us that I've talked with and myself as well,
[00:10:45] there can be this feeling of being stuck in the grind and just kind of forcing it because you feel like you have to.
[00:10:51] And it's tough. I think I'm not trying to go in a totally different direction with this, but it's easy to get stuck in that.
[00:11:00] And I think paying a lot of attention to the alignment thing is huge.
[00:11:04] And I don't there's a lot of books written on how to find that out.
[00:11:07] And it's not an easy thing. But if you're aware of it, it's a lot easier than if you're unaware of it.
[00:11:11] I think some people can go their whole lives just grinding and being miserable in a field that doesn't fit them or in a style of trading that you might have learned 10 years ago from somebody that worked for a while.
[00:11:22] It doesn't work anymore.
[00:11:24] Maybe it works again in the future, but it's time to change and adapt.
[00:11:29] Excuse me. I got this cold hanging on to adapt and to find something that that's going to fit you more.
[00:11:36] And even like I'll share a little bit the last three months for me or six months, I've had bursts of tons of enthusiasm and excitement and then a little bit of boredom and dejection at times with things getting me excited.
[00:11:49] Maybe that's not going to work out how I thought.
[00:11:51] And that's all part of the that's all part of the process.
[00:11:55] I think of finding I am the thing that kind of flips your switch and you're always going to be doing this because you get something that works well for a few years and then it changes.
[00:12:04] So back to the Alabama Nick Saban thing again.
[00:12:07] So he won a national title three years in a row.
[00:12:11] It was three years in a row, maybe four.
[00:12:13] And then he realized that he's like, oh shit, I have the best defense in college football.
[00:12:17] I have a pretty good offense, like bottom of the top 20.
[00:12:20] But all these other teams are doing this no huddle super fast high scoring thing.
[00:12:25] Since I'm so good at recruiting, we have all the talent here, but we're still winning and we can probably win for another two years just because of talent.
[00:12:33] If we don't keep up on this open world offense thing that's happening with no huddle and high scoring football, the game changed.
[00:12:41] The rules changed and he noticed it.
[00:12:44] And it was really easy just to be lazy and say, oh, my players are better.
[00:12:47] It doesn't matter.
[00:12:48] But eventually what happens is you start to someone starts to jump over you.
[00:12:51] And then all of a sudden, since you haven't adapted, all the new recruits are going to that school and then you're buried.
[00:12:56] So you've got to get in front of it.
[00:12:57] So he brought in some new coaches that fit that mold and retooled everything and became like pretty good at defense still, but more of a high octane offense.
[00:13:07] I think they might have been the number one offense for a couple years and then one one.
[00:13:11] I don't know. I think he won seven national titles in total, so maybe four more with almost no hiccup right.
[00:13:17] Very even back to back or I think maybe one year they didn't win and kind of jumped to a new system and did the whole thing all over again.
[00:13:26] And he kept the culture intact and all that stuff.
[00:13:28] But he made a big change.
[00:13:29] So it's kind of like in our world of trading, it's changing something fairly significant that you're doing with your trading, but not necessarily who you are in your whole process and doing that while you're winning, like while you're you're seeing that the game has changed.
[00:13:42] And I've I've seen this a lot in trading where it's like reading order books and trade events and news.
[00:13:49] And all of a sudden the computerized stuff comes more and more and more every year.
[00:13:52] It's like unless it's really busy and there's chaos in the world that you can't really read the order books as much as you used to anymore.
[00:13:58] That's not really useful, even though a lot of time went into learning that that's a skill that's kind of expiring.
[00:14:04] I think, of course, there's moments to do it and some people probably still have spots to do it.
[00:14:08] But generally I haven't seen it be as useful as it used to be.
[00:14:12] And it's figuring out when you're still able to make money in those moments that you have to learn other ways to do it at the same time.
[00:14:19] And that's hard to do because it's easy when you're down and out to have to restart everything.
[00:14:24] But it's hard to do it when you're winning because you want to keep winning.
[00:14:27] And why should I change?
[00:14:29] If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
[00:14:31] And sometimes that's true. But there's like this you're always cannibalizing your own thing like, you know, apples got the MP3 player and they're making her doing the iPhone to wipe it out.
[00:14:39] But also build a new market.
[00:14:41] And I think we're always having to do the same thing.
[00:14:43] So the book just shared those lessons that he had to go through as well, just like we have to go through.
[00:14:48] So I thought I had a lot of cool parallels.
[00:14:50] It's like the book's called I think something like Leadership Lessons of Nick Saban, but really good book.
[00:14:56] And I'm going to be reading more books like this because I'm just kind of in a kick right now to take down some of this sort of stuff.
[00:15:01] But hope you enjoy some of those notes and good luck out there.