In just 5 years, Dre Baldwin went from the end of his high school team’s bench, to the first contract of a 9-year professional basketball career.
While playing professional basketball, Dre pioneered new genres of personal branding and entrepreneurship via an ever-growing content publishing empire.
Dre started blogging in 2005 and began publishing videos to YouTube in 2006. He has published over 7,000 videos to 136,000+ subscribers, his content being viewed over 73 million times to date.
Dre’s daily Work On Your Game Podcast MasterClass has over 1,700 episodes and more than 3 million downloads.
Dre has given 4 TED Talks on Discipline, Confidence, Mental Toughness & Personal Initiative and has authored 27 books. He has appeared in national campaigns with Nike, Finish Line, Wendy’s, Gatorade, Buick, Wilson Sports, STASH Investments and DIME magazine.
A Philadelphia native and Penn State alum, Dre lives in Miami.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up writing a book?
My background is in professional sports. After walking on at NCAA Division 3 Penn State Altoona, I had a 9-year career playing overseas basketball that took me through 8 countries.
At the same time, my pro career started — this was 2005 — I published my first of what is now more than 8,000 YouTube videos. This was the very beginning of YouTube before we were using phrases like “content,” “influencer” or even “social media.” Naturally, I didn’t think anything special would come from being on YouTube.
After a few years of sporadically posting videos, though, players began asking about my approach to the game, as they saw that I was a high-level player yet they had never heard of me outside of YouTube. Once I told them about my background, playing D3 college ball, and being cut from my high school varsity team 3 years in a row, I started getting a lot of questions about mindset and getting started.
- What drives you to keep practicing and showing up at the gym every day?
- How can I have the same confidence in a game that I have in practice?
- What kept you believing you could make it after all your failures and setbacks in the game?
- How can someone get started getting known online?
I started answering these questions in my content, and an interesting thing happened: people who weren’t even athletes started finding my material.
They would tell me that even though I was making it for the athletes, much of the Mental Game stuff I was talking about applied in the business world and in everyday life as well. This planted a seed in my mind for what I could do even after my basketball career.
That Mental Game material, which I shared in a series called “Weekly Motivation” every Monday for over 400 consecutive weeks, was the foundation for the “Work On Your Game” philosophy that I now teach to businesses, entrepreneurs and athletes.
I gave a speech at a conference on this exact framework and was approached by an editor from a Manhattan publisher who asked me if I had ever considered publishing via a traditional publisher (as I already had several independently-published books).
I said YES!
I’d already had the idea of writing a book that encompassed my entire philosophy, so the timing was perfect.
What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
I wrote Work On Your Game for 3 specific people:
1. People who know they need more “game.”
2. People who have “game,” but need to do a better job of showing it off.
3. People who have “game” and show it, but they’re not getting the recognition they feel they deserve.
Readers will learn there is a process of creating your own success and writing your own story in life. That process starts with developing your Mental Game (Mindset), then your Physical Game (skills), then your Sales Game (marketing and letting the world know who you are).
What are the top three tools you are currently using to write, publish, and promote your books?
Writing: Google Docs! Simple and easy. And I love how it auto-saves your work as you write.
Publishing: For my independently-published books, I use Fiverr for graphic design, and Kindle Direct Publishing for getting proofs and copies of my books.
Promoting: ClickFunnels for my sales funnels and interviews like this one to connect with people who will benefit from the content of my books.
What were the top three mistakes you made publishing your book and what did you learn from it?
1. For this book through a traditional publisher, I would have negotiated harder for creative control as far as things such as cover design. I ended up getting what I wanted, but you should have seen the cover ideas the publisher wanted to use before I put my foot down and fought with them over it!
2. Not knowing that large companies like publishers move slooooowly. I wrote the first draft of my manuscript in 30 days. The book did not come out for another 18 months! They work on their one timelines and once you sign on the line, the publisher is calling the shots, like it or not.
3. Not doing more to market and promote my book before the release date! As a marketer and salesperson, I think like this every time I learn something new — “I could’ve used that for my book release!”
When will you consider your book a success?
I consider it a success already: I wrote it and published it, which is more than 99% of would-be authors can say. The book also puts my signature philosophy in print and I’m really happy with the way the writing came out. Of course, we always want to sell more copies, but I don’t tie the book’s success to sales numbers only.
Sure!
The Story people aren’t special—at least, not on the surface. They go through the same things the Statistics deal with. Not making a team. Passed up for a big promotion. Lack of familial support. Open hostility and discouragement. General bad luck.
The difference is, despite the challenges, setbacks, and bad fortune, the Stories keep going and persevere at every point along the way where the Statistics fall off. Then these winners— who are the literal authors of history—share their journeys with the public. The Statistics don’t get to say much, because people don’t pay money or attention to hear from losers.
Know this: if your glory was never in jeopardy, there would be no story. Without a moment where it looks as if it’s surely over for you, there’s no value in the achievement for you or anyone else. What can you offer to help the challenges the next person faces? I want to know that the person speaking on stage or writing a book has been where I am. That’s how I know they’re speaking to me.
If you have a goal, you’re going to go through the fire while you’re going after that goal, whether or not you achieve it. You’ll have to go through whether you give up or keep going. So you might as well make a Story out of it.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
In sports, it was first developing my game, then translating those skills to actual performance, and then turning the performance to making a career of it.
In business, it was a similar process, just with a different game: I had to establish that I had a message worth listening to, then create a process around that message, then create a value exchange for that message (aka selling).
I wrote my book around how anyone can deal with these exact challenges.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before publishing your book?
How to deal with book publishers, what is worth fighting for and what is not.
I would have demanded more creative control when it came to design, and also for the process for my book’s release. I talked to a friend who works in publishing before I signed my publishing contract, but I should have talked to someone who thinks more along the lines of an entrepreneur rather than someone who was already entrenched in the publishing world.
The best technique I’ve ever used for my books is bundling books together so I can offer my readers a package deal: They get multiple books and get them at a better price than buying one at a time. Of course, an author must have more than one book to make this technique work.
For a single book, it’s been getting on other people’s platforms — like this one — to share my message with people who otherwise had not heard of me. Making that happiness all about selling yourself, which I happen to have dedicated an entire chapter to in Work On Your Game.
One more tactic: Building an audience LONG before you even have a book to promote! I’ve been building an audience and a relationship with them for years before I even had the idea of writing a book. So when I did have something to promote, people were open to hearing about it.
If you had the chance to start your career over again what would you do differently?
In writing? I would have started sooner, but self-publishing didn’t become ubiquitous until 2007, and I was blogging as fast back as 2005. As for traditional publishing, I wasn’t even looking for it; it found me. I would surely have self-published this book, though, if a traditional publisher had never come to me.
- Good To Great by Jim Collins
- The 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene
- The Law Of Success by Napoleon Hill
If you only had $1000 dollars to promote a new book, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I’d hire a virtual assistant whose only job would be to source media that I could appear on, then craft a pitch I would use to appear on those people’s platforms. I’d make all my book sales from those appearances alone, then sell my next book to those same people.
START WRITING!!!!
What is your favorite quote?
“Work On Your Game.”
– Dre Baldwin
Who should we interview next and why?
Misty Buck, who has a book called “The Athlete Mental Health Playbook” which is a great niche and perfect for the times; mental health is a big subject these days.
Random Bonus: With the game on the line and 5 seconds on the clock, who takes the last shot? Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or Lebron James?
Jordan!
One reason is that I grew up in the tail end of the Jordan era, and the start of Kobe. Another is that MJ won more than both Kobe and LBJ; his legacy has the mystique of simply winning.
How can we get in touch with you?
Dre Balwin’s Books On Amazon. You can text me directly at 305.384.6894, and get a FREE copy of my book The Mirror Of Motivation by going to MirrorOfMotivation.com! My personal homepage is DreAllDay.com.
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