Hi Everyone! 👋🏻


Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to another edition of The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.


Today is an exciting day for yours truly, as it is finally time to jump-start the 2025 MLB season. With the Super Bowl in the rear-view, pitchers, catchers, and the rest of us are heading to Spring Training sites across Florida and Arizona to begin preparations for what promises to be another thrilling baseball season. I for one can’t wait.


Now, it’s been a week since we spoke as last Tuesday I published an in-depth commentary on the nature of athleticism in sports, with a specific focus on why I think we often miss the mark in assessing it. I’d encourage you to go give it a read in case you missed it, as I find it to be an especially relevant topic at current point in time given that two of the primary inspirations for the piece - Luka Dončić and Patrick Mahomes - have dominated the sports news landscape over the past week in the lead-ins to the NBA Trade Deadline and Super Bowl. It was a fun piece to write and I greatly enjoyed the discussions it stimulated with many of you over the past few days.

One line of conversation I found particularly interesting in the aftermath revolved around the idea that while athleticism is in fact highly relative to the skill at hand (as the piece argued), surely there must at least be some rough guidelines for what it means to be athletic in the first place. Different sports vary wildly in their athletic demands, after all, and as such there is likely a ‘hierarchy’ in which certain sports require more athleticism than others. As an example, consider the Olympic sport of curling - while it requires precision, strategy, and some highly specific technical skill, most would agree that it demands less raw athleticism than sports like football, basketball, or baseball.


Naturally, this debate got me thinking about how we might generalize the concept of athleticism to account for the variety of sporting demands. So for today’s piece, I’d like to attempt to lay out a framework that conceptualizes athleticism at the highest level of sport through the lens of two key principles:


Speed & Control.


Or, as we'll call it today - the dichotomy between gas and brakes.


Let’s get to it.


- CG

Need for Speed


Let’s start with a simple, yet hidden truth: every sport is its own version of a race.


Now, perhaps not as we understand a ‘race’ in the traditional sense - like two sprinters running a 100 meter dash, or cars jostling for position around a track in a NASCAR heat.


But when we zoom out and consider that at its most fundamental level a race is simply a competition to achieve an objective against time and space, we see that all sports quickly fall into context. Regardless of the sport, each has it’s own racing elements at play - whether against seconds ticking down on a clock, against defenders closing in, or against objects bound by the laws of physics moving through the field of play.


And as such, the natural extension is that we can borrow from the actual sport of racing to help us understand the key components of athleticism across the broader ecosystem of sports.


In the world of racing, there are three distinct forms of varying complexity that provide a convenient trifecta through which to illustrate the spectrum of athletic demands:

• Drag Racing - A pure expression of straight-line speed, pitting two cars against each other in a quarter-mile sprint to see who can be the fastest from point A to point B.
  
  

• Stock Car Racing (eg: NASCAR) - A style of racing in which drivers navigate long oval tracks that introduce gradual turns and the need for strategic positioning.
  
  

• Formula Racing (eg: F1) - What we might describe as the ‘pinnacle of racing sophistication’, in which drivers of open-wheeled cars maneuver around courses of varying conditions and tight, hairpin turns.
  

In this racing ‘hierarchy’, each step up the stack represents a stark increase in demands for both the driver and the car. Where drag racing strips variability down to its most basic level - no turns to contend with, no other cars vying for the same spot on the track - stock and formula racing introduce added layers of complexity in different ways. The tracks begin to bend and twist; drivers must now jockey with one another for positioning on the road. And split-second decisions about when to accelerate or brake now become matters of not just victory but also survival.


While each version of racing differs in its own ways, there is a distinctive underlying principle that each certainly shares: speed. Whether on the Hot Rod, NASCAR, or F1 circuits, speed is a necessity. The ticket to the dance. And as such, the faster the car the better.


And yet, there is a catch - because when it comes to the style of racing, there is an inseparable, inverse link between variability and the resultant weight of speed. At low levels of variability, as in drag racing, speed is virtually the only thing that matters. When changes in direction are an after-thought, how fast you can go 0 to 60 is the name of the game. But as that variability climbs in stock car competitions and ultimately crescendos in formula racing, speed starts to cede way in importance to another variable:


Control.

All Gas, But Please - Some Brakes Too


While the phrase “All gas, No brakes” might be an applicable - and even winning - strategy in a low-variability racing environment like drag racing, it is in an increasingly bad operating principle in settings like NASCAR and especially F1. Too much speed without the requisite amount of control is a recipe for disaster as the turns start to show up in the front windshield.

Watch an F1 race for even a few minutes and you’ll see this principle at play. These races aren’t an exercise in smashing the accelerator to the floorboard so much as they are a trial and error experiment of finding the right amount of give and take. So much so that if you pay attention for long enough you’ll notice something striking:


The most crucial moments of an F1 race rarely happen on the straightaways - they tend to happen in the corners instead.


Why? Because at its core, the sport of F1 is not merely a test of how fast one can go on the parts of the track that allow for it. The sharp and winding routes of an F1 track introduce a new variable to the racing equation, meaning its drivers must strike a delicate balance between speed and precision; between creating speed and harnessing it; between pushing the gas and touching brakes.


So while cars are frequently assessed by how they perform in the straight and narrows, it follows that the corners are often the domain of the driver. It is in the turns of an F1 track - where the margins are the tightest and thousandths of a second mark the difference between gaining an edge or losing it - that the most elite of racers separate themselves from the pack.

It thus stands as no surprise that F1 drivers are considered among the most skilled athletes in all motorsports - because while anyone can push the gas to the floor, mastering the delicate physics of acceleration and deceleration is an entirely different challenge.


To succeed at the highest levels of formula racing requires being an elite user of both the gas and the brakes.


And it’s no different when we think about the concept of athleticism across the broader ecosystem of sport.

The Two Pillars of Athleticism


In The Theory of Athletic Relativity from last week, I penned over 3000 words to explain why I believe the pursuit of a single, universal definition of athleticism is a fool’s errand. Rather than painting athletic ability with a broad brush, I’m of the opinion that we need take a nuanced perspective when it comes to the topic, a sentiment captured in the following excerpt from the piece:

[When] it comes to athleticism, getting the right definition in place matters. We need one that allows for nuance and variability rather than one that forces us into overly simplistic categorizations, else we run the risk of misdiagnosing what makes the world’s athletes so special.


Athletic relativity is the necessary antidote, as it helps us avoid getting lost in an endless pursuit for universal athletic truths. Because in the end, athleticism isn’t about meeting some arbitrary standard - it’s about possessing the right combination of tools required to excel at the task at hand.

And yet, while I’m a firm believer that relativity carries more weight than specificity when it comes to describing athleticism, I’m not naive enough to miss the fact that there are likely some core, underlying principles that make elite athletes so.


To understand why this might be true, consider a useful analogy between athletic skills and tools in a workshop - while every tool is only useful in the context of the problem it is meant to solve, some certainly carry more general-purpose power than others. Take a hammer for instance, which proves useful in many cases where a wire stripper does not - with one in hand a wide array of pushing, pulling, and breaking options open up that would not be possible with a more specialized tool.


And so too in sports. In the realm of athletics, there are in fact some skills that serve the general function purpose of a hammer; fundamental capabilities that prove valuable across nearly every sporting context even though the specific ways they manifest themselves may differ dramatically depending on the sport or position at play.


So in lieu of providing a specified definition of athleticism, I find it more instructive to think about the general purpose pillars upon which it relies. The same two principles we see at play in the sport of F1 racing:


Speed, and control.


Just as F1 racing requires mastery of both the ability accelerate at will and stop on a dime, athletic excellence in any domain depends on the fundamental blend of generating force and controlling it. Whether we are talking about an NBA shooting guard or NFL running back, success at the highest levels of athletics is an exercise in paradoxes - of striking a balance between the two opposing yet complementary forces of gas and brakes.


And yet while both are important, it stands out how much of our athleticism centric conversations orient around speed while leaving the concept of control to the wayside. Just as we do in racing, we have an over affinity for speed that is accompanied by an under appreciation for control.


Returning to the concept of ‘proxies’ from last week, we see that many of our tests designed to capture and reflect high level athleticism focus almost exclusively on the ability for an athlete to move fast. We ooh and aah over football players with the fastest 40 times, basketball players with the highest vertical jumps, and baseball players with the highest bat speeds. All while at the same time frequently ignoring how these same players perform in proxies that place a higher emphasis on control, such as a 20 yard shuttle drill.


Now to be sure, a certain threshold of speed is a necessity at the highest levels of sport. Frequently, it is the ticket to the dance such that you have to move fast enough just to get in the door. You may not have to be a full on Ferrari, but a Mazda engine isn’t likely to get the job done.


But we’ve seen that gas with no brakes is a losing strategy on the race-track, and the same is true in a plethora of other sports. Whether on a breakaway dunk attempt in basketball, a sprint to the net in tennis, or a play at the outfield wall in baseball, sports inevitably throw moments at you in which brakes are required - and you’d better be able to use them (or else risk becoming the subject of an enduring blooper reel).


It follows that elite level sports are more akin to F1 than they are drag racing. And the more complex the sport, the higher the premium that gets placed on control.


So when it comes to elite movement, and thus elite athleticism, at the upper echelons of sport, it’s not enough to just have speed. You need to make sure you have brakes built into the car as well.

Braking Systems


To drive this point home - that elite athletes aren’t just built on speed alone - let’s consider some examples from the US professional sports landscape that highlight the world’s best athletes through the lens of braking systems.


NBA


Let’s start with basketball, where the ability to decelerate quickly is just as crucial as explosive speed. Watch some of the game’s elite scorers and you’ll notice that their success tends to stem not only from their ability to blow past defenders, but also how they can stop on a dime at will.


Take Luka Doncic, for example. While he may not possess what we would consider ‘traditional’ forms of NBA athleticism, his braking system is a different story. When he visited P3's biomechanics facility in Santa Barbara as a 17-year-old, something remarkable stood out - his deceleration ability rated in the 90th percentile among NBA players tested at the facility.


"Most athletes in the NBA are Ferrari engines, whereas this requires just some really advanced braking systems," explains P3 director of biomechanics Eric Leidersdorf. "His ability to orient his hip in a way that he can decelerate and then change direction very subtly, but do so very, very rapidly is really impressive combined with the fact that he's big.”


This elite deceleration ability puts Doncic in rare company - his closest biomechanical comparison was James Harden in his Houston prime. It's no coincidence that both players mastered the step-back three, a move that demands precise control over stopping and directional changes. Watch either player and you'll see how they can have a defender draped all over them one moment, and then suddenly find themselves with multiple feet of space to get off a clean look.


Doncic is a master of momentum, having perfected the art of throttling from the gas to the brakes. And slowly, the rest of the league is following suit.


NFL


Elite braking systems aren’t just found in the NBA - they are a hallmark of the gridiron, too.


For every straight-line burner like Chiefs WR Xavier Worthy, there are countless other players across the league who make a name for themselves as a function of their ability to slam on the brakes. Offensive stars like Justin Jefferson or Christian McCaffrey dominate through precise route-running and sharp cuts that leave defenders grasping at air. On defense, players like Aaron Donald and Micah Parsons blend power with the ability to put a foot in the ground and change direction on their pursuits of the quarterback.


These elite athletes demonstrate that while raw speed is important, the ability to modulate it is equally crucial. The NFL Combine’s 3-cone drill and 20 yard shuttle run are perfect examples of tests that measure this braking ability, though they are often overshadowed by the 40 yard dash. In fact, a 2020 research study found that the shuttle run correlated with areas such as offensive guard and center grades, pressure per pass rush from defensive lineman, and more interceptions per pass coverage snap count for safeties.


So go routes are fun and all, but look beyond the home run shots and you’ll see the best football players are walking examples of the value of control-based athleticism.


MLB


But what about America’s pasttime? While we may have to search a little harder on the diamond, look in the right spots and you can’t help but see the same premium on brakes at play.


Take outfielders, for instance, who must rapidly slow down to catch a fly ball as the warning track appears under foot. Or consider runners in need of stopping in place after a tight turn around a base. Even pitchers rely heavily on deceleration techniques, needing to stop forward momentum toward the plate on every pitch for strike throwing accuracy and injury prevention.


And yet, I’d argue that nowhere in baseball is the value of control more evident than in the batter’s box. Because in an uncertain skill where you are simply making your best guess as to what’s coming - and thus frequently likely to be wrong - having the ability to adapt your swing on the fly becomes the separation point between good and great. Elite hitters don’t just have elite speed - they have elite braking systems too. They possess the ability to start with their foot on the gas to get their best swing off on 98 to 100, but can hit the brakes like hell when the moment calls for it. So every time you see a check swing where a batter manages to extend the at-bat by another pitch, or a “B Swing” where the hitter buys a millisecond of time from fastball to off-speed - know you are watching an exercise in braking systems.

AND, Not OR


So to close, if we are to put forth a foundational theory for what constitutes high level athleticism at the elite level of sports, let it be the following:

The Two Pillar Model of Athleticism: Move fast, stop on a dime.

One alone is not enough. It can’t be all gas and no brakes else you wish to lose control and fly off the track. But to be sure, some level of speed is a necessity - you can’t be all brakes and no gas unless you want to max out as a D3 athlete like the writer of this publication.


Instead, two ingredients are necessary to get the recipe right. Speed and control, in varying degrees to taste. You need enough speed to redeem your ticket to the dance, and enough control to make sure you stay on the floor. Because at the highest levels of sport athletes aren’t performing an exercise in drag racing alone; they are formula racing cars searching for the right blend between two contrasting yet complimentary skills.


So give me the gas, certainly. But make sure you put some brakes in the car too.

Hey Everyone! 👋🏻

Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to another edition of The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week since we last spoke.


We are back today after last week’s post on systems and the value of doing things that don’t scale, which you can find below in case you missed it and would like to give it a read:

For this week’s edition, I wanted to share some thoughts I had that stem from an article I came across in The Athletic on Friday. Titled ‘Patrick Mahomes and the Secrets of the Dad Bod: What We Get Wrong About Athleticism", the piece was a nuanced discussion on the topic of ‘athleticism’ through the lens of some of sports most prominent - yet unconventional - athletes. Citing all-world players from professional sports like Mahomes, Nikola Jokić, and Luka Doncic, among others, the author makes a compelling case that athleticism doesn’t always look like we expect it to; the ‘bigger, faster, stronger’ framework is too limited, and that an overt reliance on it can result in us missing what truly makes some of the world’s most spectacular athletes so special.


I think the piece is worth the read if you have some time today, and find myself largely agreeing with the premise that it puts forth. But with that said, I wanted to share some additional thoughts on the topic that stem from my experiences in professional sports.


Over the last 7+ years, I’ve been fortunate enough to be ‘in the arena’ when it comes to evaluating/developing world-class athletes - and as such, I think I’ve learned a thing or two along the way about what constitutes athleticism - as well as why we tend to get confused about it. Today’s newsletter is my attempt to crystallize some of those insights and share them with you all to further the discussion.


And so, without further ado, today’s roadmap for my perspective on athleticism:

• Beginnings - The human need for explanations as a rationale for why we care about athleticism.
  

• Proxies - Conversation on the evolution of our attempts to quantify athleticism over the years
  

• Shortcomings - Where our traditional assumptions about athleticism fall short
  

• The Theory of Athletic Relativity - An attempted redefinition of what constitutes true athleticism
  

Let’s get to it.

- CG

Beginnings

For starters, it’s worth asking two important questions as it relates to athleticism: where does it come from, and why do we care?


It goes without saying that we humans have an endless fascination with the concept of athleticism, so much so that you’d be hard-pressed to emerge on the other side of a sports-centric conversation without so much as having brushed the topic. From radio talk shows to TV back-and-forths, water cooler convos to draft room break downs, the amorphous ‘athleticism’ debate seems to permeate every corner of the sports discourse.


But why?


I believe our fixation on athleticism stems from a simple truth: we humans have an insatiable desire for explanations. As long as we have existed as a species, it has never been enough for us to simply observe something; we must also be able to say why it happened, to find a rationale for how that thing came to be. To find the cause behind the effect in order to close the loop and satisfy our fundamental need to make sense of why the world around us works the way it does.


And it is no different when it comes to sport. Certainly, we relish in the opportunities to see the what - feats of athletic skill acted out on the field of play. But we also must satisfy our needs for the why and the how so that we can find an underlying explanation for why certain athletes, and thus teams, are capable of things that others are not.


It is here where the well-intended yet frustratingly misleading terminology of ‘athleticism’ draws its roots as a subjective descriptor meant to help our brains understand what our eyes can see. By reducing feats of sports performance to a single catchall term, we in turn create a mental shortcut that helps us process and categorize the complex physical abilities we witness. A linguistic placeholder for something our minds struggle to fully comprehend - the remarkable capabilities of the human body in motion.


And in doing so, we find the explanations we seek for why sports - and thus athletes - are the way they are. At least that is our hope.


Because as we will see, the reality of athletic feat is far more complex than a single word can capture.

Proxies

While the history of the word athleticism carries with it a hallmark of subjectivity, that does not mean we haven’t been trying our damndest to put objective frameworks in place to better quantify what we mean by it.


Throughout the history of sport, we’ve long been on the hunt for ‘athleticism proxies’ - measurable tests that can be used as rough (although indirect) estimates for athletic ability. Things like the 40 yard dash in football as a proxy for speed, the vertical jump in basketball as a proxy for explosiveness, or bench press repetitions in power lifting as a proxy for strength.


What these proxies do is allow us to create a fundamental baseline for comparison, in the same way we put kids through standardized testing in education. By instituting a reliable testing standard for ‘athleticism’, we in turn define a common language that allows us to place various aspects of an athlete’s skill profile in context with those of his peers - across both time and space. A 100m sprint is the same in Europe as it is in the United States, a vert test the same in 1960 as it is in 2025. And in that standardization lies a powerful basis for assessing athletic skill.


The desire for athleticism proxies is so strong, in fact, that entire “Combines” exist in order to capture them. These combines have been long-standing staples for events like the NFL and NBA, systematic attempts meant to quantify athleticism through a pre-scripted set of tests in the hopes that the results can tell us some things about future performance. In fact, when it comes to the United States, Major League Baseball’s addition of a draft combine back in 2021 means that every major US professional sports league now holds its own version of a combine.


The rise of combines reflect our persistent desire to quantify and compare athletic ability through objective measurements. And yet, there is a problem: proxies are, by definition, approximations - meaning that while they may get close to describing the real thing they will never perfectly represent the things they aim to measure.


Take the NFL Combine. How representative are the tests actually of what makes for good football players? Perhaps not as much as we are led to believe…


As an example, consider a 2022 study from the University of Houston at Victoria which concluded that combine tests had limited impact overall on draft status. When comparing drafted players and non-drafted players, the researchers found that there was no significant differences across any of the six key physical tests (40 yard dash, bench press, broad jump, etc.). And while they did find that draft placement (ie where drafted players were taken) shared some correlation to broad jump and the 20 yard shuttle, the predictive power was limited overall. The same shortcomings even extend to the NFL’s longtime gold-standard cognitive test, the Wonderlic, which was removed from combine testing in 2022 after failing to show any significant value.


But this characterization may not be entirely fair to proxies. In fact it is worth asking a follow up question: is this actually what we care about when it comes to assessing athleticism? Predicting draft status? Or are we really trying to get at something much more important like how that player will ultimately perform down the road?


From this perspective, the data on proxies is somewhat more lenient - a 2020 study that looked at combine tests relative to future NFL performance did find some significant relationships indicators when looking across various positions. While not every test mattered for every position group, the researchers found that every offensive and defensive position did have at least 1 NFL Scouting Combine test that correlated with future performance, such as the 40 yard dash for wide receivers. So there is a bit of nuance here - more on that in a moment.


Regardless, we have enough case studies from football alone to know that proxies for athleticism are not always best followed with a blind eye. As stories like Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes tell us, these tests don’t always tell the whole story.


And here we find another important question to consider: are these testing shortcomings merely a function of the specific proxies we’ve been using, or proxies as a concept themselves?


I think there is a compelling argument to suggest that the main issue lies not with our attempt in general to assess athleticism, but rather with how we have done so up to this point.


As we’ve tested and observed over the years in sports, calibration has been a necessity. No-one wants to rely on tests of athleticism that we know don’t work, a truth we see represented in the Wonderlic story. Athletic assessment is thus an iterative process - we keep what we think works, and discard the rest.


The result of this constant process of refinement is that our tests are getting closer to describing what athleticism actually looks like. Some of this is enabled by lessons from history, but a key driver here is the never ending arc of technological progress. As science enables new breakthroughs in assessment technology, we become better suited to assess down the athletic stack - in turn allowing us to better quantify the previously quantifiable.


There are numerous examples here, ranging from ball tracking technologies like Trackman and Rapsodo to force plates and even new-age cognitive assessment tools like S2. But one stands out above the rest: markerless motion capture.


With the advent of camera based systems motion tracking technologies like KinaTrax, we now have an unprecedented ability to assess - and thus describe - human athleticism within the frame of competition itself. And while much of the research on what exactly this looks like is being done behind the scenes in labs owned and operated by professional sports teams (no secrets from me today - sorry!), facilities like P3 (Peak Performance Project) are helping us get closer to the truth of what true athleticism looks like.


P3’s pre-NBA draft assessments of two uncharacteristic NBA superstars, Nikola Jokić and Luka Doncic - neither of which are renowned for their physiques - are instructive here. Consider the following story about P3 and Jokić from The Athletic’s recent article on the topic of athleticism, which gives us good idea of both where we are now - and where we are heading (for P3’s insights on Doncic, I’d encourage you to scrub through this page from their website):

In the last decade, as Jokić grew into an NBA MVP and one of the best basketball players in the world, the story of his trip to P3 and his 17-inch jump has become a part of his lore. In many ways, it’s actually the least interesting part of the story.


As Elliott’s team [at P3] evaluated Jokić, he was put through a series of tests. P3 tested his hip abduction, or how fast and far one can affect one’s hip when moving laterally. It measured second-order metrics like how quickly he could decelerate and how high he could jump two times in a row. And it looked at a list of what Elliott calls “granular biomechanics” — hundreds of variables that rate things like force production, loads and joint extension. When the tests were complete, P3 put the numbers into a machine-learning algorithm that clusters athletes into groups with similar attributes.


What was most revealing about Jokić was not the numbers themselves, but the players he compared to. He was right on the fringe of a group of guards that Elliot called “Swiss Army Knives” because of their ability to do anything on the court.


“They’re just like a B-minus to B-level in everything,” Elliott said. “And that’s Jokić. He may look herky-jerky to you. But looking at the data, we think it looks really beautiful.”


P3 gave the cluster a name: “The Kinematic Movers.” That cluster exists as a skeleton key to unlock how data and technology can unearth athletic genius and provide a fuller picture. A Kinematic Mover is not an explosive jumper. Nor particularly powerful. But grades out above average in almost everything, possessing a portfolio of some of the most useful physical tools and movements in basketball.


As a group, Kinematic Movers in the NBA have longer careers, on average, and accumulate more of the statistic Win Shares.

Pause to notice how far the term “Kinematic Movers” is from our traditional proxies of athleticism like the 40 yard dash, and you can’t help but get the sense that we are moving in the right direction. Clearly, our proxies for athleticism are getting better.


And yet, we still have a long way to go. Because, when it comes to proxies, an old adage about models applies:


All are wrong. Some are useful.


It is not enough to merely have proxies for athleticism in place - we must go a step further, asking ourselves what they truly tell us. And even more importantly, what they don’t.


But in the defense of proxies, I think there is something else to blame. Because proxies, after all, are only as good as the thing they are trying to define.


And so, the real boogeyman isn’t our tests for athleticism, nor our desire to define it. No, it’s something else entirely:


The mistaken illusion we have that athleticism can be defined as a singular thing alone.

Shortcomings

Consider the fact that there is no universal combine when it comes to sports, and you will see what this means.


While there may be similarities across different ones - such as the NBA and NFL both testing vertical jumps - each combine stands largely on its own, a distinct combination of athletic proxies meant to be relevant only to the specific sport at hand. NHL players do not take batting practice in front of scouts, nor do NFL players participate in 3 point shooting contests at the NFL combine. Different athletes undergo different tests - and for good reason.


Intuitively, we understand why: no two combines are alike because no two sports are alike. The demands of a tennis match vastly differ from those of a soccer game, and thus so too do the skills needed by the individual athletes that play them.


Said differently: elite performance in one area does not guarantee success in another. Take basketball players, for example, who are incredibly athletic when it comes to the sport-specific demands of basketball, but more often than not incredibly un-athletic when it comes to the skill of baseball. As evidence, I present to you the following montage of NBA players throwing out first pitches at MLB games:

It follows that athleticism is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ concept - it is relative instead. To the sport within which we are trying to define it, and the individual feats of athletic skill that sport therefore requires.


An interesting extension of this insight it that it is true across sports, certainly, but also within them.


Consider the NFL, in which quarterbacks have very different positional demands - and thus skillsets - than running backs. To compare Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes to the likes of Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry on the basis of a singular definition of athleticism is a fool’s errand. Barkley and Henry far surpass the QBs in our traditional athletic proxies, but does that really tell us anything? All four are exceptional performers relative to their position groups - and in the end, that is what really matters.


My favorite example of this comes from close to home: the skill of hitting in baseball, when viewed across different position groups.


Take a look at the following chart, which details league average OPS, OBP, SLG, and Hard Hit rates for each position on the diamond:

Clearly, offensive ‘skill’ (or offensive athleticism) varies widely depending on the defensive position a player plays. Take the disparity between catchers and first baseman, for example: on average, backstops have a nearly 60 point lower OPS compared to their positional counterparts but 90 feet away. Does this mean that catchers are any less athletic when compared to first baseman? Of course not. All this tells us it that relative to the athletic skill of hitting as measured by the ‘proxy’ of OPS, first baseman tend to grade out a bit better.


Taking this example further, we can look at the breakdown by ‘part’ of the field - those that play in the middle of the diamond (ie catchers, second basemen, shortstops, and center fielders) versus those that play in the corners (first basemen, third basemen, left fielders, and right fielders):

The takeaway is clear: offensive skill tends to be a bit more prevalent in the corners of the field than it does up the middle. But again, these numbers don’t necessarily tell us which players are more ‘athletic’ than the others. Rather, the only reasonable conclusion is that different positions have different priorities. If you are going to play in a corner, you’d probably be best suited to have some athletic traits that map to offensive production. Conversely, up-the-middle players might be able to sacrifice some offensive athleticism as long as they supplement it in other ways.


And so again, we see the key truth about athleticism at play: it will always be relative to the demands of the sport-specific skill in which we are looking to assess it.


So why, when this is the case, would we be so naive as to think that we could ever find one catchall definition for athleticism?


If every sport - and every skill within it - has different requirements of its athletes, it stands to reason that athleticism must be viewed as a multi-dimensional concept rather than a singular trait.


And that requires an entirely different definition.

The Theory of Athletic Relativity

So to close, while I am skeptical about there being a singular definition of athleticism, I do think it is worthwhile to at least attempt to re-frame our pre-existing understanding of it by way of a more accommodating framework.


I’ll call it the Theory of Athletic Relativity, and we can define it as such:

The Theory of Athletic Relativity: Athleticism is only assessable according to the demands of the athletic task at hand.

The key underlying principle for this theory is that relativity is what makes athleticism unique, rather than a broad bucket of generalized proxies or tests. Because as we’ve seen, athleticism is only instructive so much as it informs us about an individual athlete's capacity to meet the specific physical demands of their chosen sports activity.


To truly assess athleticism accurately requires working backwards from the end: we must first ask ourselves what the athlete in question will be asked to do on the field of play. Only with this answer in hand can we orient ourselves in the proper direction and hone in on the specific athletic traits likely to lead to successful performance.


Too often, we operate in the reverse, defining amorphous athletic proxies that sound good in theory but have limited predicted power in practice. We then compound this initial mistake by letting these proxies lead us down the wrong path on the search of a universal definition of athletic ability, even when know that athletes come in all shapes and sizes.


In the modern era of sport, this fallacy of logic is particularly dangerous. As examples like P3’s assessments of Jokić and Doncic show us, we are getting increasingly better at quantifying - and thus assessing - the various components of the athletic stack. And yet while these advancements are undoubtedly positive when it comes to understanding how athletes operate, we still run the risk of making the same mistakes as we have for centuries if we are not properly mapping skills to demands. Because with increased precision comes increased confidence, regardless of whether we are focusing on the right things or not.


It follows that the best athletes might not be the best players, nor the best players the best athletes. At least when it comes to the traditional definition of athleticism.


So when it comes to athleticism, getting the right definition in place matters. We need one that allows for nuance and variability rather than one that forces us into overly simplistic categorizations, else we run the risk of misdiagnosing what makes the world’s athletes so special.


Athletic relativity is the necessary antidote, as it helps us avoid getting lost in an endless pursuit for universal athletic truths. Because in the end, athleticism isn’t about meeting some arbitrary standard - it’s about possessing the right combination of tools required to excel at the task at hand.


And that is something that is worth making sure we get right.

Hey everyone! 👋🏻


Hope you all have been doing well since we last spoke, and welcome back to another edition of The Gunn Show.


It’s been a busy past week+ as we are trying to get settled into our routine as parents of a (now) 11 day old, thus the mid-week send here. So in the spirit of asking for forgiveness, here is a picture of little-man in all his cuteness as my penance:

With Spring Training fast approaching and with it the 2025 MLB season, I’ve been spending some time recently reflecting on all of the systems we’ve been working to build over the past couple months. In somewhat appropriate timing, I came across one of my favorite pieces written by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham that got me thinking deeply about where systems work and where they don’t, specifically as it relates to one of Graham’s best ideas: doing things that don’t scale.


So today I thought I’d share my perspective on how I think about systems - what they are, what good ones look like, and where even the best ones fall short. Today’s roadmap:

• Thinking in Systems - A Definition

• Systems - An Equation of Idea Quality and Idea Scale

• Where Systems Fall Short - Things that Don’t Scale

• Personal Toolbox of Tactics
  
  

Let’s get to it.

- CG

Thinking in Systems


A quick look through my library will tell you that I’m attracted to the idea of principled - and thus systematic - thinking.


On the shelves in my office, you’ll find a number of books relating to the concept - ranging from ones with pointed, “system-centric” titles like “Thinking in Systems”, “Good Strategy Bad Strategy”, and “On Grand Strategy” (a personal favorite) to others with more adjacent monikers like “Principles” and “Willpower Doesn’t Work”. In fact, there are so many books in my library that touch on how to think about and build systems that you’d be excused for thinking the shelves are an ode to the concept itself.


From a broad perspective, “thinking in systems” is about understanding the interconnectedness and interdependencies within a given context. Whether in relation to sports teams, businesses, or society writ large, what thinking from a systematic perspective does is to create a mindset shift: rather than keying in on individual components, it encourages us to instead focus on the relationships, feedback loops, and flows of information between those components.


By centering on how things connect together on top of the pieces in isolation, we become more equipped to understand how actions we take not only influence specific areas of a system but also the system as a whole. And when we zoom out to see the forest created by the trees, a new host of solutions opens up - ones that help us shift from a reactive mode, in which we simply fix problems as they emerge, to a proactive one, in which we are building resilient and adaptable systems meant to embrace and adapt to the natural complexity they are sure to face.


Thinking in systems has powerful implications because life itself is merely one big system - and so too are all of the components that make it whole. Countries are systems of states, businesses systems of people and process, and on and on. To borrow and adapt an old turn of phrase, it’s systems all the way down.


And when we think through this lens, we find a solution to one of the world’s greatest questions: when things get bigger, how do we deal with the resulting challenges of scale?

Systems - A Balancing Act Between Idea Quality and Idea Scale

Systems by nature rely on information - the assumptions you make, the principles that underly them - and how that information ultimately comes together. As such, when it comes to implementing systems in my own life I ultimately see them as a balancing act between two competing variables relating to ideas: quality and scale.


Let’s define each as the following:

• Idea Quality - How ‘right’ or aligned with reality your ideas are. If there is a truth to be found about an idea, are your ideas about that truth close to the mark or far from it?
  

• Idea Scale - The processes you put in place in order to enact your ideas across a system. Good scale means having a neatly arranged combination of processes that allow your ideas to spread across your system.

When juxtaposed against each other, we can create the following visual that outlines the possible combinations:

Two of these quadrants (I = Good Ideas with Good Scale; III = Poor Ideas with Poor Scale) are self-explanatory. When you have good ideas properly scaled, good things tend to happen. And similar in the opposite case - bad ideas combined with bad scale is not likely to be a recipe for success, whether you are starting a business or running a sports team.


But what about the non-obvious cases, where there is a mismatch between quality of ideas and scale? As always, these gray areas are where things are most interesting.


First, on Quadrant II - good ideas but poor scale. I think of this as the “opportunity zone”, as in these cases you already have the hardest part in place - the quality of the idea. You may be leaving some execution on the table, but your compass is at least pointing in the right direction. All that is missing is the right processes to enact those ideas at scale - with a few small tweaks to get those right, you are well on your way to creating a goldilocks system. All things considered, this isn’t a bad place to start out.


But Quadrant IV - bad ideas with good scale - is a different story, the part of the graph I think of as the “danger zone”. Here you have good processes in place to systematize your ideas and let them take flight, but the ideas themselves are far off base from truth. Your actions may be efficient, but your direction is off. The result of a highly ‘optimized’ system construction is that you go very far but towards the wrong destination. Bad ideas with good processes create major problems, so much so that you’d best suited to go back to the drawing board and get the ideas right from the start.


From these two cases, we see that when it comes to systems an order of operations exists: get the ideas right first, and then figure out how to scale them with processes second.


A system is only as good as the underlying assumptions it makes, meaning that good ideas are a requisite for good systems. Get them right and everything else is more likely to fall into place. Skip steps at your peril - put the cart before the horse and you won’t find yourself with a recipe for success’ you’ll have one for disaster instead.


But regardless when it comes to systems, the goal is clear: we want to have our cake and eat it too - we want good ideas, properly scaled. Accurate principles that are then reinforced over and over again with quality processes at every layer of the stack. Optimize both variables in the right direction and good outcomes will be increasingly likely.


But unfortunately while optimized systems certainly do make good outcomes likely, they do not make them inevitable as a result of a simple truth: perfect systems are a myth because there are some things that do not scale.


And when this is the case, you need a different approach to fill in the cracks.

Where Systems Fall Short - Things That Don’t Scale


Speaking from experience, one of the enticing things about building systems is that they are “outsourcing machines” - rather than needing to micro-manage every single action, you can instead design a system that handles the bulk of them for you. With the right processes in place, things tend to get taken care of naturally without you having to be there. It follows that the ROI of systems is more than just outcomes - it’s the energy you have with the right ones in place to do other things.


But there is a bit of an illusion at play here because while systems are great, even the best one will have holes that need to be patched. You can’t design a system for every possible contingency or every executable action, meaning that there will inevitably be times where you have to do things yourself.


Venture capitalist and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham calls this concept doing things that don’t scale.


In his piece of the same name, Graham introduced the phrase as a response to a common misperception he has seen in startup founders: too often, founders think startups succeed solely as a function of their ideas and the processes that systematize it. As he writes:

“A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist.”

But according to Graham, this perspective isn’t exactly accurate. In his eyes, most startups don’t succeed simply because they had a better idea, or a better system. Instead, the best ones take off because the founders make them take off. Founders build the system, sure, but in Graham’s eyes that’s not enough - in the same way that a fire needs a spark to light its kindling and logs, so too do startups rely on a heavy amount of pushing to get them going.


Frequently, that initial spark is a function of effort. Or as Graham says, doing thing that don’t scale - taking a hands on, personal approach to address the gaps that systems cannot handle alone. Actions like working hard to build a network, being relentless in asking users for feedback on your product, or stepping in to problem solve yourself when processes simply aren’t cutting it.


These types of actions stand in contrast to things that do scale - like software, automation, or mass production - in that they cannot be replicated without losing what makes them special in the first place. The human touch that makes your systems, well, a little more human.


Some things can’t and shouldn’t be automated - and that is unequivocally a good thing. Because when it comes to doing things that don’t scale, it is the relative scarcity of those actions that gives them their power.


People - whether colleagues, employees, or customers - intuitively know that time is necessarily limited, meaning that they know it isn’t possible (or advisable) to spend all day focusing on things that don’t scale. You can’t spend all day crafting hand-written thank you cards or automate building a network with low-effort spam (seriously, check the cesspool of your Linked In inbox if you think you can).


The result is a greater appreciation when you actually do, especially when they find themselves at the center of that action. It is the recognition that you don’t have time to do that action for everyone that because it doesn’t scale that ultimately carries weight. Because you chose to do it for them anyways.


People are biologically hard-wired to appreciate things that require effort; to appreciate doing things that don’t scale. Outsourcing everything to a system spits in the face of this truth - if you only focus on the things that do scale, you are bound to miss the value of the things that don’t. Whether in business or in life.


And, as I’ve learned, the same is true of sports.

Personal Toolbox of Things That Don’t Scale


Most of my experiences in the world of sports have been heavily tied to the concept of building systems. With the scale at which the player development space operates in Major League Baseball, having good systems and process in place is a necessity.


But as I’ve shared above, I’ve learned over time that even when building what you think is an optimized system there will be holes to patch. Perfect systems are a myth, and a personalized touch will always be required.


And so to close, I thought I would share a small running list I’ve been building of things I’ve found to carry immense value that don’t scale. These are a few some of my favorite things I try to keep in my toolbox for the right moment in the season, whether that be for our players or our coaches. And it is my belief that many of these apply as equally to broader aspects of life as they do to sports themselves:

• Coffee - Many of the deepest and most fulfilling conversations I have experienced have come from an hour long sit down at a coffee-shop. A $5 cup of Joe and the connection it leads to is a remarkably effective thing that doesn’t scale (a sit-down for a cold evening beverage works wonders here as well).

• Hand-Written Thank You Cards - The digital age hasn’t eroded the power of the written word; it has amplified it instead. When a text is so easy to send that everyone can do it, putting pen to paper in order to give someone their roses is a powerful way to stand out above the rest.

• “I See You” Texts - The season moves fast and there our countless things to keep track of across a system of hundreds of players and coaches. In an environment like this, it is easy for those in the midst of it to feel like they are just lost in the shuffle, a small cog in the machine. Simple texts when a small but important accomplishment is made goes a long way in making someone feel like they play a big part in the broader whole.

• 1 on 1 Coaching/Film Sessions - If you’ve ever been in a position where you’ve worked with players, you’ll know that the most-powerful breakthroughs are often on the other side of a long, gritty, raw, and highly personalized training session. So much so that it’s one of the things that I hear the most from coaches - “I wish I had more time for those 1 on 1 connection opportunities”.

• Life Follow-Ups - Every time we meet someone, we share a lot about ourselves to get to know each other - where we are from, what our hobbies are, pets, kids, spouses, and on and on. But more frequently than not these types of little details go in one ear and out the other. Dale Carnegie once said that “a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest sound in any language”. That idea extends to more than just names - remembering the small details about someone’s life and asking targeted follow ups at the right time goes a long way in making them feel valued. As we say in Texas, get to know the person - not just the performer.
  
  

Hopefully this list serves as a starting point to get you thinking about the small yet powerful actions you can take that can’t be automated away.


Systems are great, to be sure - so try your best to create things that scale. But let this be a call not to neglect the things that don’t along the way.

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Hey everyone! 👋🏻


Happy Sunday, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.


It was about as good of one as we could’ve hoped for on our end, as Baby Grayson made his long-awaited appearance last evening to make our family a party of 3. 6lbs, 4 oz of complete and total perfection. Mom and little G are doing well, and we are beyond excited to move into this next phase of life with him!

It’s been a chaotic and fulfilling experience, and as such today’s edition will be a little bit shorter and less fleshed out than usual. Forgive me, but these are thoughts from the hospital after all…


But after hearing from so many people from different walks of our lives over the last 24 hours, I had a few thoughts I wanted to share on concepts of support and community, specifically as it relates to each of us finding our Village.


Let’s jump in.


- CG

The Village

One of my close co-workers here with the Rangers has an old proverb he is fond of reciting: “It takes a village”.


It’s a relatively simple phrase with which I’d guess most of us are familiar - perhaps a bit ‘cliche’ yet nevertheless one I’ve always enjoyed. Because each time I hear it, I can’t help but be struck by how powerful of an insight those 4 short words contain: an insight that speaks to life’s accomplishments, but even more importantly to the necessity of support in reaching them.


A life in sports teaches you pretty quickly about what a village looks like, through the lens of something we call a team: a collection of individuals from different backgrounds and with different experiences, coming together in service of a common vision. Said differently: many, joining to become one.


The longer you are around competitive athletics, the more you come to appreciate the value of a Village. This is because of a deep truth about great moments of success on the field - they are never achieved in isolation. Instead, achievement in the world of sport is always the result of countless contributions from a wide array of people and systems working together.


It is easy to see this idea reflected in team centric sports, where each group is composed of a myriad of players and coaches from unique walks of life. Shifting from single-player to multi-player competition places an increased premium on coordination, and the teams that harness it best tend to reap the lions share of the rewards.


Think about some of the greatest dynasties in the history of sport and you will see that this is true - Saban’s Crimson Tide, Popovich’s Spurs, and Wooden’s Bruins to name a few. While each had great players and great coaches, their hallmark trait was what they did together rather than in isolation. Great runs of success that were defined by their ability to create their own distinct ‘Villages’ in which the power of the collective outweighed that of the individual.


And yet while we don’t often think of athletes competing in individual sports this way, the same concept applies. We tend to romanticize the power of the individual when it comes to single-player sports life golf or tennis, but this line of thinking is naive. Because behind every Masters winner and US Open champion is a slew of people standing behind them - trainers, coaches, nutritionists, publicists and the like. Each has their own Village that they fall back on, whether we see it on the television screen or not.


It follows that regardless of if the name on a leaderboard is a person or a program, sports are always a multi-player game. And villages thus are a defining factor behind success within them.


It should come as no surprise that the phrase “it takes a village” applies just as equally for life itself as it does to sports.


There is a quote from Isaac Newton that I am fond of. In talking about how humans make progress as a species, he said the following: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. And while he was talking about scientific innovation specifically, I think the core of that quote speaks to what it means to have a Village for each of us.


See, each of us stands on the shoulders of others every day of our lives. In the same way that athletes need people behind them to bring out their best selves, we too need a support system that lifts us to new heights. Friends, family, co-workers and more that help us be something more together than we could be alone. Every one of us needs our own Village.


What that Village looks like will differ from person to person, with each distinct and evolving over time.


We start life with a pre-scripted Village for each of us, an environment into which we are born that serves as our starting foundation. But is a mistake to think that birth is destiny.


The beauty of life is such that as we progress through it, navigating the challenges and experiences that come our way, we are presented with countless opportunities to shape our Villages. New people will immigrate in, old ones will emigrate out. And since the inhabitants will always determine the Village, the structure of each is certain to change along with the people inside it.


Each of us has our closest confidants, the people on whose shoulders which we stand. And yet while I think it is easiest to define this group - and thus each of our Villages - in the singular, I think there is something missing in this viewpoint alone.


That is the following: Villages are not defined so much by their singularity as they are their plurality. Because while each of us ultimately has one that we will call home, there are in fact many others that intersect with it depending on the seasons of life.


We may live at a certain address, but there are many adjacent ones within the same zip code. The teams we play on, the colleges we attend, the cities we move in and out of - each a unique Village with something to provide. And the more we frequent them, the more we come to redefine our own. New experiences lead to new connections, new friends and a subsequent intertwining of our Village with theirs.

Our Villages thus do not exist in isolation so much as they do at an intersection. Between me and you, us and them. And that is what makes them spectacularly beautiful. Because life is about connection - between ideas, experiences, countries and more. But connections between people, most of all.


And so as I sit here and reflect on the past 24 hours, I can only say that I am grateful for the Village that we have. It is moments like these where the power of a Village is felt most of all - through texts and phone calls, well wishes and prayers. We stand on the shoulders of giants, after all. And each of you has played a part.


Our Village gained a new inhabitant today, and I can’t wait for him to go out and build his own.

P.S. - If you are looking for some deeper reading and missed last week’s edition, I’d encourage you to go give Athletic Antifragility a read.


It’s about the value of stress in sports and how challenges serve as a necessary impetus for growth - a particular relevant topic for those of you looking forward to the CFB National Championship between Notre Dame and Ohio State tomorrow night!

Hey Everyone! 👋🏻


Happy Sunday, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.


It was a frigid and white one on our end, as we found ourselves in the midst of our biannual winter storm that turns the DFW metroplex into “Dallaska”. It was a great opportunity to spend some time in the snow together as a family (Luna is unsurprisingly a big fan), on top of getting to tune into some playoff football at both the NCAA and NFL levels.


After two great college football playoff semifinals, I found myself thinking about the journey that the two teams set to face off for the title - Notre Dame & Ohio State - took in order to get there. And in doing so, I couldn’t help but notice that there is a underlying similarity between their paths to Atlanta: brutal losses to inferior teams (Notre Dame at home to NIU, Ohio State at home to Michigan) that served as a catalyst for something more.


Zooming out, I think their stories are representative of a broader trend in sports: stressful moments experienced by teams and players that create a crossroads at which they are forced to adapt or crumble. And so for this week’s edition, I wanted to dive into the underlying mechanism behind why I think this happens in sport - through the lens of one of life’s fundamental principles:


Antifragility.


So let’s get to it. Hope you enjoy, and look forward to hearing any thoughts or comments.


- CG

“Wind extinguishes the candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, and chaos; you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.” - Nassim Taleb, Antifragile

Sport moments, like life, tend to adhere to the guiding principle of power laws: there are but a select few capable of standing out against the backdrop of the many. For while the history of competitive athletics is littered with countless games and performances, the lore of sport is such that only a small handful of them come to dominate our attention and endure in our minds throughout time.


As individuals, each of us erects our own pantheon of memories; monuments that house our favorite sports recollections, ones that speak to our inclinations towards teams, athletes, and the like. I’m sure that as you read this a number jump to the forefront of your mind, in the same way that they do for me (Tennessee’s 2004 victory over Florida on a last-second field goal is first up on my end, in case you were wondering).


And the same is true when it comes to our collective attention. Just as there are feats in sport history that strike a chord with specific people, there are also ones that manage to capture the attention of groups of them. Moments that form the foundation for how we attach to and talk about sport as a society, threads that weave together to form the canvas of sport as we know it.


But what leads to this phenomenon? What qualities distinguish the ones that rise above the rest?


A basket of them, to be sure.


High stakes and the thrill of drama certainly play their part. An air of improbability, an essence of unexpectedness too. Iconic matchups and rivalries, innovative plays, never before seen performances. The list is long and the more qualities a specific moment or game combines, the likelier it is to etch itself into fame.


And yet there is a fundamental characteristic of sport that stands out above the rest: adversity. Moments that test athletes and teams in ways that extend beyond raw skill or preparation; times where challenges reveal the underlying character and resilience of a competitor. And in doing so provide a lens into a powerful - yet often missed - lesson about the nature of sport.


Consider the following examples from sports history:

• June 11th, 1997 - Michael Jordan scores 38 points while sick with the flu to take down the Utah Jazz in a pivotal Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
  

• October 20th, 2004 - The Boston Red Sox defeat the New York Yankees 10-3 in Game 7 of the ALCS, becoming the first (and only) team in MLB history to rally from a 3-0 deficit to win a best of 7 series.
  

• February 4th, 2018 - The Philadelphia Eagles defeat Tom Brady and the New England Patriots 41-33 in Super Bowl LII to cap an improbable championship run behind backup QB Nick Foles.

Three pivotal moments etched into the pantheon of sports lore, each sharing a core underlying theme that transcends the decisive moment of victory and speaks instead to the process of achieving it. Three case studies in odds faced and ultimately surmounted. Three lessons on the value of adversity. On the value of stress. And ultimately about what can emerge on the other side of it.


Each of these moments are bound together by a common thread. Whether Jordan fighting his biology to give us greatness, the Red Sox spitting in the face of probability, or the Eagles banding together to overcome the loss of a star quarterback - the moral of the story is one and the same:


Stress is a necessary catalyst for greatness.


And as such, it is not something to be mitigated so much as it is a mechanism to be harnessed.


Because what great moments teach us about athletes and teams is that they are not candles extinguished by the slightest breeze; they are instead fires that sit and wish for the wind. People that lean into adversity, embracing chaos and uncertainty to catapult themselves to new heights they would be incapable of reaching without them.


Sporting greatness, thus, is a lesson in antifragility: a characteristic trait of the world’s systems that grow stronger when exposed to stress.


This is that story.

Taleb

Coined by the philosopher-economist Nassim Taleb, antifragile is a term that refers to how certain systems - and thus the individuals within them - exhibit a unique response to stress: rather than shrinking in the face of it, antifragile systems use adversity to grow stronger and thrive in the process.


Antifragile systems stand in contrast to two other types of systems, which Taleb details in his book of the same name: fragile systems, in which stress or disorder impair the system and cause it to break down; and robust systems, in which stress does not harm the system but nor does it drive it forward.


To contextualize the distinction between the three system responses to volatility and chaos, he provides the following analogies from the ancient mythology:

• Damocles (Fragile) - Borrowed from the Roman myth in which Damocles, a courtier to the Sicilian ruler Dionysius II, is allowed to enjoy a luxurious banquet, albeit with a catch: a sword hangs above his head while he dines, tied to the ceiling with but a single thread of horse hair. With enough pressure from gravity over time, the thread of hair is certain to break - meaning that Damocles finds himself in the midst of a short-term enjoyable yet long-term fragile conundrum.
  

• Phoenix (Robust) - The ‘bird of splendid colors’ that is reborn from its ashes whenever it is destroyed. A representation of a system that neither fails nor improves, but rather always returns to its initial state.
  

• Hydra (Antifragile) - The fabled multi-headed monster dwelling in Greece’s lake of Lerna, with a peculiar trait: cut off one head, and two grow back in its place. The Hydra, as Hercules found out, loves to be harmed. And as such, like all antifragile systems, it is inevitably hard to kill.

What this triad teaches us is that when it comes to our daily lives, we’d rather be more akin to Hydra than Damocles.


When the only certainty of life is in fact uncertainty, is it is imperative that we learn to adapt to chaos and the resulting stress rather than hiding from it. In striving to become antifragile, we can live a life in which exposure strengthens rather than weakens, one where challenge leads to adaptation and opportunistic responses to disorder turn chaos into growth.


Everywhere we look, antifragility is at play. It serves as an underpinning for many of the world’s most powerful phenomena, extending equally across domains such as biology (eg: growing stronger muscles by first breaking them down) and business (eg: the restaurant industry succeeds as result of individual restaurants failing).


And sports are no exception.

Sports: A Microcosm of Antifragility

The landscape of sport creates an environment that is ripe for antifragility. So much so that I believe it is the fundamental trait that competitive athletics reward above all else.


Why? Think about it: sports, like history, may rhyme - but they never repeat.


Competitive athletics are an inherently complex environments, one where the context of each moment changes from one to the next. The ball never bounces the same way, the players are never in the same place. From season to season, game to game, and play to play, no two points in time are ever the same.


The result is a landscape in which volatility, chaos, and uncertainty are ever-present. And so too is the resulting stress that each of these characteristics leads to. Coaches, players, and teams do not have the luxury of a complete blueprint for each situation that they may face. Rather than planning perfectly for every eventuality, they must instead be adept at responding on the fly. In any given moment, they must try to find the best possible combination of strategies for what the moment requires - with the recognition that perfect conditions, and thus perfect responses, are a mirage.


Jordan didn’t know at the start of the ‘96-’97 season that he would be playing Game 5 of the finals with the flu. Likewise, the ‘04 Red Sox didn’t know they would be down 3-0 in the ALCS until they were. And I can promise you that when the ‘17 Eagles were bulldozing through the NFC on the back of MVP candidate Carson Wentz, they had no expectations that their playoff Super Bowl run would in fact be led by their backup quarterback.


And yet, each found their way to greatness. As in countless other moments throughout the history of sport, adversity and uncertainty led to something special on the other-side. Chaotic moments forced players and teams to rally around stress and become something more. Antifragility, in action.


So much so that it is worth asking if that stress was the necessary ingredient that made those moments possible in the first place. Does Jordan score 38 in Game 5 if he is fully rested? Do the Red Sox win the ‘04 title if they had swept the ALCS instead?


It is tough to say - revisionist history is a tricky thing, after all. But it is not a stretch to imagine a different outcomes in each of these cases should the initial conditions have been a bit less challenging. Because sometimes in order to find your best, you need something that draws it out of you.


Since a positive response to stress serves as a hallmark of antifragility, it follows that an absence of it prevents systems - and thus players and teams - from becoming the best versions of themselves. Take it from Taleb, who said the following in describing how a lack of stressors affects antifragile systems:

“Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die, or blow up.”

In this we see an explanation for how superior talent can play down to the level of inferior competition - not enough stress. And similarly, why certain teams and players need a catalyst to ‘wake up’ or ‘rally around’ - whether that be an illness, a bad break, the loss of a star player, or insurmountable odds.


A certain level of stress in sport is thus not only a certainty but also a necessity. In order to achieve greatness in athletics, it is not enough to merely recognize the presence of challenges - you must welcome them at the same time, leaning into them for all the growth they are capable of inducing. Whether as an athlete or as a team - you must be Hydra and not Damocles.


Good teams and players may win in spite of stress. But the great ones win because of it.

Creating Anti-Fragile Athletes and Teams

Taleb wrote that antifragility has a singular property: “it allows us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them.”


In this quote lies the perfect link between the concept of antifragility and sports, because at the end of the day sports are about instinctive reactions to the unknown. And when no-one knows for certain what will come their way, the ones capable of harnessing uncertainty the best will inevitably stand the tallest.


So it goes without saying that teams and athletes benefit the more antifragile they become. But how do they get there? A few principles can help:


First, embrace exposure to stress. At the heart of anti-fragility is the idea that exposure to manageable challenges leads to adaptation and growth. Make your training as tough as possible. Simulate pressure situations. Play in hostile environments. Seek out opportunities against the toughest opponents. The more you expose yourself to stress, the friendlier you become with it.


Second, iterate and adapt. Antifragility isn’t built over night but rather via small, incremental failures over time. Through constant bouts of appropriate stress that allow us the opportunity to calibrate and adapt. Note that the word appropriate is key here: while critical to embrace the upside that challenge can provide, we must be wary of taking it too far. Or as Taleb says, “we must avoid the risk of ruin at all cost.” So find a balance. In the same way you start lifting light weights in the gym and increase over time, making your training progressive as well. Allow your athletes to fail in controlled, low-pressure environments so they can experiment without fear of major consequences. Micro-dose adaptability in practice and it can’t help but show up come game time.


Third, develop optionality and flexibility. In both life and sports, the more avenues you have through which to succeed, the better equipped you will be to handle uncertainty and adversity. Teams with versatile rosters can more easily plug holes that emerge from injuries. Players with diverse skillsets can adapt when their primary strengths are neutralized. So work to build mastery of a skill, certainly - but make sure that you adding more than just one to your tool belt. More optionality, more antifragility.


And lastly, make sure everyone is putting real skin in the game. From coaches, to players, to support staff and beyond. It’s not enough to sit on the sidelines. To become truly antifragile - both as individuals and as a unit - you have to get into the arena. What that looks will differ for everyone depending on roles and responsibilities, but everyone should have a level of accountability for how their preparation and performance drives outcomes. Growth is downstream of ownership - of our successes, but especially our failures. And the more accountable we hold ourselves to realizing outcomes agnostic of circumstances, the stronger we become.

Go Forth & Be Antifragile

And so to close, we see that sports exemplify antifragility in its purest form.


In the end, the greatest athletes and teams understand that adversity isn’t just an obstacle to be overcome - it’s the very catalyst that enables them to achieve the extraordinary. They recognize that like the Hyrda of ancient mythology, stress exists in order for us to grow stronger from it.


For in sports, as in life, the path to becoming truly exceptional isn’t about being unbreakable - it’s about growing stronger with every challenge faced. The most memorable moments in sports history serve as a testament to this truth: it’s not just about surviving the storm, but learning to thrive within it.


About being the fire, and wishing for the wind.

Hey everyone! 👋🏻


Happy first Sunday of yet another New Year, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. I hope each of you had a fantastic holiday season spent celebrating with friends and family and are looking forward to all of the special things ahead in 2025.


It was a busy yet fulfilling one on our end as we hosted our first Christmas at the new house here in Texas. After a great couple of weeks spending time together as a family, we are refreshed and recharged for the exciting journey to come - which is set to kick off this month with the arrival of our little one. We are patiently awaiting the day when Grayson decides he is ready to join our family and can’t wait to share the journey alongside you all.


And so, after a brief period of relaxation, it’s time to get back on schedule with the newsletter.


While the holiday season presented us with the opportunity for connection, it also gave me space for something else: reflection. As such, I’ve been spending the past couple weeks looking back on year 1 of this publication and wanted to kick off 2025 by sharing some thoughts on the path taken to this point, and even more importantly, the direction in which The Gunn Show will be heading for the foreseeable future.


After embarking on a project that was once but a vague outline of an idea, I believe iteration has finally helped me reach a point of clarity on what I want this newsletter to be about. That vision had already begun shaping more recent editions of the publication, but even so I realize it is time to step back and clearly outline the core philosophy behind my writing - and ultimately, my life.


So let’s get to it. Time to start the New Year off with a bang. This is the 2025+ vision for The Gunn Show.


Hope you all enjoy, and looking forward to sharing what is to come with each of you.


- CG

Intersections: The 2025+ GunnShow Thesis

Past


Let’s start with a confession: when I first started The Gunn Show back in January of last year, I had absolutely no idea what in the hell I was doing.


It was a new experiment on two fronts: first in putting my ideas to paper, and second in sharing them on a public forum. I didn’t exactly know what I wanted it to look like, but I did know one thing - that I wanted to get started.


At the onset, my rationale for the newsletter was selfish - I’d noticed a consistent theme cropping up in my life, a problem I was in need of solving. After a period of deep reflection, I had come to the realization that I was losing the battle for my attention. That I was letting apps and algorithms control my focus, and ultimately, my thoughts. And in the process, I felt like I was losing a piece of myself that I desperately wanted to get back.


My first post, Philosophy of Focus, was a direct commentary on this problem and attempted first step in rectifying it. In it, I shared the following quote to contextualize the place I found myself at in that point in time:

“For the past few years, I’ve been on the journey to regain control over my attention. Searching for strategies to fight back against the information waging war on my mind.”

My hope was that The Gunn Show would serve as a Forcing Function to reclaim what I felt like I’d lost. By putting pen to paper and finger to keyboard, I felt I could create a weekly antidote that would help me shift from consumption to creation, allowing me take back control of my mind in the process.


To start, I wanted to ensure I made it as easy as possible to build the habit of writing. I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew and sabotage my goals too early, so I devised an easily replicable format that turned into the ‘What I Read This Week’ series in which I simply shared summaries of the most insightful pieces of content I’d come across in the week prior. My thought at the time was that by forcing myself to shift through and pick out the best of what I’d been consuming, I’d start to develop a better filter for my attention - and provide you all with some valuable information in the process.


And in the beginning, it worked.


From January to July, I published close to 20 editions of What I Read This Week while carving out time for some more in depth thought pieces like Intellectual Dividends and Simple is No Guarantee of Beautiful. By the midpoint of the year I had already hit my goal for published newsletters and felt confident that I’d established a writing habit that was I enjoying.


But while it was a good start, I couldn’t help but feeling like there something was missing.

Present


As I was thinking about this Substack at the midpoint of the year, I found two things to be true.


First, I’d accomplished what I set out to at the start of the year: start a publication, share some ideas on a weekly cadence, and publish them for others to see. Come July, I’d taken a previously non-existent habit from zero to one while having fun in the process.


But second, I felt it was starting to grow a little stale. I couldn’t help but thinking that I was mostly regurgitating the thoughts of others rather than exploring ones of my own. And while this strategy had been effective in overcoming the necessary activation energy to start a writing project, in order for it to truly serve the function I hoped the newsletter had to evolve.


Looking back, I think what I uncovered over those first few months was a fundamental truth about writing and creativity: sometimes you just have to put things in motion before you can calibrate your bearings.


It took me a bit to realize this, because it ran somewhat counter to a pre-existing belief I had. I’d long operated from the standpoint that direction supersedes action - if you find yourself wanting to go to New York City from Dallas but start heading towards Los Angeles, it doesn’t matter if you are traveling at the speed of light; you are simply moving fast in the wrong direction.


But this writing experience has taught me something different: while direction is undoubtedly key, starting a new venture often means that you have no idea where it is you want to go in the first place. And in order to figure it out, you need to get moving first. Life is often a constant process of recalibration, of moving the compass around and watching how it shifts to point you towards True North. So while direction may be the determinant of things in the long run, action is often highly informative to direction at the outset.


In the case of the newsletter, action simply looked like putting words on a page. And as I’ve done that over time, the result has been a more finely calibrated compass that points me towards the things I like to write about. The ideas that spark my curiosity, the pieces that get me excited to get out of bed at 5AM and head to the keyboard.


If you’ve been following along, you’ve probably started to pick up on what those look like: sports.


My life has orbited around them for as long as I can remember - I’ve been an athlete from the time I could walk, a fan from the time I could watch. Fast forward to today and it’s only natural that sports form the foundation for what I do every day for my profession.


So naturally, my writing compass slowly started to orient back to what has been my True North all along. For the second half of the year, The Gunn Show has mostly been an exploration of key ideas from the world of sport, leading to pieces like The Sports Singularity, Athletic Excellence, and Rise of The Generalist Athlete. And it’s exactly that idea that I’ll be doubling down on in 2025 and beyond.


But with a bit of a twist.

Future (Intersections)


Now before I explain where we are heading, let’s address the elephant in the room (it’s big, pink, and standing over there in the corner).


Some of you are reading this because you are close friends or family and want to offer your support - and for that I am truly grateful, more than you know. But for those of you I don’t know that have stumbled upon The Gunn Show, you may be thinking the following: “Aren’t there already thousands of writers covering the world of sports at big publications? Don’t they have journalism and broadcasting degrees, years of experience that allow them to do this at a high level? What makes this newsletter any different, or any better?”


Let me explain.


From my lens, there are two differences in perspective that will make this publication different from the normal sports centric newsletter.


The first is somewhat small: I believe that much of the sports centric content in the world operates from an outside-in viewpoint rather than an inside-out one, and that the distinction is important.


What outside-in means is that the perspective comes from a distance. Decisions and happenings are covered rather than made, such that a combination of surface-level metrics, game outcomes, public statements and external observations are the building blocks with which to craft a story. Outside-in content takes a big picture perspective and weaves them into digestible narratives for mass consumption, a critical piece in the sport landscape from which many of us - myself included - gain insight and understanding. It is the what, much more so than the why.


Inside-out coverage, however, stands in contrast. Where outside-in stems from a necessary amount of removal from the day-to-day environment, inside-out necessitates being fully embedded in it. These types of perspectives stem from ‘living in the arena’ - bearing full responsibility for influencing and making decisions, rather than simply observing them. Inside-out sees the why that underlies the what, as it is in the doing of things where understanding truly lies.


And it is exactly this viewpoint that I bring to the table. So, while a healthy balance between both is key, I hope that my experiences behind the scenes can be informative in providing a slightly more nuanced - and thus balanced - commentary on the world of sports.


Which brings us to the second point of differentiation, the twist I believe will be the key evolution for The Gunn Show in 2025 and beyond: rather than talking about sports as a separate entity of life, I want to explore them as a critical subset of it.


I think the way we talk about sports today frequently misses the boat. Too often we treat them as if they are an isolated part of the world, a separate entity from everyday life that operates by different rules. They are merely entertainment, ‘just a game’ as the saying goes - whether for the athletes that play them, the coaches that coach them, or the fans that watch them.


I could not disagree more.


Sports aren’t just a game. At least not to me, and I’m guessing many of you feel the same. To fall in line with this reductionist viewpoint means to be dismissive of the deep significance the institution of sport has carried in society for thousands of years; to ignore the power of the attraction that people feel towards the ethos of competitive athletics.


Because the truth is this: we aren’t drawn to sports because they are a distraction. We are drawn to them because they are an extension; an extension of life itself.


Sports are life, or at least a major subsection of it. They don’t exist in a different realm so much as they live within the same world each of us inhabits. They are an integrated thread in the fabric of life, a critical patch in the blanket of our experiences. And since they exist within life, that means that they must be reflective of it.


What does this mean? Simply the following: that sports operate according to many of the same fundamental principles that govern our daily lives. The rules of sport aren’t different from the ones we already know, like we are often led to believe. Instead, they are frequently one and the same. Put simply, sports are the lessons of life put on display in the arena of competition.


As I reflect on my own experiences, I’ve come to view my own life as an exploration of this idea. Because while sport has been a constant for me, it would be disingenuous for me to say that it is my singular focus. My interests vary far outside of them, spanning domains of life such as mathematics, science, philosophy, and psychology. I’m probably the rare sports professional that enjoys studying Tversky and Taleb just as much - if not more - as I do Saban and Smart.


And because I view sports as a canvas integrated with that of life itself, they do not constrain my interests so much as they amplify them. It is for this reason that I’ve never viewed my work in baseball as a ‘job’ - in contrast, I’ve always thought about it as an exploration of the fundamental principles of life applied to a game oriented around a white leather ball with 216 red stitches. It’s a space in which I have equal opportunity to integrate my love for math, science, and the human condition - all through the lens of competitive athletics.


Said differently, my work is an exercise in finding the intersection points between life and sport; in finding the time-tested principles around which the world operates and figuring out when and where those apply within the domain of athletics. It is this idea that gets me out of bed in the morning and keeps my gas tank full.


And so at this point, there are many of you who have read nearly 50 editions of The Gunn Show and seen the following cover image just as many times:

But I now realize that I’ve never explained where it comes from. At its core, this visualization is the representation for how I think about the world of sports - it is the nexus of sport and the world itself, the intersection between the two rather than either insolation.

And so that, in one sentence, is exactly what The Gunn Show will be focusing on moving forward: the time tested principles of life, applied to sport itself.


I’m excited to explore them moving forward, and hope you are as well.


Let’s have a year.

Hey Everyone! 👋🏻


Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.


In keeping with the theme of big milestones in the Gunn family of late, we had another very special one on our hands this weekend - Brooklyn’s birthday! It was an especially sentimental one this year as we are getting increasingly close to the due date for our little one, making Sunday the last time we were celebrating her as a party of two. In a season of life that has been increasingly about looking forward to what is to come, it was a great opportunity to step back and be appreciative of what we have in the here and now. There’s no other person I’d rather be walking into this next phase of life with and I know I speak for many of you when I say that I hope this was the best birthday yet. Cheers to you, Brooklyn, today and always.

Now, on to today’s topic.


While the rest of the college football world took a brief on-field pause this weekend in advance of the upcoming playoffs, Saturday night marked the official ceremony for the 2024 Heisman Trophy Award at the Lincoln Center in New York City. In what turned out to be a two-man race, Colorodo’s two-way star Travis Hunter edged out Boise State’s dynamic running back Ashton Jenty to become the second Buffalo to take home the award in school history. If you haven’t gotten a chance to watch his acceptance speech, I’d highly recommend it - I found it to be a great example of the value in remembering the people that stand behind you in the dark so that you can shine in the light.


As college football’s premier award, the Heisman naturally leads to spirited debate on a yearly cadence as to who is most deserving of taking home the coveted trophy. And while this year’s race was no different in this respect, I couldn’t help but see a conceptual underpinning to the discussion that differed starkly from any we’ve seen before. Because while this year’s Heisman ceremony crowned the “best player in college football” just as it has in all 89 years prior, Hunter winning the trophy represented something entirely unique:


For the first time since I can remember, the Heisman Trophy didn’t go to college football’s best specialist - it was given to its best generalist instead.


And in that decision, I believe, lies a powerful lesson for both sports and life.


Let’s talk about why.

- CG

Rise of the Generalist Athlete

Deep into the midst of MLB Winter Meetings this week, I found myself in the middle of a discussion with some co-workers about which of the four finalists we thought would take home the Heisman (yes - we may have been a little off topic in light of the week’s events, but sometimes you just need to talk a little college football…).


Like most, our group had come to the conclusion that either Hunter or Jeanty would be awarded the trophy come Saturday night. But we had some differences in opinion - while all each of us thought that Hunter would ultimately be crowned by the voters, a couple of us thought that Jeanty was actually the most deserving. Myself included - at least at the time.


The crux of the argument for Jeanty over Hunter was the following: while Hunter was surely doing something we’d never seen in college football in playing at a high level as both a wide receiver and a cornerback, he couldn’t claim to be the best at either of those positions in the same way that Jeanty could as a running back. Where Hunter was a ‘jack of all trades’, Jeanty represented the opposite - as college football’s leader in rushing yards, yards per carry, and rushing touchdowns, he is without a doubt a ‘master of one’ (if you disagree and would like to cite “quality of competition”, I’d encourage you to go watch the tape).


The conversation ended harmlessly (none of us have Heisman ballots, after all), but as I left and reflected back on the debate I started to re-shape my perspective. Namely, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been talking out of both sides of my mouth when it came to the concepts that I believe each player represented - generalism (in the form of Hunter) vs. specialism (in the form of Jeanty).


I’ve been on record before as to the power I see in taking a generalized approach to life, a perspective I’ve shared before in articles like Talent Stacks and Unicorns. So much so that I even wrote the following in Unicorns:

To become a unicorn means opening yourself up to a world of possibilities, as the more skills you can combine in one domain the likelier you will be to have success in others. Problems will fall apart in front of you, and doors will open that you never possibly imagined. Because at the end of the day, people are endlessly fascinated by outliers, and for good reason - they are the people that drive the world forward, the ones that accomplish the things we priorly thought to be impossible.

And so, as I stepped back and looked at the Heisman debate through this lens, I started to view it differently. Yes, Jeanty had been the premier back in all of college football - a true master of his craft. But Hunter was the true outlier here, with a long list of ‘never-done’ feats to his name. Things like:

• First athlete to win both the Bednarik (best defensive player) and Biletnikoff (best receiver) awards in the same year
  

• First known FBS players with 150+ receiving yards and four pass break ups in a single game
  

• Only FBS player to earn Power 4 Offensive and Defensive Player of the Week honors in the same season
  

Ashton Jeanty is a star. But Travis Hunter is a unicorn - and for that reason, he is the exact player I should have hoped would win the award for college football’s best player. And as it stands today, I’m glad he did.


This was a unique Heisman race because it captures a hidden truth I believe has long existed about the world: to the generalists frequently go the spoils.


This is not a concept with which many of us are familiar, as we often are led to believe that success - regardless of domain - comes from going as narrow as possible. Life places the stories of specialists front and center for us to behold, tempting us to believe that fame and success are the results of savant-like journeys taken from an early age. We hear endlessly about the Tigers and Mozarts of the world that began their path to mastery of craft at a time when they could barely walk.


But these stories are illusions at worst, and disingenuous at best. To center on specificity disregards the power of plurality, and it’s fair to argue that many of the world’s most successful people owe their feats to a generalist skillset.


In fact, this is the exact question that the author David Epstein looked at for his book Range, which serves as a counter-perspective to the infamous ‘10,000 hour rule’ often parroted in favor of early-specialization. In his studies of the world’s highest performers, he came to the following conclusion:

“The most successful people didn’t set out to become the best in a narrow domain; they tended to develop by dabbling across a range of pursuits first.”

From athletes to scientists, artists to technologists, Epstein found countless examples of high performers that owed their success to their ability to bring multiple skills to the table. People like Roger Federer, who played soccer, badminton, and basketball as a child before ultimately choosing to focus on tennis. Or Leonardo Da Vinci, who had varying interests across the domains of art, engineering, anatomy, and more. Elon Musk serves as a great example, too - many have founded space companies, others electric car companies, and yet others payment companies. But there is only one person that has helped build a successful company in each of those domains like he has with SpaceX, Tesla, and PayPal.


The polymaths, it seems, thus frequently have an advantage in life when compared to the monomaths. But can the same be said when it comes to sports? I think so, and let me explain why.


In sports like basketball and baseball where you are required to play both offense and defense, there is a concept called the “both sides of the ball player”. The terminology describes the athletes that are capable of impacting the game in multiples ways, like the shortstop that possesses both an elite glove and bat, or the wing that is an elite shooter and lock down defender.


Both sides of the ball players are their respective sport’s version of “generalized specialists” because while they may specialize in a specific sport like all their opponents, they are also masters of multiple skills within it.


And as such, they frequently find themselves in the highest demand. They are the players taken at the top of the draft, like NBA superstar Victor Wenbanyama (‘The Alien’), and the ones that ink the largest free-agent contracts, such as Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto in Major League Baseball. A simple look at the dichotomy between pitchers (single-sided) vs. position players (doubled-sided) in professional baseball serves as an exclamation point on the value of generality in sport - of the 15 free agent deals signed for $300M in the sport’s history, 13 of those have gone to position players and only 2 to pitchers.


And while I believe this has been true of sport for as long as it has existed, I think the trend towards generalism is only becoming more prevalent. Consider the following developments across sport in recent years:

• “Dual Threat” quarterbacks in football (eg: Patrick Mahomes & Lamar Jackson)
  

• “Positionless Basketball” in the NBA (eg: Nikola Jokić & Lebron James)
  

• “Two-Way Players” in Baseball (eg: Shohei Ohtani)
  

• “Power & Precision” golfers (eg: Scottie Scheffler & Rory McIlroy)

One sport alone could be considered an anomaly, but to see this trend across multiples at the same time suggests that there is a pattern at play. Sports, like life, are evolving to favor the generalists. But why?


There are a number of factors at play, ones that arise from a blend of both new challenges and old.


First and foremost, what hasn’t changed: versatile athletes are a god-send to teams who find themselves constrained by competitive balance mechanisms such as salary caps and roster sizes. With every dollar and spot precious, team builders are thus tasked with finding creative solutions to optimize their financial allocations across a select group of players. And as it turns out, there is no better bargain in team building than the “many things for the price of one” option that the generalist athlete brings to the the table. Because why pay two separate players - and lock up the roster spots in the process - if an option exists to blend their respective talents into one?


Yet while this versatility advantage has always existed, there is another constant in sport: change. And as sport has continued to evolve, the value of the generalist athlete has only continued to grow.


With pace of play and the complexity of on-field strategy at all time highs, the modern sporting arena is now one of increasing complexity. Borrowing again from Epstein, sports are now much more akin to the “wicked” environments common to life itself: settings and fields in which rules are unclear or incomplete, feedback is delayed or missing, and patterns are hard to identify or non-repetitive.


And as the games change, so too must the people that play them. The modern athlete is now tasked with more than at any point before in the history of sports. All at the same time they are being asked to compete against counterparts that are bigger, faster, and stronger than we have seen to date. Add all these factors up and you will find an environment that is not only ripe for generalism but one that demands it - the messier the games get, the more solutions one needs to possess in order to play them. And so, as the traditional boundaries of sport continue to fall to the way-side, the one-trick pony seems to be on its way out the door. The more dynamic and versatile the player, the better.


This is generally true across all of sport, but football serves as a particularly interesting case study. Because as one of the few sports that puts players solely on one side of the ball or the other, it would appear to be one of the last strongholds in athletics where specialization still reigns king. You either play offense or defense, but you don’t do both.


At least until Travis Hunter came around. And that is exactly what made this year’s Heisman race so utterly fascinating: in a sport that has hung its hat on specialists competing against specialists, the generalist took home the crown. Hunter broke the mold, and in a rare turn of fate, he was appropriately rewarded.


And in doing so, it is entirely possible that he may be the force that pushes the game of football back in lock-step with its sporting counterparts as it relates to the value of the generalist. Why? Because when someone does something for the first time, the rest of us start to view that same feat as something we can be capable of ourselves. Which in turn leads us to do the most important thing of all: try.


I can promise you this: all over the world on Saturday night, there were kids watching as Travis Hunter - college football’s ultimate generalist - was honored with the sport’s most prestigious award. For the ones that were, what they saw was a unicorn standing at the podium in the flesh, a walking representation of the fact that artificial boxes and labels need not exist. And I’ll be damned if at least one of them didn’t think to themselves that they wanted to do something like that too.


Now, that is not to say that there will be a bevy of Travis Hunter’s to come in the future of the sport - he is a generational athletic talent, after all, and few are likely capable of reaching the heights he rose to in the 2024 season.


But regardless of who may or may not follow in his footsteps, Hunter’s win on Saturday night was a shining example of one of the world’s core truths: the world need not belong solely to the specialists.

The generalists get a say, too - in sports, just as in life. And when they get the chance to speak with their play on the field we’d all do well to pay attention, because their voices might carry more power behind them than you’d initially think.

Hey everyone 👋🏻,


Happy Sunday and welcome back to another edition of The Gunn Show. As always, I hope you had a fantastic week.

It’s been a busy last couple of weeks with the Thanksgiving holiday, house projects, baby prep, and more on the docket - as well as MLB Winter Meetings in Dallas this upcoming week.


As such, there are a number of things worth updating. First and foremost, I would like to wish a belated Happy Birthday to one of the biggest supporters of this program - Mom! I know I speak for many others when I say thank you for the endless grace and love you show us all. Each of us is better off for having you as a light in our lives and here’s to hoping you feel that love returned ten-fold on your special day.


The past two weeks have been both full and fulfilling for the Gunns. It was a great Thanksgiving as it was our first time hosting for the holidays at our new house. We were full of projects from start to finish: from patio furniture to bedroom sets, Christmas decorations to a nursery setup - if you can name it, we probably took care of it. In the event that you are in need of any assistance with a hand wrench for your home improvement needs, I can confidently say that I can be of some assistance (assuming I don’t develop Carpel Tunnel syndrome over the coming days…).

And considering the sports centric nature of this family, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a particularly special occurrence: the Tennessee Volunteers are College Football Playoff bound for the first time in program history following a 36-23 win over Vanderbilt last week. After a nerve-wracking start that saw the Vols down 14-0 in just 5 minutes of play, they re-grouped and found a way to come out on the right side of the scoreboard in a “win and in” situation for what was arguably the program’s biggest football victory in 3 decades. The bleak aftermath of the Georgia loss three weeks ago seems like a distant memory at this point, as college football’s never ending penchant for chaos has set the Vols up in prime position to be one of the 12 teams left to compete for a National Championship. As of noon Eastern today, we will know who awaits the Big Orange in the first round of the playoff. Here’s to hoping the committee does the right thing and sets them up for a Round 1 home game in Neyland two weeks from now….


But enough on the update front - let’s get on to the topic for this week. It’s one I’ve been thinking on for a while especially as it relates to sports and athletic accomplishment - expectations.


Let’s dive in.

- CG

Expectations

There was an innocuous yet powerful comment tucked away at the back end of Josh Heupel’s post-game press conference last Saturday that caught my attention.


When asked for his breakdown of the post-game message he shared with his Volunteer team in the aftermath of their victory - specifically as it relates to the College Football Playoff spot they had just clinched - he offered the following:

"There was an expectation from our staff and our players… it was a goal… but it was [also] an expectation to be in this," Heupel said.

It was a small quote, but one that struck a chord with me considering I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the concept of ‘goals’. It’s an idea I find myself coming back to on a routine cadence this time of year with the MLB playoffs in the rear-view mirror and CFB soon to follow suit - specifically as it relates to the ‘goal’ many have but few realize: the opportunity to be crowned a champion.


What I found most interesting about Heupel’s comment was the way in which he drew a line between two words we often use in conjunction with one another - expectations and goals. Rather than treating them as one and the same, he instead juxtaposed each against the other, saying that the Vols had both. Like many, they had a goal to be in the College Football Playoff; but like few, they also had an expectation that they would be. And in that contrast, I believe, is a very powerful lesson.


From my perspective, that lesson is this: expectations and goals exist in very different realms, such that a cavernous gap marks the distance between them both. And while many like to think there is a bridge that joins them together, it may not be nearly as sturdy as we might initially believe.

The Difference Between Goals & Expectations

Let’s talk about why, starting with goals.


I think of them in the following way: goals are the things you “hope for”, the end points you “aspire to”. They are something out in the distance that you want but do not have, a vision that offers the promise to be captured yet comes with no guarantee that it will.


From my perspective, goals are about “nice to have” outcomes - blurry pictures we hope to one day turn from dream to reality, accomplishments for us to work towards. When goals are realized a sense of pride accompanies them; when they are not, disappointment reigns. But while falling short of them is painful, it is not crippling - there will always be other goals to take their place, opportunities to reset and reload. A chance to dust ourselves off and try again. Life will go on.


But expectations are something entirely different. Because while goals are concerned with outcomes, expectations revolve around what drives those outcomes in the first place. They are the things that you believe you are, rather than the things that you aspire to be. They are the bars you hold yourself to, the standards that align your vision and clarify your behaviors. Expectations compress your actions to a narrow band of possibilities because at the end of the day they simply say that you see no other option.

Expectations are similar to goals in that a sense of pride follows when we meet them. Prizes and praise, too. But unlike goals, the riches of accomplishment are often muted in the context of our expectations - not because they ‘don’t matter’, but rather because there is no accompanying sense of surprise when you wind up at the place you expected to be at all along. With expectations, the surprise does not come when you meet them - instead, it comes when you do not. So while failing to reach our goals leads to a softened disappointment, falling short of our expectations leads to something much more powerful: an excruciating cascade of emotion, a brutal awakening of dealing with the reality of not living to the standards that you have set for yourself.


And so, the contrast between the two - between goals and expectations - could not be more stark. Because where goals say “I want to be”, expectations say “I am”; where goals are a “nice to have”, expectations are instead a “must have”. And while goals deal with dreams and life as we wish it would be, expectations deal with reality as we believe it is meant to be.


The implications of this delineation is important, because while goals give us something to strive for we still must walk a pathway in order to reach them. This is where expectations come in - with the right standards in our lives to hold ourselves to, we add a wind to our back along the journey; a laminate on the surface to provide us the traction we need to keep moving forward when the going gets tough - if only because we expect nothing less of ourselves.


Expectations drive the realization of goals, and to think otherwise is to put the cart before the horse. By shifting our perspective on endpoints, we can turn our aspirations from a foggy dream into an inevitable outcome in a story that has yet to reach its conclusion, but one that we know will ultimately run its course. So much so that I believe there is a blunt truth to be learned about the delineation between goals and expectations:


The fastest way to bigger and better outcomes is bigger and better expectations - not bigger and better goals.

Expectations and Outcomes, Through the Lens of Sport

The above statement is a fundamental concept to consider when it comes to human behavior - whether we are talking about understanding it or changing it.


Why? Because expectations are inextricably linked with identity - who you are as a person; the things you believe you are about; the guiding principles that provide the foundation from which you operate. What you expect of yourself tells you what you believe about yourself, and when you believe something your actions will naturally follow suit.


This is a concept that is well documented in the domain of habit change, and one that is captured well in one of my favorite quotes from the author James Clear:

“ The most effective way to change your habits is not to focus on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become” (Atomic Habits)

Said differently, expectations shape behavior. And there is a logical conclusion that follows: if you want better results, spend time realigning your expectations of yourself first and your goals second.


When I think about this conversation in the context of sports, I can’t help but think of it as a principle I’ve seen play out time and time again watching elite players, elite coaches, and elite teams.


First, in regards to players. As I’ve stepped back to think about what makes an elite performer beyond just their physical abilities, there is one recognition that stands out above the others: many of the best have goals, but virtually all of them have expectations.


Some are certainly motivated by awards and accomplishments, wanting to bring home Silver Sluggers, MVPs, and the like. But the best are driven by something much more powerful than accolades - they possess a foundational expectation of what they are capable of, a bar they hold themselves to on a daily basis.


From my lens, it is the existence of a standard - rather than goals - that guides the actions of the best athletes at every moment of the day. It is something that they hold themselves to rather than something they chase, which in turn leads to a powerful inner confidence and conviction that allows their natural talents to be on full display when the lights are the brightest. So much so that we joke in professional baseball that there is actually a sixth tool on top of the traditional five: delusion.


What this means is that the quickest path to being good is often believing that you are in the first place - regardless of whether that may or may not be true in the moment. In the case of athletes, expectations are the Schelling point around which all else orient. They are a pre-requisite to high performance in front of 40,000+ every night. Because at the end of the day, you only get what you expect.


And I think the same can be said when it comes to coaches, perhaps even more so than with players. Think about it - how many times have you heard a head coach mention the words “standard” or “expectations”? Whether in an introductory press-conference (ie “this is going to be the standard here”) or in media responsibilities after a tough loss (ie “we didn’t play up to our expectations tonight”), you will hear them talk about the two concepts ad nauseam for a simple reason: as figureheads of their respective programs, coaches are the ones setting the expectations for everyone - not just themselves.


Take it from one of the greats in Nick Saban, who when asked recently about his time at Alabama said the following:

“It wasn’t about winning championships…..There were no signs in the building that said win the SEC. There were no signs up in the building that said win the national championship. There was a sign that said be a champion in everything you do. Then there was a definition of what that took.”

For Saban and the Tide, the championships sitting in the trophy case in Tuscaloosa are the direct result of living up to a standard instead of chasing a goal. Rather than pushing his staff and players towards something, he instead held them to something. Expectations of championship behavior meant championships followed suit. Funny how that works.


Another example can be found far to the northwest in Eugene, Oregon - Dan Lanning, head coach of the newly minted Big 10 Champion Oregon Ducks. A disciple of the Saban-Smart tree himself, he had the following to say last year:

“[It’s] 1A and 1B. 1A win, 1B playing to the standard. If you do either one without the other you’re going to feel unfulfilled. And that’s really what it’s about for us is making sure we hit one 1A and 1B. We want to play to the standard, and we want to win the game.”

It’s a perspective I love: when it comes to the best, goals alone are not what makes the journey of achievement fulfilling. You need expectations and a standard to hold yourself to, and a recognition that the outcomes you want will be a natural byproduct of simply meeting the bar - assuming it is high enough.

Expectation Implications

Let me provide a few more rapid fire thoughts on expectations before we close:


1. Expectations are a Shortcut to Self-Fulfilling Prophecies


This is something that has stuck out to me like a sore thumb watching college football over the last two weeks - some teams simply find a way, no matter the circumstances. I believe this is something naturally stems from high expectations.


Take Georgia as an example. Two weeks ago, they won an 8 OT thriller against Georgia Tech in a matchup where they brought their “D-” performance to the field. A mere week later, they followed that performance up by winning the SEC Championship after having to insert their backup quarterback into the game for the entirety of the second half - a player that has attempted less than 40 pass attempts over the last two seasons combined.


During both games, the odds were bleak for the Dawgs at critical points - but it didn’t matter. Down 14 to your in-state rival with 5:37 left in the 4th quarter at home? No problem, we’ll win anyways. Lost your starting QB against a top 5 defense in the country in the biggest game of the year? No problem, we’ll win anyways.


In both cases when it mattered most, Georgia found a way to win because it is was their expectation. Circumstances be damned, they were going to come out on top because that’s simply what they do. And I’d be lying if they didn’t have me believing the same way as I watched those games unfold: regardless of the score, I couldn’t help but think they’d wind up on top when the clock hit 0:00.


So call it what you want: confidence or conviction; the placebo effect or a self-fulfilling process. But the point remains: more often than you think, you don’t get what you want. You get what you expect.


2. Expectations You Set for Yourself >>> Expectations Others Set for You


We live in a world where people are hyper-focused on what others think of them. Our friends, our parents, our co-workers, our bosses - in every aspect of our lives, there is a never-ending stream of people that supposedly get to have an opinion on us. And the weight of all those expectations for us can be a hard burden to bear.


But there is a hack to solving this, one I’ve learned personally over the past number of years: the higher the expectations you set for yourself, the less you have to worry about the ones others set for you.


Setting your own standards high is a shortcut to stripping the pressure from others out of the equation. Because when you set the bar for yourself higher than anyone could ever set for you, a perspective shift occurs: you no longer need to focus on rising to the expectations of others because the ones you have of yourself are plenty enough.


Meet your high expectations first and it will leave no doubt that you’ll meet those of others.


3. The Dark Side of Expectations


Expectations are a paradox in that they are freeing yet demanding. And as such, there is a dark side that can come with them if not managed properly.


A key here is that your expectations have to be somewhat aligned with reality - because while they can force you to rise to a new level, they can also drag you into the darkness should you fail to meet them.


To misalign your expectations with reality is a recipe for disaster: at a certain point, no matter of effort or confidence will be sufficient to surmount a large gap between where you expect to be and where you actually are. And in the case where your expectations are poorly calibrated to truth, that is likely going to lead to you being pissed off a lot.


This is a concept that likely bears deeper discussion at some point, as it is perhaps the biggest thing I see holding athletes and others back from true progress. But for now I’ll leave you with this: leveraging expectations properly necessitates an appropriate alignment between where you actually are and where you believe you should be.

Closing - Expect More, Get More

From my view, great expectations are in short supply in our modern world. We have shifted away from standards in favor of goals, rewarding participation with trophies and prizes regardless of where the bar is set in the first place. And so it is my strong belief that we are in need of a perspective shift as a society, one that eschews the allure of goals and instead priorities the power of expectation.


Lyndon B Johnson once said that “what convinces is conviction”, and it is this sentiment that underscores the necessity of expectations over goals.


Internal standards and expectations lend themselves to a resulting conviction that far outweighs the power of aspiration. Which leads me to a hard truth to close: people that expect more generally get more.


Many want, but few expect. And in that realization is all the help you need. Change your expectations first, and watch your outcomes change as a result.


It really is as simple as that.

Hey Everyone! 👋🏻


Happy Sunday, and welcome back to another edition of The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.


It was another good one on my end after spending the back-end of the week at our hitting camp out in Arizona, which served as the final PD specific road-marker for the 2024 season. With the MiLB dead period kicking off yesterday, it’s officially time for the baseball calendar to dial the pace back a couple of notches as we head into the upcoming holiday season. There is still plenty of work ahead - specifically in regards to off-season roster construction and 2025 planning - but I know all of us are looking forward to the opportunity to reset and recharge with family and friends over the coming months.


And yet while the winter months of the baseball calendar come baked in with plenty of moments for recovery, they also present countless more opportunities for something equally important: growth. Because at the end of the day, the off-season is about two dual concepts existing with a constant tension between them - rest & work. It’s something we stress heavily for both our players and staff each year at this time, namely that you must find a balance between refilling the tank and starting to put your foot back on the gas in preparation for the year to come.


Why? Because one of the surest truths about sports at the highest level is that the margins are incredibly thin. Talent is merely the price for admission, and the corollary that follows is that the work you do to maximize that talent is often where the point of separation lies. It’s a hard truth that applies equally whether you are a coach or a player, in your first year or your 20th - but it’s one you must accept the reality of if your goal is to win when competing against the elite. As such, you have to develop a productive paranoia that keeps you focused and moving forward - because if you think someone, somewhere is outworking you - then they probably are.


As such, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to get the most out of this unique time in the year. How do you keep moving forward at a time of the year when the environment is more relaxed, where the set of possible choices available to you is more abundant than at any other point in the year


Today’s piece is an attempt to share how I think about solving this problem through the lens of what I call Forcing Functions. It’s a story of vision and focus, of constraints and choices. And ultimately, a story about the power of rules.


Let’s get to it.

- CG

Forcing Functions

Scene Setting


If you are plugged into the world of athlete training at all, you’ve likely become familiar in recent years with a trendy coaching concept: environmental design.


For the uninitiated, the term when used in a sports context represents a newer philosophy for how we can design training environments to get the most out of our athletes. Whereas traditional athletic development has relied heavily on “old-school coaching” - which one can think of simply as “direct coach to player feedback”, similar to what you would see in the movies - environmental design takes a slightly different perspective. Rather than choosing to place priority on the coaching that occurs within the course of the training session, environmental design instead zooms out to focus on the conditions that lead to those coaching opportunities in the first place. Get the system right first, it says, and everything else will fall into place as you go from there.


The philosophy behind this method of training is built on sound logic for how the world operates, specifically is it relates to the recognition that an order of operations exists - environments lead to actions, not the other way around. It’s a hard truth to grasp considering the premium we humans place on the value of “free will” and “choice”, but it is a truth that deals with reality as it is rather than as we’d like it to be.


Why? For a simple reason: the concepts of choices (which lead to your actions) and environments are inextricably linked. Every environment comes baked in with a set of rules or norms, ones that naturally determine the behavior of the people operating within them. These ‘environmental constraints’ in turn make certain actions more acceptable than others depending on the situation, like how crying might be okay for a baby in a nursery but not the best strategy for you during a 1 on 1 with your boss. Regardless of whether you are operating as an athlete, professional, or everyday human, every action you take will be constrained by the rules of the environment in which you take them.


And so, both a challenge and promise follow.


First, the challenge: your environment will shape you, whether you want it to or not. Rules exist for a reason, and you can’t out-will yourself past them any more than you can spit in the face of gravity to take off in flight. To ignore them is merely a recipe for disappointment, so do so at your own peril.


But while environmental rules are a reality, we’d be remiss to neglect the fact that they come packed with powerful potential. Because not only do they constrain - they also clarify. By narrowing the set of possibilities, rules can give us clear direction for getting what we want out of our lives. And when used properly to design your environment, they can create the conditions that make achievement of your goals inevitable.


We underestimate both the power and necessity of setting our own constraints; of crafting our own environments. Too often we go through life on autopilot, living according to the rules of an environment that someone else designed for themselves yet we just happen to find ourselves trapped in the middle of. This is a call to change that - to become the coach practicing “environmental design on your own life”.


Let’s talk about what that looks like.

Theory

To start, you have to recognize that someone else doesn’t always make the rules for you. There will certainly be moments where you have to play someone else’s game, times where you have to do your best to adapt to the situation you find yourself in. But it is important to realize that when it comes to your everyday life you end up having a say much more often than you think. And in those times, the more control you exert over your inputs, the more control you will have over your outputs.


But to do so requires setting the right rules for yourself, ones that drive you closer to the things you want rather than taking you further away. And that’s not always easy.


So when it comes down to designing environments, I find a concept I learned during my days masquerading as a college math major to be instructive: forcing functions. They come from the differential equations branch of mathematics and can be described simply as the following: external functions that drive a system towards a desired outcome.


Every forcing function shares three key components:

1. They are Additive: They revolve around adding something to a pre-existing system - some new variable, rule, or constraint that combines and interacts with the things that were already present.
   

2. They Change the System: When you add a forcing function to an initial system, it creates some sort of shock to the original conditions that will create a different outcome than without it.
   

3. The Change They Induce is Inevitable: Forcing functions create an inevitable outcome, moving that initial system in a predictable direction upon being added.
   

Essentially, forcing functions create ‘non-optional constraints’ on a system by injecting a new variable, almost as if they are saying “I know what this system was before I got here, but none of that matters now - I’m making the rules now.” Injecting one is akin to adding a new ‘top dog’ to the equation, something that changes and supersedes all the prior rules of the game. By simply adding something new to the equation, they give you the power to change an environment in an entirely predictable direction.

Forcing functions are common in many walks of life, especially as they relate to the natural rules of the universe encapsulated by physics. When I drop a pen from a building, I know it will fall to the ground because gravity serves as a forcing function on its motion. Something similar happens when I squeeze a bottle full of water hard enough, knowing it will explode with enough effort thanks to the forcing function of pressure.


But they exist in plenty of other areas of life too, driving human behavior in specific ways. Take deadlines, for example, which force people to accomplish work in time frames they would likely not in lieu of them. Or speeding tickets, which incentivize driving habits to operate within certain speed ranges on the road.


We could go on and on, but you get the point: forcing functions change the rules from one structure to another, instantaneously. So regardless of the domain, we can think about them in the following manner.

Natural Behavior + Forcing Function = New, Predictable Behavior

When taken in the context of human action, this is a powerful model because forcing functions can shape behavior without requiring constant decision making or willpower. When you inject appropriately powerful constraints, you have no choice but to adhere to them. So by merely designing the right environment with the right rules, we can in turn force our outcomes in a pre-specified direction. Doing the work up front can in turn help us make our goals inevitable.


But unfortunately, it is not enough to recognize that we can use forcing functions as an advantage in our lives. We have to take it a step further and understand that we must use them if we are to have any chance of accomplishing our goals.


This is because of a modern conflict: humans thrive under environments of constrained choice, yet we now have more available than ever. It has become harder than ever to make the right choice precisely because of all the other options on the table, resulting in a modern inertia that keeps us mired in a quicksand staring out at our goals far off into the distance.


It is thus as if the world has its own forcing functions in place. And if we want to find a way to surmount them, we have to start enacting some of our own.

Practice


So how do we put them into practice? It’s actually quite simple: we work backwards, from the end to the beginning.


To start building forcing functions into your life, you have to live in the future and ask yourself what it is you want to accomplish. Remember, the entire purpose of a forcing function is to make your desired end state inevitable. At their core they are merely constraints put on an environment meant to influence it to a specific outcome - so in order to ensure you are enacting the right ones, you have to know what your desired end state is in the first place.


That is for you to find out, but once you come to a conclusion you can start aligning the rules in your life to those goals through the lens of the following question:

What rules, were I to put them in place for my life, would make it a near certainty that I would accomplish my end goal?

I’ve been on this journey of tying forcing functions into my life for the past year, so let me provide a couple of personal examples to bring this all into context.


Back in December of 2023, I went through my annual goal-setting process and outlined a number of things I wanted to accomplish over the course of 2024. At the top of that list were the following two items: I wanted to be in the best physical shape I’d been in in my life (even better than my college playing days), and I wanted to start a blog so I could learn how to write and communicate my ideas effectively. To bring each of these goals from mythical targets into reality, I decided I’d put into place some rules for my daily, weekly, and monthly environments to ensure I was making progress towards accomplishing them.


For my health goals, I mapped out the following:

• Big Picture Checkpoint Goals → 14% Body Fat DEXA by July 15th, 2024; 75 Hard Challenge completion during Spring Training; 3x yearly bloodwork commitment
  

• Weekly/Monthly Rules → 4x weekly weight lifting sessions; 2x weekly Z2 cardio sessions; 1x weekly Z5 cardio session; Bi-weekly health review (Whoop Biometrics, Weight, Body Composition)

• Daily Rules x Checkpoints → 5AM wakeup; 180g protein daily; 30g+ fiber daily; <200g carbs daily

My writing goals followed a similar structure:

• Big Picture Checkpoint Goal → 26 articles published by EOY
  

• Weekly/Monthly Rules → Minimum 1 article published every 2 weeks; Track habit execution weekly
  

• Daily Rules x Checkpoints → 120 min writing per week minimum; 30 min daily reading

It was a pretty robust and ambitious roadmap, but as I sit here today I feel pretty confident in saying that it worked. From a health perspective, I was able to complete two 75 Hard Challenges and measured at 14.8% BF at my DEXA in August - down about 6% from when I first started measuring in February of 2023. My bloodwork has been great under the hood as well. On the writing front, I surpassed my goal of 26 pieces way back in July. We are at 46 total and counting, and not slowing down anytime soon.


I share this not to say that I’ve been perfect - far from it, in fact. There have been multiple points in times where I’ve fallen off track slightly, not quite hit my weekly or monthly goals. But the broader direction of the progress arrow has undoubtedly been in the direction I wanted it to go - and I owe that exclusively to the rules I point in place all the way back in December of last year. They’ve constrained the actions I’ve taken throughout the year, forcing me to make sacrifices on the things I thought I wanted for the things I know I wanted.


And from my viewpoint, this is one of the most powerful components of forcing functions: not that they optimize for perfection, but rather that they optimize for inevitability even in a world where perfection is impossible. Gravity is a perfect example of this feature - you can fight it for some point of time, but it will eventually take its course once your energy runs out. Human behavior is no different - with the right set of rules in place, you ensure you stay between the bumper guards for long enough to ultimately take down the pins.

Your Turn


So to bring this to a close and tie it all together, I wanted to present the following question:

Where in your life can you start implementing forcing functions to put your behavior on auto-pilot and make accomplishing your goals an inevitability?

Answering that question will necessitate a little introspection through the lens of the future, the present, and the past. Where are you now? Where do you want to go? And what has been holding you back?


With those answers in hand, you can then shift your focus to the power of rules and starting thinking about yourself as a coach practicing environmental design on your own life.


Because at the end of the day, forcing functions are either working for you or against you. Design them intentionally and you’ll find that success isn’t a question of effort or willpower - it’s one of inevitability.

Hey Everyone! 👋🏻


Happy Sunday, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.


There has been a lot going on on our end over the last seven days per usual, across a variety of locations. To kick the week off I took a quick trip down to the Dominican Republic for our DR Instructional league, which is winding to a close with the Thanksgiving holiday fast approaching. It was a once again a great experience down there as the weather this time of year is hard to beat while the energy at the complex remains unmatched.


Upon my return state-side, there were a number of boxes waiting to be packed, taped, and transported as it was time for moving week. After a long weekend of back and forths, we have officially made it into our new place with two humans, one dog, and all of our belongings…. well, minus the third of our couch that was too big to get down from our apartment with the freight (in)conveniently down for maintenance. All in all, it was a smooth move and we are beyond excited to start this next chapter of turning a house into a home. Next up on the every-growing docket: furniture, decorations, Christmas lights, a nursery build out, and what I am sure will be the start of a never-ending DIY project list.

This week’s edition of the newsletter marks a special milestone as it is officially the 40th weekly edition of The Gunn Show - a number I am particularly excited about considering my target number for the publication was 26 pieces over the entire course of 2024. It’s been quite the journey over these past 10+ months, and I like to think I’ve learned some things about both the arts of thinking and writing well along the way. I’m greatly appreciative to those of you that have entertained me throughout this process, sharing thoughts, feedback, and encouragement each week. You all have made this project something I look forward to on a weekly basis, even when time runs thin and there are other priorities that take precedent.


So with the dual considerations of this being a nice, round # edition of The Gunn Show and that I’ve been quite short on time this week, I thought I’d take today’s newsletter to re-surface some of my favorite posts up to this point in time. Hopefully this serves as a starting point for your holiday reading list over the next couple of weeks, and we’ll get back to some more regular programming next week!


Talk then.


- CG

Best of The Gunn Show - Edition 1 through 40

1. Simple is No Guarantee of Beautiful - My take on finding the delicate balance between an idea that is simple enough to understand yet powerful enough to make a difference.
   
   

2. Intellectual Dividends - A different perspective on knowledge acquisition over time and the value of applying the concept of financial dividends to your own mind.
   
   

3. Parenting & Operating Systems - A ‘note to self’ guidebook for how I’m thinking about this next phase of life as a parent, through the lens of simply ‘figuring it out’.
   
   

4. The Agency Era - My roadmap for getting shit done in a world that rewards initiative and execution above all else.
   
   

5. Talent Stacks - A breakdown of my favorite mental model for hiring and building high performing teams.
   
   

6. Unicorns - Thoughts on how to identify the truly spectacular people in the world - and how to become one yourself.

Hey Everyone! 👋


Happy Sunday and welcome back to The Gunn Show.  Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.


It was a busy one on our end per usual, with our now normal mixture of work, baby, and house items all at once. A co-worker summed up my feelings well this week, saying “wow, you really just decided to go full on ‘adult’ all at once, huh?” Touché.


Nevertheless, it was a good one with plenty of highlights including an ultrasound (still amazing every time), our first items moved into our new house, and a Vols victory over Mississippi State on Saturday. Like the Big Orange, we’ll be looking to build off our momentum from this week into next as Friday marks the official move date to our new place. Fingers crossed for a smooth experience and an installed TV by 7pm on Saturday for UT vs. Georgia.


Now - let’s get on to this week’s edition, which centers around a topic I’ve written about before: the role sports will come to play in an increasingly digitized age. Today’s piece takes a slightly different lens than prior, looking at through the lens of something that machines - and thus AI - can’t replicate: human biology.


Hope you enjoy, and see you next week!

- CG

On Athletic Excellence - The Last Bastion of Human Greatness

This week, I came across something that got my brain churning.


The moment of inspiration came after reading Sahil Bloom’s weekly newsletter The Curiosity Chronicle, in which he shared an idea he recently captured following a conversation with actor/musician Josh Radnor. The construct of their back and forth was centered around the future of human creativity in the AI space, specifically as it relates to the concept of ‘greatness’. He described the encounter as such (emphasis mine):

I recently spent time with Josh Radnor, an actor and musician who shared some brilliant thoughts on the future of AI in the creative space. He referenced a friend who had said that AI will write a lot of good songs, but will never write a great song. The reason: Greatness is a uniquely human idea. It is about pushing the upper limits of human possibility.

That idea - that greatness is uniquely human - helped crystallize some thoughts and got me thinking more about the role that sports will play in the coming years.


This is a topic I discussed in depth in my article The Sports Singularity, where I shared on my belief that sports are uniquely positioned to serve a powerful role in an increasingly automated and digitized world. At the core of this conviction is the idea that sports capture something unique about what it means to be human that AI and similar technologies do not: they are real experiences. I described that sentiment as the following:

For as long as it has existed, sport has revolved around real people in real places, the great desire for human competition played out in real life…... That is always what has made sport so - and nothing about the world and technology will ever change that.

[And so], instead of placing our bets on what will change, for sport we need to place them on what shouldn’t - namely, that they should serve as one of the last - and best - bastions for human experience. They should continue to pull at the same emotional strings they have for millennia - the desire for competition, for connection, for excitement, for passion……. Because the more we live our lives with a screen, the more we will come to yearn for the things that represent the real.

Overall, my feelings can be summed up as the following: in an era of increasingly non-human things, I have a growing conviction that people will develop strong attachments to the things that are human. And sports is at the top of that list.


The idea of greatness as a uniquely human trait adds an interesting bent to this perspective, one that only makes me more convicted in the power the institution of sport will carry into the future. Why? Because I believe there is a strong argument to be made that athletic excellence is one of the best encapsulations of human excellence possible, if only for a simple reason: sports tap into one of the most fundamental aspects of human life, something that machines have no hope of replicating: our biology.


If you zoom out and take a big picture perspective of what athletics are, it is hard to see them as anything other than a public display of human biology. At its core, the story of athleticism is one of biological coordination - the result of muscles, tendons, organs, and other human systems all working together synergistically in order to accomplish the feat of movement. The best athletes are the ones that harness this process most effectively, pooling the resources of their physical and mental systems together in order to accomplish feats that other humans can only dream of. It is this, more than anything, that keeps us tuned into sports - we want to see athletic greatness because it redefines our expectations of what humans are capable of, giving us all something to aspire to in the process.


I’m of the belief that now, more than ever, we are fully equipped to appreciate athletic greatness in all its splendor - if only because of the ways in which technology is now plugged into sports. Because while the games themselves have barely changed over the years (outside of pitch clocks and some weird kick off rules….), the same cannot be said for our ability to objectify - and thus evaluate - the performances happening within them.


Let me explain why.


I’m old enough to remember the early days of ESPN’s Sports Science segments, in which host John Brenkus would give perspective-setting breakdowns on the most exceptional athletic feats from across sports - things like Usain Bolt’s sprint speed, Dwight Howard’s reach, and more. By way of advanced technologies like motion-capture systems, high speed cameras, and computer-generated imagery, the show did an amazing job of peeling back the various layers that make up the ‘how’ behind the world’s greatest athletes. I remember thinking at the time how cool those segments were because of how the specificity of the science gave you an appreciation for what made certain athletes unique; what truly made them great.


Back in the early 2000s when the show first started, there were few things like it in the public domain. The secrets of the world’s greatest athletes remained largely hidden from view, confined to obscure research labs far out of the public eye.


But times have since changed. The modern era is now one where we can track everything from the elbow extension velocity of a baseball pitcher to the precise GPS location of a football, and virtually everything in between. The key, however, is not that that data now exists so much that it is now overwhelmingly public, hosted on various sites like Baseball Savant or displayed on your television screen during your weekly installment of Sunday Night Football. The result has been something akin to a democratization of Brenkus’s sports science superpowers, such that anyone with an internet connection can now study the science of the skills behind the world’s best athletes. Put simply, now more than ever we are able to understand what truly makes great athletes great.


This quantification of excellence is nothing new to sports, per se, as we’ve been doing it with statistics as a proxy for centuries. Wins and losses, homers and steals - all aggregate measures we use to help contextualize greatness and help us formulate an answer to the questions of Jordan or LeBron, Tiger or Jack. And yet, regardless of the nature of your favorite water-cooler debate, there is one commonality underlying them all: we are seeking to ascribe a winner to the game of athletic, and thus human, excellence. Because at the end of the day, we humans have a fundamental need to believe in the capacity for human excellence - and there are few things in the world that capture this idea quite like sports. 


And so, in a world where there will be an increasing amount of machine excellence, I’m willing to make a bet that people will be increasingly attached to finding examples of human excellence.


Why? Because in a highly automated world, human greatness is a feature and not a bug. As I’ve written about many times before, the most valuable point of differentiation in this new world will lie in the skills that distinguish humans from machines. And while there are increasing amounts of our mental attributes that companies and builders are attempting to turn over to machines, I think the physical ones are likely to be the last frontier.


Look at even the most physically advanced machines in the world (like Spot and Sparkles from Boston Dynamics), and you can’t help but thinking that there is something missing. Sure, it may be surprising - or even impressive - to see what these machines are now capable of relative to the past, but when compared to humans we all know it’s not quite the same, a case of apples to oranges. Machines will never possess the marvels of biology that make humans (and any other living beings) special. And as such, they will fail to provide humanity with a stick with which to measure the greatness of the human form. 


Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe in the year 3000 machines will have become so advanced that humans will fill 100,000-seat stadiums to watch them play 11 on 11 between some white lines. If that day comes and I’m here to see it, maybe I’ll even buy a ticket myself (and hope that they’ve automated the refs by that point too….).


But I doubt it. 


Because after all, if athletics are representative of the biological excellence that is fundamental to humans alone, machines are behind from the start. 

It’s 7-0 good guys, and we are out to an early lead. I’d bet the score is only getting run up from here.

Hey Everyone!

Happy Sunday and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week!


It was a big one on our end and we have some exciting news to share - for the first time, we can now say that we are officially home owners! After a long back and forth process, Thursday morning saw us finally close on our new house in the northern part of the DFX metroplex. We are some kind of excited to have our own space and continue planting our roots in the Dallas area (and to finally get Luna her yard!). A couple of pictures of the new place:

Now, onto this week’s edition of the newsletter. This is a piece I’ve been wanting to write for a long time, which centers around a red-pill concept I think many are overlooking in our modern era: you have complete and total agency to accomplish anything and everything, you want - if only you have the courage to try. In a world of ever expanding opportunities and resources, ordinary people are capable of accomplishing the extraordinary with but a simple combination of vision, determination, and resourcefulness. These are my thoughts on what that process of just doing the damn thing looks like, through the lens of what we will call agency.


Let’s get to it.

- CG

The Agency Era


For 6 years as a kid growing up in Kingsport, Tennessee, school at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School started the exact same way.


Get dropped off out front. Walk into the classroom and grab your supplies for the day’s upcoming adventure. Sign in on the board. Take your seat. Patiently wait for the school intercom to kick on at 9AM. Spend 15 seconds reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with your classmates. Pay attention to (or ignore) the daily announcements - and pray for an early release. And finally, to bring everything to a close, listen to the school’s tagline and words of advice: “Make it a great day or not - the choice is yours.”


A 180 day long school calendar means that from kindergarten to fifth grade, myself and my fellow classmates followed that same routine no less than 1080 times. But reflecting back, what stands out the most is not the fact that we did the routine so much as how little we thought about it - especially as it relates to that phrase that brought the morning routine to a close each day. And ultimately, the lesson it was intended to teach.


”Make it a great day or not - the choice is yours.” 11 words concealing a simple truth behind them, one I was remiss to understand for all those years. What follows is a story of that long lost lesson, recently found; of the power contained in that phrase from Thomas Jefferson Elementary all those years ago.


It is a tale about the ability of humans to get things done through the power of choice. Of our ability to take our lives into our hands and make them what we wish. Of our capacity to bend the world to our wills.


This is the story of agency: a force that has existed throughout the arc of humanity, quietly shaping how the world operates - and more importantly, what it rewards.


Let’s begin.

Scene Setting


First, a definition.


Throughout history, the word agency has taken on countless forms.


We can trace its roots through ancient history, all the way back to the Latins and their word agentia - a concept which centered around the ability of people to ‘initiate action or exert influence’. The Greeks later defined it in a similar manner but with a different moniker - praxis, which placed a special emphasis on ‘purposeful action’. During the time of the Renaissance, it came to be known as potestas - a specific reference to the ‘power’ or ‘authority’ of individuals to make decisions and influence their surroundings.


Pressing fast forward, we find that its modern version first appeared back in 1943 - when a then century old dictionary by the name of Webster’s defined it as the following:

Agency (n): The capacity, condition, or state of acting or exerting power.

Different times, different meanings. And yet, while agency has shape shifted along with the sands of time, there is a commonality to be found under the surface of its many definitions if we look closely enough. When boiled down, it is ultimately about one thing above all else: action, taken by humans, with the intent to to influence the world in a way that meshes the vision they have for it.


So for our purposes, let’s define it more simply as the following: agency is the ability to get done the things you want to get done; the ability to bend the world to your will.


And a brief history lesson teaches us exactly how powerful that concept can be.

The Arc of Agency


If you study the arc of humanity through the lens of agency, you will notice a few peculiar things.


The first is this: the world moves in a simple, predictable pattern - from less agency to more. As time inches forward the capacity of humans to accomplish ‘things’ is ever increasing, such that with each year, each month, and each day, new possibilities emerge for what we are capable of as a species.


The expansion in human capabilities is a direct result of invention and advancement. Of innovation. Because after all, this is what innovations do - they take something previously thought impossible for humans and make them possible instead. New ideas lead to new technologies, and new technologies lead to new solutions. The result is a daily upgrade in our superpowers as a species, and with those new powers in hand we are able to take action in novel ways to influence the world around us.


So in many ways, the story of agency and the story of innovation are but one and the same. To see this, lets consider some examples of invention throughout history across three different buckets - transportation, energy, and communication:

From a zoomed out, categorical perspective, we notice that each of these technology buckets have enhanced human agency in specific ways:

• Transportation → New inventions increase human autonomy in moving self, others, and goods through space.
  

• Energy → New inventions increase human autonomy in harnessing and utilizing various power sources.
  

• Communication → New inventions increase human autonomy in sharing information across time and space.
  
  

The more innovation occurs within in an individual sector of society, the more capable humans are of accomplishing things within it. Take transportation, as an example. In the 5000+ years between the invention of the wheel (3500 BC) and the invention of the airplane (1903 AD), we have taken quantum leaps in terms of both how much we can move through space and how quickly we can do so. Travel that used to take months is now instead condensed to hours.


Another thing worth mentioning here is that this process is progressive - meaning that innovation slowly builds upon itself over time. Frequently, we like to tell the story of singular inflection points that changed everything - such as the iPhone moment or the launch of the first Facebook page. But to do so is to neglect reality. Yes, there are critical points in the history of invention that create an entirely new world - but they themselves are only enabled by all of the inventions that preceded them. Social Media only exists as a function of the scaffolding provided by the Internet, in the same way that the iPhone was only made possible by the advancements in computing technology that came before. The story of innovation is thus more akin to a Lego project - prior pieces fit together to create something bigger and better.


An important key to realize is that there is a time component to this process - and the pace with which it moves is ever changing. In the early years of humanity, the clock was ticking slowly — but the further we move into the future, the faster the hands start to move. To see this, let’s look within two of the aforementioned buckets and map out some spacing between inventions:

• Transportation: 5200 years between the invention of the wheel/cart and the invention of the steam engine → 176 years between the invention of the steam engine and the automobile → 17 years between the invention of the automobile and the airplane
  

• Communication: 4640 years between the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press → 400 years between the invention of the printing press and the invention of the telegraph → 150 years between the invention of the telegraph and the invention of the internet → 16 years between the invention of the internet and Facebook/Twitter

With each invention, the time between the prior standard and the new one seems to compress. So not only does the world arc from an environment of less innovation - and thus less agency - to more, but the pace at which that pattern occurs is only speeding up with time. The more we create, the faster it happens. And vice versa.


It is the pairing of these two recognitions - that human agency is ever increasing at a pace that is ever accelerating - that gives us a blueprint for living in the future.

Time Travel


With our history lesson complete, let’s reground ourselves in the present so that we may look to the future.


If you take away nothing else from this post, let it be this: we are moving into an era of unparalleled agency, and the people that both recognize and capitalize on this truth will be the winners in the game of life.


It’s a bold statement, but one I strongly believe to be true. Let me explain why.


We’ve already seen that the world moves in a predictable pattern of increasing agency due to the promise of technology and invention, and that the pace at which this process occurs is only accelerating. This has been true for centuries and I see no reason why the same will not apply moving forward.


But another key component of this story is that agency is democratizing at the same time that it is increasing. In fact, the two go hand in hand. The more that technology enhances human capabilities, the more that those capabilities get expanded to everyone - as opposed to a select few.


Why does this matter? Because historically, what an individual could accomplish depended greatly on starting points and resources - where you are from, how much money you started with, the environment you grew up in, and more. Sure, we’ve long heard about the underdog stories of society - the people that came out of poverty or horrible situations to accomplish great things - but we can’t deny that starting a couple squares ahead on the board-game of life increases the probability of you winning the game.


But this is changing. Increasingly, backgrounds are becoming less relevant - where you start from is no longer quite the barrier it used to be. Yes - the privilege effect still carries relevance. But more and more frequently, the only barrier to accomplishment is having a digital device and an internet connection. No longer is your knowledge dependent on your circumstance. You don’t have to be able to afford a Harvard education to become an elite thinker - an ‘internet education’ can get you there just as quickly, if not more effectively.


What this means is that the arc of agency is both a global and local phenomenon - humans are becoming increasingly capable as a species, and the same applies to individuals. And as both technology and agency gets democratized, so too does success. Competition in the world is increasing, and the implications are critical to understand: if you don’t take advantage of increased opportunity, someone else will.


This brings us to a harsh truth - in the coming days, high agency people will pass low agency people in the game of life. When opportunity becomes democratized, the spoils will go to those that seize them.


Note that this does not mean that highly skilled people will surpass lowly skilled people. This is not about skill, per se, because skill depends highly on the specific moment in time at which it is assessed. It is not a static concept - there is no guarantee that a highly skilled person today will be a highly skilled person tomorrow, and vice versa. The world around us evolves, and so to does the bar for success.


Instead, the modern environment is one of want - the vector through which we level up what we are capable of as humans. As technology continues to knock down the barriers that stand in the way of opportunity, the individuals that will grow the quickest will be the ones that master the concept of agency. The logical extension here is that excuses are falling to the wayside, if only because they share an inverse relationship with agency. When there is both more opportunity to be seized and more power to do so, the world’s tolerance for explanations has a heavy bias towards the following statement: ‘Don’t like it? Play better.’


And so, to summarize:

• Shifts in technology and global dynamics are increasing the importance of agency exponentially.
  

• Starting points are becoming less and less relevant as the playing field becomes leveled by those same forces.
  

• The resulting landscape is one of abundant opportunity and, consequentially, abundant competition.
  

• Those that take ownership of their lives and exercise their agency to seize opportunities will move ahead of everyone else.
  
  

But what does all of this look like in practice, specifically as it relates to you, today?

Agency Today


The same story that has existed for centuries continues to play out where we are now - new people inventing new products so humans can accomplish new things. The modern world, as always, is an era of agency.


To put it into context, I find an analogy from software to be helpful.


As technology companies have proliferated over the last 20+ years alongside the growth of the internet, you’ve likely seen the term SAAS - software as a service - floating around. It describes what many think of as the ‘golden’ business model of the 21st century, in which companies deliver software applications to users over the internet by way of subscriptions.


In terms of efficiency, SAAS is an incredibly low friction model for companies - simply create the software, put it behind a paywall, and let consumers purchase and download it to suit their needs. It is a hybrid blend of both cheap and efficient. And yet while technology business have benefitted heavily from this model, SAAS has been a godsend for users. Rather than needing to rely on on-premise and complex licensed installations, SAAS instead allows users access to powerful software tools and services at but the click of button. The only requirements are a computing device and an internet connection.


In the big picture, what the model has done is democratize software installation and utilization. By abstracting away the complexity of software behind the scenes, it has created a more flexible alternative where users can quickly pay for and acquire the services they need. We no longer need extensive technical programming knowledge or expensive hardware to interact with software - instead, we can simply download what we need, when we need it.


The result of this democratization is simple: more people are capable of tapping into the advanced capabilities of software, allowing them to achieve more with fewer resources. If this sounds like technology enhancing agency to you, then great job - you are catching on.


From my perspective, the companies of the future will do the same thing to the world that SAAS has done for computing, just in a slightly different way: rather than selling software as a service, they will be selling agency as a service.


And in fact, they already are.


Look at virtually any industry in the world, and you will see this trend toward democratization - towards agency - starting to occur. One by one, companies are building products that put power and ownership into the hands of the individual, all selling some version of the same story that we might call ‘The Agency as a Service Manifesto’:

“Take control of your ____”.

What goes in the blank depends on the user’s need, but the options with which to fill it in are ever increasing. Some examples to illustrate the point.


Consider the following list of products from the health, finance, and information management sectors. I’m an avid user of each, for the specific reason that I believe each sells and delivers on a vision to enhance personal agency in a way that prior technologies have not:

Health/Fitness

• Whoop (Fitness Wearable) → Take control of your fitness

• Levels (Continuous Glucose Monitoring) → Take control of your metabolism

• Function (Longevity focused blood testing) → Take control of your bloodwork

• DEXA (3D scanning technology) → Take control of your body composition

Finances

• Bitcoin/Ethereum (Cryptocurrencies) → Take control of your money

• Robinhood (Stock Trading) → Take control of your investments
  

Information Management

• ChatGPT (AI Chatbot) → Take control of your productivity

• Notion (Knowledge Management OS) → Take control of your knowledge

From a personal standpoint, these are exactly the type of products that I get most excited to use - and the ones that I am on the lookout for as we move into the future. Ones that give us an increased sense of agency (or ownership) over our own lives. Technologies and companies that allow us to take the world into our own hands rather than needing to rely on bureaucratic institutions or unnecessary middle men. Things that allow us to get more shit done, in less time.


Agency technologies.


Plenty exist already, but more are coming. Because the world, as ever, is arcing towards agency - and the pace with which it is doing so is only intensifying. New companies, new products, new possibilities. And as a result, new opportunities.


So how do we capture them?

The Power of Belief


When it comes to acquiring agency, there is one recognition that supersedes and sets the stage for everything else: it is a mindset, not a skillset.


Agency is not an innate trait - one you are born pre-programmed with as if it is woven into your DNA.. Where you start from says next to nothing about where you will wind up. Because agency is not a biological concept so much as it is a psychological one, one that requires a singular thing above all else: belief.


So the first step in the process of leveling up your agency is in fact quite simple: you must reshape your expectations and convince yourself that you are capable of accomplishing whatever it is that you wish. You must cultivate a conviction that you can bend the world to your will, recognizing that everything you need to do so is already on the table. Because at the end of the day, the path to agency is paved by expectations - and walking it requires you remove the boundaries you place on yourself. The self limiting beliefs that hold you back, the doubts that keep you stuck in place.


Note here that expectations are different from goals. Goals are aspirational - we set them to provide direction for ourselves with the ‘hope’ that we will accomplish them. Goals are meant to be strived for, yet rarely do we find ourselves surprised - or even disappointed - if we do not reach them. If we do - great; if not, then oh well. On to the next one. Put simply, goals are a nice to have.


Expectations are different. They do not revolve around being nice to have so much as they do around being must have. In contrast to goals, expectations are the foundational beliefs about what you should be accomplishing - the standards you have for yourself, the bar you set for your capabilities. The difference is critical. Where others can give you goals to aspire to, no-one else but you is capable of setting your expectations. When you fall short of what you demand of yourself, it hurts. And in that feeling of disappointment is a world of power.


A hidden truth of the world is that high expectations beget better outcomes - and agency carries no exemption in this regard. Raising the bar on your agency requires adapting your expectations.


Once you do, the real work begins, work that comes down to two simple concepts: education and action.

Education


Whatever it is you wish to improve upon, education is the foundation.


Why? Because knowledge forms the basis for effective action - the more we know, the more we understand, the better suited we are to make quality decisions. And the more capable we thus become of accomplishing the things we want.


The concept of education itself is highly ‘agentic’: acquiring knowledge requires two things specifically related to agency - a level of personal ownership over the process and a fair amount of effort. Our brains do not operate like an Apple iOS system - others cannot simply airdrop files to enhance our knowledge base. Instead, they function much more so in a ‘DYOR’ (Do Your Own Research) manner: no-one else is capable of educating you but you. To level up your understanding, and your agency, you have to do the work yourself.


And so, once you have convinced yourself that you are capable of high agency, the next step is simple: take your education into your own hands.


Start by identifying areas you would like to take greater ownership of - things you have been ‘outsourcing’ for much of your life, such as your health or finances. And then do the work to level up your understanding. Dive deep into whatever concept your choose; build up a foundational understanding of the core principles in that domain; set yourself up with the knowledge necessary to take action.


In our modern environment, education is the low hanging fruit of agency. With platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Tik-Tok having democratized the spread of information, knowledge is more abundant and accessible than ever before in human history. As a result, we have moved from an era of formal education to one of self education: learning now revolves much more strongly around individual initiative than it does institutions and teachers. Whatever you need you can now find - if only you have the agency to go look.


But a word of caution - along with this new environment comes a paradox: information is harder to find than ever, but the same cannot be said for truth. The amount of signal remains constant as the noise grows, making it increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction (a concept I’ve written about multiple times before).


So, with this in mind, a few words of advice on how to educate responsibly:

1. Do Your Own Research - As mentioned above, take the perspective that no-one should be responsible for educating you but you. Don’t wait for the right information to make its way to you - go find it yourself instead.
   

2. Find Quality Sources of Truth - To avoid falling for false prophets and snake oil salesmen, do the work to find information sources you can trust. Use the 80/20 Principle as a guide here, and recognize that you can get 80% of the information you need on a specific topic from merely 20% (or less) of experts.
   

3. Don’t Trust, Verify - Resist the urge to take things at face value - instead, cultivate a habit of verifying. Ask questions about what people tell you is true - consider ways to both validate an invalidate that perspective. Find tools (eg: ChatGPT, Google) that help you fact check.
   
   

Once you’ve taken the first two steps on the agency roadmap - convincing yourself you are capable of accomplishing what you want and educating yourself on how to get it - there is only one that remains: act.

Action


If education is the low hanging fruit when it comes to agency, then action is the point of leverage. Because today, in an era where content is abundant and information is cheap, separation lies much more so in the doing of things rather than in the learning of things.


Yes, education is a necessary precursor to action - but it is important to recognize that the two concepts are far from one and the same. The truth is that there is a dichotomy that exists between them, a case of necessary but not sufficient: knowing a thing is the first step towards doing a thing, but action does not follow as a guarantee. There is instead a barrier that lies between knowing and doing - one that requires careful focus and extra energy to surmount.


This has never been as true as it is today, in our relentless content environment where Tweets and TikToks battle for our attention at every second of the day. Most everyone today is running around on a never-ending hamster wheel of education: reading, listening, and watching with no respite, never taking a pause to put any of that newfound knowledge to work. Action has fallen to the wayside - we’d much rather scroll in the name of ‘continuous education’ than do anything with what we learn.


But education - at least in the traditional sense - requires application; the taking of ideas learned in theory and the putting of them into practice. For the tests that defined much of our schooling journeys, this was the ultimate point - they served as mile markers on our educational roadmaps, forcing us to take stock of where we had been, where we were, and where we were going.


Unfortunately, the real world comes with no such assessments baked in - there is no quiz you must take before you close Twitter for the day, no test that forces you to summarize your monthly TikTok insights. So rather than pausing to solidify what we have consumed, we let inertia push us towards more information, more knowledge. The hamster wheel is built to keep turning - unless you bring it to a stop yourself.


The result is a modern paradox: action is less frequent than ever at the exact same time it is easier to take than ever. And in that understanding lies all the leverage you need.


If you consider yourself a person capable of high agency, you should read that statement and come away brimming with excitement. You should sense the opportunity, and recognize that this is one of the most exciting times to be alive in human history when it comes to developing agency. Because as technology continues to decrease the threshold energy needed for action, not only are you capable of doing more things but simply taking the step to actually do them will separate you from others that do not.


So, by all means - educate yourself like everyone else. But recognize that agency is inherently tied to action. It is not enough to learn - you must also do. Some principles that can be helpful in getting started:

1. Find a Tool - Whenever there is something you want to accomplish, cultivate an instinctual reaction to finding something that can help you along the way. Recognize that one of the great promises of modern technology is that you don’t have to do it alone - tools are meant to help reduce the barriers between us and the things we want. And with each day that passes, the probability of finding a product or company specifically tailored to your problem becomes increasingly likely. More resources are out there than you can possibly imagine - all you have to do is look.
   

2. View Money as a Lever - Here is a blunt truth about the world: dollars are a pathway to both increased opportunity and accelerated accomplishment. This has been true for centuries in industries such as education, real estate, and more - and the same principle applies when it comes to agency. A helpful perspective shift is thus to view money as a tool with which you can accomplish more, better; as a lever through which you can work smarter rather than harder. Simply put: you can pay to earn the right to increase your agency - whether that is in your knowledge (eg: books, content subscriptions), your health (eg: supplements, gym memberships, training equipment), or elsewhere. Never second guess paying to invest in yourself.
   

3. Become Friends With Failure - By definition, agency requires an expansion in your current capabilities - which in turn necessitates the doing of something new. Yet an unfortunate reality is that the more new things you try, the more you will struggle and fall short. The more you will fail. This process is an inevitability, one that cannot be shortcut else you risk undermining the growth you seek in the first place. And so, to improve your agency you must develop a love for the struggle, an appreciation for the process of being uncomfortable. As one of my favorite quotes says, you must be willing to do today what others will not, so that tomorrow you can do what others cannot. To do so may require you to look a little stupid in the short term - but pay it no mind. Recognize that the struggle is what makes the rewards sweet in the first place, and that the path to high agency necessitates a trip to the moat of low status. The friendlier you become with failure, the better.
   

4. Define and Measure Success - Resilience in the face of failure is no small task. New challenges test our confidence just as much as they do our competence, and as such it is a necessity to have continuous streams of motivation to sustain you along the journey. A tried and true method for maintaining forward motion in the agency game is to measure whether or not it is increasing - the more you keep tabs on where you stand, the better you will be able to assess if your energy investment has been worth it. But how the hell do you measure an abstract concept like agency? It’s simpler than you might think - because at the end of the day, agency is merely about what you got done. And so, a simple checklist is all you need - set a clear goal, and check it off once you reach it (more on setting goals here). By making the goal the end point, you will force yourself to get resourceful in how you level up.
   
   

To act in today’s world means to set yourself apart from everyone else. Because when it comes to agency, talk is cheap - but action pays.

A Word of Caution


Now, there is an important disclaimer I’d like to make before we close: agency is not an entirely risk-free concept.


Taking ownership of your actions and decisions inherently involves some uncertainty - you must leave the comfort of what you know behind while pursuing the things that you do not. With that comes the possibility - the likelihood, even - of acquiring some bumps and bruises along the way. Because as the old adage says, if you play with fire there is indeed a good chance that you will get burned.


The truth is that we cannot be experts in everything - that is not how the world works. It is too broad and vast, too complex and interconnected for us to become masters of all. This recognition is important to have as we begin taking more ownership over our lives, because the areas in which we lack expertise are the ones that are most rife with the possibility for poor decisions.


As such, it is important to take the perspective of increasing your agency responsibly. And to do so necessitates that you have safeguards in place. You wouldn’t try to cross Niagara falls without a safety net for your first experiment in tightrope walking, and the same should be said for how you go about enhancing your agency.


The key concept to keep in mind here: in the early going of something new, your goal should be to avoid multiplying by zero at all costs. This is a principle borrowed from mathematics, which teaches us that zero is the great equalizer - regardless of the other variables present, everything becomes nullified from the moment that we inject it into a multiplicative equation. 1 million x 1 million gives us 1 trillion, but 1 million x 1 million x zero scales to zero.


In the context of our actions, multiplying by zero says the following: you want to protect against the downside risk of failure as best you can, to eliminate every possible ‘zero’ capable of nullifying the positive progress you have made. Think of the scenario in which you optimize every aspect of your life - your nutrition, your fitness, your sleep - yet decide to drive recklessly without a seatbelt and suffer a fatal car wreck as a result. You have just clearly multiplied by zero - all of the hard work in other areas of your life was eroded in a split second, as a function of one poor decision with no safety net.


The more ruthlessly you design your environment to eliminate the probability of catastrophes from which you cannot recover, the more likely you are to compound on your progress. Note that this does not mean you are optimizing away any possibility of failure - you still need to welcome the small ones that signal you are stretching your current capabilities, the ones that will ultimately lead to the growth you seek. Your goal instead should be the following: strike the balance between catastrophic and productive failure.


Consider the following as an example to illustrate the point:

• (a) 1 Million x 1 Million = 1 Trillion

• (b) 1 Million x 1 Million x 0 = 0

• (c) 1 Million x 1 Million x .1 = 10 Billion
  

In regards to agency, reality tells us that equation (a) is a complete fairytale - this is the ‘have our cake and eat it too’ scenario, the ‘free money’ scenario, the ‘too good to be true scenario’. We don’t get to grow without stress, to improve our capabilities without trading off against failure along the way. It is never that easy.


The last two equations, however, deal with reality. Equation (b) is the one to avoid at all costs - the result of excessive risk taken with no fallback plan, a recipe for disaster. It is equation (c) that we want - the goldilocks zone of agency where we give ourselves the opportunity to tap into the upside of growth responsibly.


To do so, we must start small - resisting the urge to bite off more than we can chew at the start. What this looks like in practice is akin to bowling in new lanes while making sure there are bumper guards on the side. Things like public speaking opportunities with low stakes, new gym exercises with light weights, or funding your first crypto wallet with a minimal amount of cash. Play with low stakes at the start, and create opportunities for small wins to build the confidence that you - yes, you - are capable of accomplishing new things that you set your mind to.


Because ultimately, agency is a self-fulfilling prophecy - the more conviction you build that you are capable of accomplishing great things, the more likely you will be to do so.


And so to close, one final word of advice: do, or do not; make it a great day, or not. But regardless of what you decide, don’t make any excuses - I don’t have any time for them, and the world doesn’t either. The choice is yours, now more than ever.


It’s the era of agency, and we are only getting started.

Hey everyone!


Happy Sunday, and welcome back to another edition of The Gunn Show. As always, hope you all had a fantastic week. It was a great one on our end, as we finally got a much needed respite from a hectic October travel schedule to spend a little bit more time at home in Dallas.


As such, this week granted a bit more time for in-depth writing, and I used it to tackle a concept that has long been on my mind: a talent evaluation/acquisition model that I’ve come to call ‘The Unicorn Framework’. It is a corollary to a piece I wrote earlier in the month that centered around the concept of Talent Stacks - which deal with the hiring reality of rarely if ever finding the ‘perfect candidate’. This week’s piece takes that question further, challenging it through a different lens: what would it look like to get as close as possible to one?


Hope you enjoy, and as always please send any thoughts my way. Look forward to talking again next week!


- CG

Thinking On - Unicorns

Bears on Unicycles


Let’s start with a thought experiment.


I want you to imagine you are at the world’s greatest circus, an extravagant affair complete with all of the spectacular artistry one might expect from such a show - magicians vying for your attention with their sleights of hands, stilt walkers aimlessly stumbling around, fire eaters making balls of blaze disappear. It is past time for the big show, and after navigating your way through the sprawling fairgrounds you finally settle into your seat at the tent for the main performance.


It starts slowly with the basic acts, easing you and the rest of the audience into the event. Clowns engage spectators with humorous faces while a juggler tosses some clubs around in the air. A balloon artist crafts a ferocious dragon from his materials while a man rides a unicycle around the circular pit. The children ooh and ah, but not you - while your attention may be piqued, you’ve seen these tricks hundreds of times before. They’ll have to do better if they are to truly put you in a state of awe.


Slowly, the show builds to a crescendo. The acts get harder and more complex, more zany and wild. A man rides a motorcycle through a terrifying ring of fire. Performers start swinging from the trapeze bars, coordinating their stunts to create magic in the air. A man flies through the night like a rocket, shot out of a cannon with eyes on a target across the stage. Slowly, but surely, you are shifting to the edge of your sheet.


And then, the grand finale. Out walks a bear - 600 pounds of intimidating fur and sinew, growling ferociously to alert the crowd to his presence. His steps are slow and measured, as if he is building tension and anticipation with each one he takes on his way to center stage. As he reaches the middle and raises up onto his hind legs, the act is ready to begin.


He starts in simple fashion, with a coordinated dance routine consisting of some basic moves - friendly waves to the spectators, a ballerina twirl, a smoothly controlled bow. Impressive, but nothing earth-shattering - that is until he starts to show off. Suddenly the props are out and he’s balancing a ball on his nose, juggling pins in the air to bring the crowd into a frenzy until finally, it is time for his surprise trick.


In the far corner of the ring, the unicyclist re-emerges and rides to meet the bear. After some brief showmanship and goodbyes to the spectators, he returns attention to his furry friend by handing over his prized cycle. The bear grabs it in his paws, taking a moment to survey his new toy. He studies the singular rubber wheel, notices the glisten of the silver spokes that hold it together, and comes to rest his eyes on the jet black leather seat. And then, in but a moment, the laws of physics and biology seem to break. The bear is up on the cycle, balancing his gargantuan form on the tiny bike as he peddles around the arena. He peddles fast and then slow, jumping and spinning as the crowd rises to their feet in awe. Even you, amidst all your skepticism cannot help but follow for a simple reason - finally, after all the mediocre tricks, that is something that you have never witnessed before with your own eyes.


You’ve seen bears, and you’ve seen unicycles. But at no point have you ever seen them together - and after tonight you may never again.

While but a hypothetical (unless you are frequent circus goer, at which point cheers to you), the story of the bear on the unicycle carries a powerful lesson.


At its core it is a story about the power of combination, about how uniqueness and differentiation emerge by way of pairing together distinct skills not normally found together. In isolation, neither the bear nor the unicycle is particularly interesting - you have likely seen each alone hundreds of times before. But put them together and suddenly you have a new phenomenon, an outcome you have never seen. Your attention becomes captivated by the novelty that emerges - because while the bear alone is but a bear, the moment he hops on that unicycle he becomes something else entirely - a unicorn.


Let’s talk about what that means.

Definition


The definition of what a unicorn is will invariably depend on who you talk to.


Take two far opposites, as an example: a young girl and a venture capitalist. To the girl, the unicorn is a creature of magic and wonder; a gentle horse with a glittering horn that lives in an enchanted forest and offers the promise of granting her wildest wishes. In her eyes, the mystical being is an encapsulation of her hopes, her dreams, her imagination.


But the venture capitalist sees it differently, using the word to describe the rare startup that manages to cross the mythical line of a $1 billion dollar valuation. To the VC, a unicorn is less about magic and wonder and more about dollars and cents - a unicorn company represents a story about risk, vision, and the thrill of capturing the next big idea.


Two perspectives, two distinct definitions - one a representation of imagination, the other actuality. Because like all words ‘unicorn’ carries with it an air of context dependence, such that different locations will equate to different meanings. But regardless of their flexibility, words must have roots - core concepts that underly them, ideas that speak to the essence of their meaning. And in the case of unicorn, that foundational idea is about one thing alone - whether used in reference to horses or companies, athletes or employees. Rarity. It is a word that represents the scarce, one we use as an attempt to label the things rarely if ever seen. And as such it is a perfect encapsulation of the ephemeral, borderline magical wonders of the earth that make us pause in a sense of awe to say “wow, now that is something truly special.”


And while it carries great power as a word, there are implications waiting to be unlocked if we choose to convert it from label to framework. Because when used as a cognitive model through which to parse the world, the unicorn concept comes to serve as a mechanism through which to both identify and capture that which is truly unique - the outlier people, outlier places, and outlier things that drive the creation of inordinate amounts of value, and push the world forward in the process.


In regards to mental models, the great investor Charlie Munger was fond of saying that they must exist together in a ‘latticework’ - meaning they should be interconnected and tied together, each hanging off the other to create a connected structure by which you can move from one to the next. In the case of the Unicorn model, we can say the clothesline from which it hangs is that of Talent Stacks, which I wrote about earlier this month and described as the following:

Rather than focusing solely on individual skills, Talent Stacks emphasize the combination of various complementary abilities, character traits, and experiences that blend together in order to create a unique and valuable person. They resist the urge to treat skills in a check-box, “you have it or you don’t” type manner and instead recognize that skills exist on a gradient - meaning you can have differing levels of ‘proficiency’ depending on the area.


But they do not only look at skills in isolation - instead, they also look across the full combination of those skills to understand how those traits interact and overlap to create the entirety of the skillset…… [so rather] than trying to find the perfect peg for the hole in the board [Talent Stacks] give us more flexibility throughout the hiring process by acknowledging that we are not only hiring a person but also a complementary set of skills.

Talent Stacks are a great model for helping us look at the full skillset of an individual, but there is a hidden blind spot: they make no consideration of how hard specific skills are to find in combination together in the first place. This is an important recognition to make from my perspective because it accounts for one of the biggest oversights of talent evaluation - namely, that underlying traits are very rarely independent of each other. Humans have a tendency to think of skills as isolated cases, but the reality is that skills frequently carry ‘correlations’ between them - attachments that mean we are more likely to find certain skills paired together than others, like ingredients that complement each other in a recipe. When viewed through the lens of talent stacks, the natural implication is that a sort of ‘rarity’ scale emerges - certain stacks will carry a higher frequency rate in the world, while others will be harder to find.


In the grand schemes of talent evaluation and development, a failure to recognize the interconnectedness of traits leaves us short-sided, lacking the necessary level of appreciation for skill packages that are hard to find. And that can cause us to miss out on powerful opportunities to upgrade our companies, or even ourselves.


Recognizing the unique when it is in front of us requires an understanding of what unique means in the first place - and that is exactly what the Unicorn model helps us solve for. By taking a microscopic lens to the concept of Talent Stacks, the search for Unicorns challenges us to think in terms of frequencies and to ask the question “how likely is Skill A to be found with Skill B in the first place?”. When we answer that question first, we are then able to set a base-case expectation for a specific combination of talents, and thus gain a more appropriate level of respect for sets of traits that are rare to exist tied together. The result is that when we finally do find a unicorn, we are much less likely to overlook it because we are able to appreciate it in all of its glory.

Baseball’s Unicorn Amongst Unicorns


Let’s look at an example to help contextualize this, from the domain I know best: baseball.


Most, if not all of you, are familiar with the concept of the “5 Tool Player” from the traditional scouting perspective - the term used to describe the rare player that possesses each of baseball’s most important skills: hitting for average, hitting for power, running, fielding, and throwing. Traditionally, most players are strong in a few areas while showing weaknesses in others - like the big first baseman that can hit for both average and power but who may lose a foot race to a snail. The “5 Tool Player”, however, redefines expectations, creating a near mythical blend of baseball’s five talents in but a single athlete. The result is a player capable of impacting the game in nearly any scenario, in turn offering the team that employs them a unique competitive advantage because of their ability to perform at an elite level across multiple dimensions.


With respect to our current topic, the “5 Tool Player” is baseball’s ultimate version of a unicorn. And now, in the middle of a highly touted World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, is no better time to study some of these unicorns in their natural habitats. From Aaron Judge to Freddie Freeman, Juan Soto to Mookie Betts, this series is packed with unique stars that stand head and shoulders above the rest.


And yet, for all the star power on display in the Fall Classic, there is one that separates himself from the others: Shohei Ohtani. Even amidst all of baseball’s history, there has been perhaps no better encapsulation of the unicorn phenomenon on the diamond than the Dodger’s Japanese superstar. Let’s look at why.


Using MLB’s public tracking data (via Baseball Savant), we can put some objective context around Shohei’s uniqueness. To do so, let’s consider a few key metrics that more or less approximate his tools, primarily as an offensive player:

• Whiff% (Hitting for Average): A measure of how much contact a player makes (and thus a decent proxy for ‘hitting for average)
  

• Avg Exit Velocity (Hitting for Power): A measure of how hard a player hits the ball on average
  

• Sprint Speed (Running): A measure of a player’s top-end speed when running all out
  

• Arm Strength (Throwing): The average velocity for a defender’s competitive throws
  
  

Starting with Whiff%, Ohtani comes in with a value of 29.8% - meaning that he makes contact with the baseball on around 70% of his swings. While solid, there is nothing spectacular here as 162 different players (with a minimum of 400 plate appearances in 2024) showcased a lower Whiff% rate this season. Speed is a similar story for him, too, as his 28.1 m/s average sprint puts him in the 70th percentile for the league - a number that 169 different players topped this past year. Up to this point, nothing that looks like an incredible outlier. Yet things get interesting when we start to layer in both his power and throwing abilities, as his average exit velocity of 95.8 mph comes in at 2rd best in the league while (using his pitching FB velocity as a proxy) his 97 mph arm strength ranks as 5th best. So, what we are ultimately left with is two above average skills (contact & spring speed) and two elite ones (power and throwing).


But remember, unicorns are about combination - the resulting stack you get when you put all of these things together, and how unique that stack is when compared to all the others. And in the case of Shohei this where the true separation lies, through the lens of the following question: how many MLB players have a whiff rate less than 29.8%, an average exit velocity of higher than 95.8 mph, a sprint speed faster than 28.1 m/s, and an arm strength of stronger than 97 mph? If you’ve been following along, you can guess the answer - zero. When all the pieces are put together, he stands on an island by himself - a true unicorn amongst an already elite group of athletes. He is one of a kind, an outlier amongst outliers and the only player in MLB history to accomplish the feat of 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a single season. And all of that comes before you consider the fact that, when healthy, he pitches too. Unicorn, squared.


And so, within the frame of baseball alone, Shohei serves as a perfect encapsulation of the power of combining highly-indexed skills rarely found in combination with each other. But the unicorn phenomenon extends far beyond the realm of just sports, serving as an equally representative nomer for business founders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as it does for athletes like Ohtani and Patrick Mahomes.


Unicorns can be found anywhere and everywhere, so long as we know what we are looking for. And with that comes some powerful implications for both building companies and developing yourself as an individual.

Implications - Teams


With the above in mind, let’s talk about unicorns from the standpoint of hiring and building a team.


Like the 5 Tool Player in baseball, the unicorn employee - regardless of industry - is the most powerful type of person that you can add to your operation. They are the ‘impact players’ of your organization, the ones capable of taking on and solving a variety of problems across a broad scope of asks. The unicorn is the rare candidate that brings to bear a variety of unique but complimentary skills, talents that you may find separately in two different people but rarely combined within one - like a programmer who is exceptional with both backend data structuring and UX/visual design, or a baseball coach with both a robust understanding of analytical information and the ability to communicate it effectively to a player.


Depending on your domain, the general construct of a unicorn will look slightly different. The first step is to understand what those unique skill profiles are in your industry by outlining a wide bucket of traits and then determining the relative strength of correlation between them. Once you’ve done so it is time to go on the hunt - to find the people that seem to defy the normal pattern of talent stacks, those that stand out from the rest as a function of their unique blend of skills. And if you are fortunate enough to find one - that golden, mystical unicorn - the goal becomes singular: capture it at all costs.


Why? Because adding a unicorn to your team is the equivalent of taking a ‘hiring shortcut’. One of the great challenges of team building is that we are naturally limited by headcount - whether we are looking at a sports roster or an org chart, there is always an upward bound on the amount of people we can marshal towards any given problem at one time. Unicorns are the ultimate solution to this paradox - the more diversified and counterintuitive the skillset, the greater the likelihood they will be capable of finding solutions to the endlessly vast array of problems your team is likely to face. Rather than needing to find answers to questions via multiplicity, unicorns instead allow you to solve them via singularity. One person, many possibilities.


A powerful implication of unicorn skillsets is that they can be a leading indicator for impact to come down the road. CEOs and elite athletes alike teach us this lesson clearly - when we strip down their successes to the traits that underly them as in the Ohtani example, it seems all but inevitable that they would have wound up where they ultimately have. The unicorn model allows us to accelerate this identification process - rather than focusing on what a person has done (which is naturally limited when someone is first starting out in their career), it instead allows us to strip them down the traits that project what they will do. And that, in the grand scheme of talent evaluation and acquisition is a massive difference.


As such, the earlier you can identify unicorns the better - primarily because doing so allows you to benefit from all of the impact that they will have, but even more-so because unicorns are ultimately the ones that come to command the greatest premiums down the road. The earlier you can find them, the cheaper the price the price at which you can acquire them.


But ultimately, when matters much less than if. Beggars can’t be choosers, and in the case of the unicorn you have to take your shots to get them whenever they come. So again, if you are fortunate enough to find one - please do whatever it takes to capture it. I promise, you’ll thank me later.

Implications - Individuals

Now, up to this point we’ve spent a great deal of time talking about both what a unicorn is and how to find one. But there is an important backdrop that has been missing: namely, how do you as an individual become one yourself? Let’s wind down by providing some answers to this question.


A key realization here is that unicorns are not born so much as they are made. They are not people that have been graced by the hands of the gods, pre-ordained with unique talents that destine them for greatness. Even in the case of someone like Ohtani, we often undersell how much targeted effort goes into crafting what we ultimately come to recognize as an outlier skillset. I personally ascribe to the belief that anyone can make themselves a unicorn with the right roadmap properly executed. Doing so certainly takes time and dedication, but the path is there for any who choose to walk it.


Yet there are hurdles along the way, as unicorns are scarce for a reason. The overarching challenge to living life as a unicorn is the following: the journey to differentiation necessitates a willingness to become comfortable being uncomfortable. It is a path few are willing to walk, but the hard truth is that there is no other option. To become a unicorn one must be willing to step outside their comfort zone and areas of expertise, to go on a search for skills that do not come naturally as a function of personality or experience. You must be willing to take a hard look in the mirror and deal with the reality of what you see.


In the case that you are, let me posit a method through which to get started. Start by assessing the skills that you already have in place, the things you might commonly identify as your ‘strengths’. Once you have, ask the following questions: for any strength you possess, what is the counterbalancing, outlier skill on the opposite side of the equation? What is the complementary talent to your strength that is rarely found in combination with it?


More often than not, the path to differentiation lies through the answers that emerge to these questions. The easy part of becoming a unicorn means leaning into the things that already make you you - but the other, much harder part requires doing the work to add orthogonal skills to those that already exist. In doing so, you open up the opportunity to set yourself apart by living at the intersection of skills rather than any one alone, an important recipe for success in an era where it is becoming increasingly difficult to be #1 in the world at any given thing.


If you excel at softer skills like communication or empathy, learn how to augment those with harder skills like data analysis or programming. The same applies in reverse - if you are an outlier in your ability to perform technical analysis, recognize the value you can create by adding softer skills like storytelling to you stack of talents. Put simply: embrace opposites, lean into paradoxes. Make yourself scarce - and thus valuable - by becoming a 1 of 1, creating a non-traditional combination of skills that makes people stop and say “wow, I’ve never seen those two skills together in the same person”.


I can promise you that the benefits of doing so are endless. To become a unicorn means opening yourself up to a world of possibilities, as the more skills you can combine in one domain the likelier you will be to have success in others. Problems will fall apart in front of you, and doors will open that you never possibly imagined. Because at the end of the day, people are endlessly fascinated by outliers, and for good reason - they are the people that drive the world forward, the ones that accomplish the things we priorly thought to be impossible.


See, life is often more of a fairy tale than we like to believe and in this one, unicorns do exist. And yet while everyone wants a glimpse of that magic, few realize they are capable of it themselves - if only they have the courage to pursue it.

Hi Everyone!


Happy Thursday, and welcome back to another edition of The Gunn Show - making a rare late in the week appearance. The last couple weeks have been chaotic with travel and off-season strategy meetings, so we’ve gotten a bit off schedule. But things will be quieting down here soon and I’m looking forward to having more time to get back on the regular cadence.


I normally kick this newsletter off by saying that I hope you had a fantastic week, but today is the rare one where I can say that I know for a fact many of you did. Why is that? Well, because a great number of us were able to spend the last past weekend together in Knoxville for our annual pilgrimmage to Neyland Stadium.


For those reading yet unaware, this marks year 10 of our yearly trip to catch a Volunteer Football game in live action. What started back in 2015 as a ‘college football introduction’ trip for two of my Amherst Baseball teammates has since grown into a big family affair, one that brings together people from all different walks of our lives - parents, hometown friends, college teammates, wives, fiancés, and more. It is always one of my favorite weekends of the year with the opportunity to tie so many strands of life together, and this year’s edition did not disappoint. From Friday on we had much to celebrate with two engagements, a birthday, and a Sunday Shower for Baby G - all on top of a Big Orange overtime victory over the Florida Gators.


In a trip full of great ones, here are some of our favorite pictures from the weekend:

Now, onto this week’s topic. Baby G’s shower came at an appropriate time as January - and thus parenting season - are fast approaching. Naturally I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what is ahead, specifically around one important question: how the hell do you do this Dad thing?


Today’s newsletter is an attempt to tease some of those thoughts out. Hope you enjoy, and look forward to the next time this newsletter hits your inbox!


- CG

Thinking On - Parenting, Operating Systems, & ‘Figuring it Out’


Our baby shower this past weekend presented a great opportunity to reflect on the question of what it means to be a Dad - and specifically, what it looks like to be a good one. Because while we were surrounded by many people from various walks of our lives, there was one demographic that stood out to me in conversation amongst the rest - the ‘Dads’ in attendance, most notably my own father.


I’m a big believer in the value of what I call exemplars (or what others might call role models) - people that you can look to as a source of inspiration, ones that embody a set of ideals or characteristics you wish to one day live yourself. So naturally, as a first time father-to-be, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I may (or may not - considering how little attention I naturally payed for a long time) have absorbed from the many fantastic Dads I’ve been surrounded by throughout my life. Because while the time is now ripe to ask for the answers to that question, I’d be remiss if I didn’t realize that they have been showing me what some of those look like for many years.


And while I’ve taken various things from each of them, there is one thing that stands out above the rest: everyone does it differently. Every Dad is their own version, answering the question in their own way. Give 50 different Dads the same test and you will get 50 unique ways of parenting back.


Why is that? Well, because from my perspective it is due to the fact that parenting is not as simple as multiple choice; the ‘Dad’ test doesn’t come with pre-determined bubbles for you to neatly shade in like you did on your high school scantrons. Rather, parenting is much more like an open-ended test, one that challenges your creativity and critical thinking by forcing you to formulate your own responses - both to the world around you and to the child in front of you. There is no small, single subset of options because parenting doesn’t measure your recall so much as it measures your ability to adapt.


In an environment with no scripts, there will naturally be an infinite amount of possible outcomes. Which means one thing above all else: simply, you have to figure it out.


As I’ve asked around - to both people that have been on this journey for many years and those just beginning - this is by far the most common piece of advice I’ve gotten in return: You will figure it out, if only because you have to figure it out. There’s no other choice, and no-one gets the answers to the test before you have to take it. So you have to find them as you go. If that doesn’t make parenting a beautiful microcosm of life itself, then I don’t know what else does.


So as I’ve heard that bit of advice and thought more deeply about it, it’s made me come to think of parenting as a ‘skill’ that we are learning daily from the moment we are born. Why? Because from my vantage point the best description of life is as a constant see-saw of problems and solutions, a game in which each of us must navigate through the world facing a never-ending series of new challenges and doing our best to solve them. Whether in school, at work, or elsewhere, life is like a self-updating test that provides us with new questions we have never seen before, daily. Surprises are a certainty, but if we are to keep moving forward the only way to do so is to somehow, someway find a solution. To figure it out.


Returning back to the question of how to be a Dad, I think I’ve started to formulate a guideline for how I want to go about it: the goal, put simply, is to help your kids figure out life as best you can. In a sense, you are merely trying to teach them the same skill that you yourself are learning along the journey - the ability to problem-solve, to be faced with something new and find a path to a solution. Ultimately what that means for me is the following - I don’t want to give my kids the answer to the test so much as I as I want to help them find them for themselves. I want to teach them how to figure it out, whatever ‘it’ is.


The more I’ve thought about this concept of parenting and problem-solving, the more the technology nerd in me can’t help but see an analogy to the world of computers.


With our increasingly digital world, each of us has become well familiar with the concepts of ‘hardware’ and ‘software - the former serving as the nomer for the physical nuts and bolts of the computer while the later relates to the programs and instructions that make it tick.


Humans, while different in a myriad of ways, are more akin to computers than you might think. The things we see in humans are our own versions of hardware - things like our bones, our skin, our eyes and more that give us our physical form. But we also have our own version of software - our minds - that are always running, like a program in constant update mode according to the information in the world around us. And while it is our hardware that sets our foundation, it is ultimately our software - our ability to think, to learn, and to problem solve - that determines how successfully we will navigate through life.


Each of us comes pre-installed with our own version of a fundamental human ‘operating system (OS)' in the same way your Apple MacBook would arrive with MacOS at the ready. The starting point of that software is important in that you want to be running the most ‘up to date’ version possible - after all, who wants to run v1 when v17 is available? But as we move through life we quickly come to learn that updates are required - it is easy for an OS to fall out of style, and some are more suited for certain phases of life than others. The temper tantrums from our BabyOS are not likely to do us any favors as we head to school, in the same way that the procrastination function from SchoolOS won’t set us up well for the workforce. As the seasons of life change and the demands with them, so too must the software running our lives.


To do so requires the mental equivalent of hitting the “Install Update” button,
putting your brain into debug mode to take a cold, hard look at the programs you are using to process the world. As life presents new challenges, some of our programs will be tested - some will be close to right but just missing a small piece, while others may be completely off base. Solving problems in the worlds simply means updating our personal OSs to keep the things that work and discard what no longer applies.


The beautiful thing is that just like when Apple pushes that big red update alert to your phone, life will continue to present countless opportunities to make the switch to a better OS. So much so that we could think of our day-to-day lives as a constant stream of ‘Install Update’ push notifications, with every interaction or decision a chance to put our mental software to the test.


But alas, there is a catch - only you can be the one to make that update. People can make suggestions, but the decision ultimately is yours to make. In the same way that you have the choice of whether or not to update your phone, you have the choice of whether or not to ‘learn’ from the world around you and press your personal ‘install update’ button at the right time, in the right place.


And that, to me, is what much of parenting is about.


With all of this in mind, parenting to me is thus akin to becoming a software engineer. Each of us has to learn how and when to update our personal operating systems, our set of programming and solutions for how we navigate the world, with the same being true for our kids. And while none of us have this process mastered to a T, it is almost certain that when it comes time to be a parent we will be running a higher level lifeOS version than our children. The reason is simple - time, and the experience that comes with it, has presented us with more opportunities for updates along the way.


So while we never stop adjusting our own programming, parenting thus becomes about the process of helping someone else update theirs. With this recognition in mind, the onus of a parent thus becomes to coach, massage, and teach our children how to make updates to their own systems. We must teach them how to think for themselves so that they are capable of solving whatever the world demands of them.


Many times, I think, parents go about this by trying to tweak their child’s OS to be more like their own. But while this is a good start, parenting only from this standpoint is likely to create some blind spots along the way if only because while the experiences of our children may somewhat mirror our own, they will not be carbon copies. It is a near certainty that our kids will face problems in the worlds that we have never seen ourselves, ones that our own OSs are not positioned to solve. When those moments come, our kids will have to be equipped to make their own updates, to find their own answers. Simply put, they will have to figure it out, in the same way we are trying to ourselves.


And so as I zoom out on the process of becoming a Dad, I know that there is a lot coming - both for me to learn, and for me to teach. But if there are two things above all else I’m hopeful to pass along to my kids they are the following - I want to make sure they have the ‘install update’ button written into their software and that they know how to use it when the time is right.


Because ultimately I want them to be able to do the same thing I’m going to be trying to do along the journey with them: figure it out.

Reading


Dad Mode - Evan Armstrong, Every (~8 min)


The first of two ‘dad’/parenting shares this week, this from Evan Armstrong of Every. There’s a lot of great insight in here centered around the concept of parenting being a forcing function for personal growth, including this banger of an opening line:

The secret to personal growth isn't in self-help books or ayahuasca trips. It's in a $1.99 pregnancy test from Target.

Worth the read if you get the time.


Burn the Playbooks - Packy McCormick, Not Boring (~7 min)


Just like there is no one way to parent, there is no one way to educate. But in a world that is becoming increasingly specialized, this was a great read from Packy on the value of a broad education, stemming from some recent comments/research on the inability of modern students to read in-depth books from start to finish. There are a number of reasons why, such as declining attention spans in a hyper-digitized world, but Packy calls out one in particular: success has been over-playbooked, which has led to a broader issue:

The problem isn’t that kids are competing or studying hard, but that they’re narrowing.

Great food for thought.

Hi Everyone!


Happy Sunday, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.


This past one was a sentimental one on our end for a couple of reasons. First, Brooklyn and I had our pregnancy photo-shoot in Dallas last weekend and the pictures turned out better than we could have hoped. It’s been an exciting journey so far and we are looking forward to being able to look back on these as we get further down the road. January can’t come soon enough! Here are a couple of our favorites:

To top off the week, we flew to Nashville on Friday for a family & friend filled weekend with a couple of big events as Brooklyn’s brother Cory proposed to his now-fiancé Rylee (she said yes!) and Sunday was the ‘girls-only’ edition of Baby G’s baby shower. As I’ve written about here before, these types of experiences with everyone in the same place are few and far between for us, helping make them extra special. It is always a lot for us to squeeze into but a few days but we know the long-term memories far outweigh any of the short term stress and can’t wait for the next time for us all to get back together again.


Unfortunately, all of this means that there was a limited amount of time this weekend to put finger to keyboard. So in lieu of some in depth thoughts this week, I’ll instead point you back to the piece I published on Tuesday of this week in the event you missed it, which centers around a mental model I use in thinking about skill development, hiring, and team building called ‘Talent Stacks’. I’d put it up there for one of my favorite pieces I’ve written to date, so I’d love it if you’d give it a read and pass along any thoughts you may have. You can find it by clicking here.


Lastly, I’ve included a couple of shares that I found especially interesting this week. Hope you enjoy and let me know if any catch your eye specifically, or if you have something you’ve come across yourself that you think others need to see.


Talk next week.


- CG

Reading


Nick Saban on Transformational vs. Transactional Coaching (~3 min)

In my eyes, Saban’s retirement prior to the 2024 college football season was a huge boon to the sport for a couple of reasons. First and foremost as a Volunteer fan, no longer do we have to worry about him patrolling the sidelines in crimson and white intent on ruining any chances of the opposition leaving with a smile on their face after a Saturday mixup with the Tide. That responsibility now falls on Kaelen DeBoer, and for as impressive as the Tide were against Georgia two weeks ago the Vanderbilt stunner on Saturday was unlike anything we saw with a Saban coached team for the last two decades. But while a more fallible Bama team is certainly a positive for all of us Tide haters across the sport, there is an even bigger win that has come out of Saban’s retirement from the sidelines and subsequent shift to the broadcast desk: we now get to see in the open what his players and coaches saw in the locker rooms for countless games and speeches. The insight he has been providing on College Gameday throughout the course of the year has been fascinating to listen to, and I thought this take on the difference between “transformational and transactional coaching” to be especially good. Worth taking 3 minutes of your day to give it a listen.


Make the Complex Simple and Adapt on the Fly: How Kevin O’Connell Leads Electric Vikings (~12 min)


The Minnesota Vikings have been one of the most exciting stories in the NFL with having jumped out to a 5-0 record to start the 2024 season. But while ‘24 has certainly been impressive, I’ve been fascinated by what they’ve been able to accomplish dating back to 2022 when they won 13 games, with 11 of those wins coming by one score. The Vikings have had a tumultuous couple years of injuries and both player/staff turnover, but even amidst all of that chaos the steadying and adaptable force of Kevin O’Connell has kept them on track for success. This was a great read into the ‘how’ behind the scenes that provides some important lessons on the value of leadership in times of chaos when things are not going to plan.


The Intelligence Age by Sam Altman (~5 min)


This was a powerful, quick read from OpenAI’s founder and leader Sam Altman on how humans and AI will interact into the future to create prosperity for society. I love being able to get a behind the scenes look into the minds of the people impacting the future of the planet, and found Sam’s perspective on the power of technology to be especially insightful. Two of my favorite lines from the piece:

Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.

I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.

Hey Everyone!

Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you had a fantastic week as always.

It was officially “bye week” on my end for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, we said “bye” to Arizona and the 2024 Minor League Baseball Season as we officially wrapped up Instructional League on Friday. As the last on-field item of the year, Instructs serves as the bookend for a long summer and with it in the rearview mirror we now turn our attention to prepping for 2025. It was a fun and productive camp for us, but I know myself and the rest of our staff are looking forward to the opportunity to re-charge at home with family and friends over the next few weeks as the off-season officially begins.

Secondly, the Vols were idle on Saturday for their first bye week of the season, meaning we got to sit back and watch all of the carnage that took place in Week 5 of the college football season. It was a Saturday to behold with great games across the board, including a couple of upsets that should pay dividends for Tennessee down the stretch of the season if a College Football Playoff opportunity is still on the table as we head into December. Sometimes graphics are more suited to capture situations than words themselves, so with that in mind here I present to you what it felt like to be a Tennessee fan this weekend:

Now, onto something I will try to capture in words for this week’s edition.

With Monday marking the final day of the 2024 Major League Baseball regular season (and sadly, the end to the World Series title defense for the Rangers), many of us are now moving onto an equally important time of the year - the offseason. It is a time to re-coup and recover, but also one of the most important periods of the calendar as the decisions made over the next 5 months are critical in laying the foundation for success in 2025 and beyond. Trades will be made and free agents signed as clubs look to bolster their rosters.

And yet while the player personnel side of things garners much of the public attention, there is a less public but equally important game being played behind the scenes - hiring season. October and November are the two busiest months of the year from a staffing standpoint as clubs look to bolster their rosters of employees - whether that be from a front office, scouting, analytics, or on-field coaching perspective.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see both sides of this period - both as a prospective applicant nearly 7 years ago and as someone now responsible for helping man the entry ports for the people that we bring into our organization. As such, I always find my mind consumed this time of year with hiring and interviewing as we try to continually refine our processes to ensure we are bringing in the best possible people to join our group. I’ll be frank - when I was first put into the position where I was responsible for interviewing and hiring people, I had approximately zero idea what I was doing. And, to be even franker - that might actually be generous. I was grossly overmatched from the start and knew it - in less than a one year span I went from being the one submitting 30+ applications to one of the ones responsible for reviewing them.

That flip in responsibilities kicked off a long journey of learning of which I am even now just in the mid-stages. I read books, studied research articles, and built templates - all with the goal of mastering the craft of interviewing and hiring as best I could. And while I’m not going to sit here and claim that I have anything figured out, I do think I’ve learned a good deal on how to navigate the process.

So over the next couple of newsletters, I’d like to make an attempt to put pen to paper on some of the lessons and mental models I’ve found to be useful in the process. Partly as an attempt to crystalize some of my own thoughts on the matter, but also in the hopes that someday these ideas may help someone that finds themselves in a similar “oh shit” position to where I was five years ago.

We’ll start with the mental model that sits at the top of the list for most useful frameworks when thinking about interviewing, hiring, and developing talented people.

I call them ‘Talent Stacks’. Let’s dive in.

- CG

PS - As you’ve likely noticed, this edition of the newsletter is being sent on a Tuesday rather than on the normal Sunday cadence. The reason behind it: as I started to dive into Talent Stacks this weekend, I realized I had a lot more to say than I initially thought. So I decided to take the time to give the topic it’s proper focus and say it right rather than saying it rushed. I think the resulting piece ended up being worth the wait.

Thinking On - Talent Stacks

When I first started hiring, I was under the illusion that it was a simple process, akin to a math equation where all you have to do is make 1+1 equal 2.

My initial stance was that hiring is a basic match making game, one where the process would differ based on the organization or position but in which the goal was ultimately the same: find the person most suited to succeed in the job you are looking to fill. And just like any game, I thought, hiring should have a clear strategy or roadmap for winning. So I set out to figure out what that was.

I began like most managers and companies: by creating a standard job description with a list of desired ‘attributes’ or ‘qualifications’ - the things that myself, my coworkers, and our organization deemed to be essential components to success for the roles we were hiring for. From there I scripted out a series of questions meant to unearth those questions through conversation, ones I would ask in interview settings with candidates and subsequently ‘grade’ their responses on a hand-crafted rubric. My thought at the start was that by creating a clearly defined process up front with a logical series of steps, I would make the decision easy on the back end. With enough candidates screened and the right questions asked, I couldn’t help but make the ‘right’ decision and hire the ‘best’ person when push came to shove. Or at least so I believed.

But the more I went through my roadmap, the more I kept running into a specific issue: each role would have hundreds of applicants and dozens of interviews, but for some reason I was never able to find the person that checked every single one of the boxes. I was looking for the perfect candidate, but was never able to find them. And even after re-checking and updating every layer of the process - from the qualifications to the questions to the grading system and everything in between - I kept getting the same outcome. It took me some to figure out why.

Over time I came to see the issue wasn’t with the process itself, but instead with my expectations of what the process would uncover: the perfect candidate. The one that satisfied every condition, had all of the prerequisite skills, and fit every qualification to a T. I was searching for gold, but doing it like a fool. I was looking for the perfect candidate when the truth is that the perfect candidate doesn’t exist.

It was a harsh truth to learn, but one that has paid dividends since. Because once I came to the recognition that I would never find the exact fit for whatever role I was hiring - the perfectly cut square peg for the square hole - I recognized that I needed to start looking at the process a little bit differently.

Those early experiences forced me to go back to the drawing board. I realized I needed to go deeper and question many of the assumptions I had made on what a good hiring process looked like on a number of avenues, but especially on one in particular: I had to re-think what it meant to be ‘skilled’ in the first place. A couple of observations from two distinct industries helped me gain a better understanding.

The first came from a nearby place - the field. One of the most remarkable parts about competitive athletics is that ‘talent’ comes in all shapes an sizes. Tall or short, fast or slow, big or small - it is a unique feat of human performance that no two players are exactly alike and thus there is no singular path to success. Each sport has it’s own version of this talent distribution, such that you can define a bucket of ‘top performers’ and find a highly diverse group of players that constitutes it. Take baseball, for example, and the juxtaposition of Aaron Judge next to Jose Altuve. Or perhaps football, with Tyreek Hill and his 5’9” frame in the context of physical WRs like DK Metcalf and AJ Brown.

What sticks out like a sore thumb when you start putting players next to each other is that their on-field accomplishments often resemble each other more so than their skills do. Said differently, the outcomes might be the same but the path to getting there can take many different routes. As an example, Hill and Brown are 1st and 4th respectively over the last three seasons in total yardage, and yet they get there in completely different ways - Hill is a burner that creates major problems for defenses by simply outrunning them, while Brown relies more on physicality combined with explosiveness to create separation and rack up yards after the catch. The ultimate point is this: player performance is the emergent result of various complementary abilities that blend together in order to create a valuable skillset, but there is no perfect recipe. Instead, there exists an infinite amount of possible combinations that can lead to successful outcomes and successful players. The same can be said for staff.

A second parallel analogy to this concept from on the field can be found off of it - by borrowing from the technology industry and their concept of a ‘tech stack’. For technology companies, a tech stack refers to the combination of software, tools, frameworks, programming languages, technologies, and more that are used in combination with each other to create a high functioning operation. They are the key components both on the back-end and front-end of impactful companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and more, and share a few key attributes:

• They are interdependent, meaning that each of the technologies in a stack work together to create a seamless experience;
  

• They are customizable, meaning that the company can pick and choose different components based off of their needs; and
  

• They are tailored, meaning that no two tech stacks are likely to be the same as different companies possess different goals.
  

What tech stacks allow for is a sort of ‘picking and choosing’ process, where you as a company can first assess your needs and then pick from a suite of tools that can service them. As it turns out, the interdependence with which they operate and their subsequent customizability are both critical features, as they give companies flexibility to adapt as new problems arise over time. Tech stacks do not remain stagnant so much as they evolve over time, meaning that companies can add or subtract components as needed based on the demands of their specific industry. Is your site performance struggling with increased traffic? Change the programming language that underlies it. Will AI transform the way your business operates? Find an AI agent that you can plug directly into your operation that will enhance the way customers interact with your data.

Zooming out and putting these two ideas - variable talent sets and tech stacks - together, we get the mental model I’ve come to rely on the most in the hiring process: Talent Stacks.

The way I think of them is the following: rather than focusing solely on individual skills, Talent Stacks emphasize the combination of various complementary abilities, character traits, and experience that blend together in order to create a unique and valuable person. They resist the urge to treat skills in a check-box, “you have it or you don’t” type manner and instead recognize that skills exist on a gradient - meaning you can have differing levels of ‘proficiency’ depending on the area. But they do not only look at skills in isolation - instead, they also look across the full combination of those skills to understand how those traits interact and overlap to create the entirety of the skillset. By looking both at individual ‘talents’ and the subsequent stack they form, Talent Stacks give us a dual model that can be applied to both individuals and - as we will see in a moment - teams.

I’ve become fond of the Talent Stacks model because it serves as a direct response to the recognition that there never has been and never will be a perfect candidate for any role. Instead of trying to find the perfect peg for the hole in the board, they give us more flexibility throughout the hiring process by acknowledging we are not only hiring a person but also a complementary set of skills. They encourage us to heed the lessons we’ve seen from both athletes and companies alike - that there are a multitude of ways to be successful in a given role with many different possible combinations of talents that can give rise to that success.

An analogy here can be helpful. Say I gave you a 1000 piece LEGO kit, and asked you to build a dragon. Depending on how the pieces fit together, you could have hundreds or even thousands of ways to build your mythical creature of choice - but you would take them and do your best. Now suppose once you finished I asked you to build that dragon again, but to make it better - more vibrant, more detailed, more imposing. The lessons you learned in that first trial would come in handy, as you’d then have a detailed idea of both the pieces you were working with and how they fit together. But since this dragon needs to be better, you would take those LEGOs and put them together in process that is distinct from the first. You might satisfy those conditions by choosing to prioritize some shapes in certain locations, or by putting specific colors next to each other. Your roadmap would be different, but in the end the result would be the same - a dragon made of 1000 (or less) LEGOs. Two different processes to get a similar, yet slightly different result.

Talent Stacks work in the same was as a LEGO set, where each skill is a block that you add to build a unique structure. Some blocks are foundational, like basic communication or problem solving abilities, while others are more specialized or advanced, such as being able to code in a specific programming language as a computer scientist or throw good batting practice as hitting coach. Like the components of a tech stack, these blocks can be rearranged or added to over time as different challenges and opportunities are presented - in any way you want. But the ultimate key - and why it is essential to think of talents as a stack rather than in isolation - is that the skills must be complementary to each other in some way. Like our LEGO blocks, it is critical that individual talents fit together neatly so that they can enhance each other - or else the totality of the skillset will suffer.

When we look at hiring through the lens of Talent Stacks, some valuable insights emerge - both at the individual and team levels.

In regards to the individual, a key lesson is that a person’s stack at a given point in time will not necessarily be the same stack that will exist into the future. This is because talents, in general, are cumulative - when you come pre-programmed with a certain skill, it is not likely that you will lose it in the future in the same way that you will not simply forget how to ride a bike. Talent Stacks thus recognize and appreciate the opportunity for growth, such that a given candidate’s stack can evolve over time as they enhance strengths, shore up weaknesses, and add new capabilities to their skillset.

An important corollary here is that allowing for upside in the long term gives us the ability to make compromises in the short-term. The backdrop of the imperfect candidate naturally necessitates that we make sacrifices, picking and choosing certain high index skills at the expense of others. Talent Stacks allow us to do so, and in turn place a high priority on determining the traits that you as a manger believe to be the most easily teachable or developable. The best case scenario thus becomes identifying and acquiring people with talent stacks that are highly proficient in skills that are difficult to improve, while being willing to sacrifice in areas you know you are uniquely positioned to enhance as a group.

But where things get incredibly interesting is when you take the concept of Talent Stacks and start to apply it to building a team. Fortunately the concept scales neatly to this level because teams are by nature combinations of individuals - and thus combinations of individual Talent Stacks. So in the same way that one person will have their own stack, your team will have one too - one that represents the combination of all the skills brought to the table by the people in it.

At the team level, Talent Stacks are freeing in a number of ways. First and foremost, they give you flexibility by way of synthesis. Rather than relying on a single person to fill multiple existing gaps in your group’s skillset, Talent Stacks instead provide an avenue to plug your holes by leaning on a diverse combination of individuals. Because talents are frequently ‘plug and play’, any gap in knowledge or skill that your team possesses can quickly be filled by hiring the right person with that trait already present in their stack.

Take the example where your group is lacking two hypothetical skills, “A” and “B”. From a traditional hiring vantage point, there would be a strong inclination to look for a singular candidate that brings both of those skills to the table - a “two birds, one stone” type hire. But the challenge with that line of thinking comes when we move from theory and start dealing in the realm of probability: the more individual skills we are looking for in a single person, the less likely that candidate is to exist in the first place. Add on top of this another consideration - what if A and B are two traditionally uncorrelated skills, such as data analysis and emotional intelligence? Now you are no longer looking for a candidate - you are looking for a unicorn instead. Good luck.

But when this problem is viewed through the lens of Talent Stacks, you now have a solution. Rather than hiring one person to plug both holes, you can instead hire two: one person that indexes highly on Skill A, and another that indexes highly on Skill B. This is a much safer - and realistic - bet than putting all of your eggs in one basket. And there is something beautiful that comes as a result.

Up to this point, we’ve mostly discussed how the Talent Stacks model can help us ‘patch up’ the overall skillset of a group at a point in time. But there is an important piece that this lens neglects - namely, that like a recipe from the kitchen, teams involve a healthy dose of “mixing” - of responsibilities, of personalities, and - especially - of skills. Given this fact, we can start to see that Talent Stacks are not only valuable to teams in the short-term but also carry heavy freight for the long run.

Because not only does adding various talents to your group’s stack benefit the team itself, the interoperability present in teams means that there is also a major carry over effect to the individuals already within it. As you bring in new skillsets to your group that were priorly lacking and your team members interact over time, you’ll notice an important “rub off” effect of one person on the others. And as that new member interacts with pre-existing ones, a bi-directional growth process occurs - they begin to teach others in your team the skills they possess, thus raising not only the floor of your overall team but also enhancing the skillsets of their teammates. The same phenomenon also occurs in reverse - the priorly present team members teach the newcomer their skills, thus helping them grow as they assimilate to the team.

As such, we can now understand why the complimentary nature of Talent Stacks is so crucial to pin down. Returning to the analogy of a recipe, you need flavors - ie skills - that pair well together so that each can enhance the other. If they don’t fit together, the taste that comes out on the other end is all but certain to be a little ‘off’. In order to get the recipe of Talent Stacks right, there has to be a base level of compatibility to both the people you bring into your team and their subsequent skillsets. You need to walk the line of similarity and uniqueness deftly in order to create the right blend that both enhances the full stack of your group while also allowing the people within it to grow as individuals.

Now, this letter has gone on long enough. But in zooming back out to think about Talent Stacks as a whole, I am hopeful that you can now see why the model carries so much power in my mind. It serves as both an antidote and an elixir, a solution to the common pitfalls of searching for the perfect candidate and a mechanism through which we can create teams that enhance the value of all those within it. There are few more impactful frameworks that I use to guide my hiring and team building process, and I am hopeful you’ve taken some things from it that you can blend into yours.

Hey everyone!


Happy Sunday and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.It has been a memorable (and busy one!) for the Gunn’s on a number of fronts.


We kicked off the weekend by celebrating the wedding of two of our good friends in Newport, RI. It was a perfect event in a perfect place with - most importantly - perfect people. These are always times that we end up cherishing the most as building a life in Dallas has at times come at the expense of seeing many of the people we hold most dear to us. But the reality of that fact makes moments in time where we do get the opportunity to spend time together extra special - there is a higher premium the fewer and further between they are, meaning you have to take advantage of them when you get them. And do that we did.


Saturday was also a big night for the #6 Tennessee Volunteer football team as they went on the road to Norman and took down the #15 Oklahoma Sooners in a primetime night game. In case you need a stat to contextualize the importance (and rarity) of the win, last night marked the first road victory for the Vols over a top 15 team since 2006. Yes, you read that right - nearly 20 years. Apologies to my good friend Jonathan Gelnar for the rough welcoming to the SEC for OU - feel free to blame it on the injury report…. It’s good times on Rocky Top right now and can’t wait for what’s ahead for the rest of the fall.


And as if those two events weren’t enough, Brooklyn and I capped it off by flying to Knoxville on Sunday for a mashup of two of our favorite things - Morgan Wallen and Neyland Stadium. It was a spectacular event from start to finish in one of the best venues in America and unlike any concert I have ever seen. From Wallen walking out with Josh Heupuel, Nico Iamaleava, Bru McCoy, and Peyton Manning (in full uniform!) to Rocky Top on full blast with 80,000 fans screaming late into the evening, it was a true Tennessee 10/10 experience that is hard to put into words. So to compensate, here are some of my favorite shots from the evening:

Now, unfortunately the downside of all the weekend festivities the last few days means that there has not been much time to write - so in lieu of some in depth thoughts I’ll instead use today’s newsletter to share a major piece of news for those yet to hear it:


Brooklyn and I are very blessed to say that we have a baby boy on the way, coming January 2025!

We are incredibly excited to start this journey in expanding our family, and are greatly appreciative for all the love and support from those that have reached out already. Time will tell if there is a glove and bat in his future but regardless we know a new light is coming to our life and cannot wait for our little +1 to be here soon.


I’ll be sharing some thoughts on the experience of becoming a dad in future editions of The Gunn Show, but we’ll leave it at that today and I’ll catch you all next week!


Talk soon!


- CG

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Hey everyone!


Happy Sunday and welcome back to The Gunn Show. As always, hope you all had a fantastic week.


It was a great one on my end here out in Arizona as we wrapped up the first week of our three week Fall Instructional League. A yearly post-season camp that consists of a subset of our younger players, Instructs is one of the more unique portions of the baseball calendar as the timing allows for us to create a highly controlled - and thus specifically tailored - development environment for both staff and players. I always find it to be one of the more impactful camps we run, as each year I look back on things that were accomplished across the system and know much of the groundwork was laid during the prior Instructs to serve as a launching pad into the following season. Looking forward to the next two weeks of work to set ourselves up for a big 2025 (as well as the cooler weather that is on its way to AZ).


With that said, let’s get into this week’s edition which centers around a topic I’ve been thinking deeply on recently: questions and answers. Hope you all enjoy, and thanks for reading. Catch you next week!


- CG

Thinking - On Questions and Answers

Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. - Tim Ferriss

6 years ago, I read a book that changed my perspective.


It was a very thick book - one with a bright orange cover, a black embossed spine, and 672 pages of tactical wisdom for life from some of the world’s most elite performers. Written by Tim Ferriss and titled Tools of Titans, it still to this day stands as one of the best curations I’ve come across on the habits, tactics, and routines that high achievers from billionaires and icons alike accredit their success to. If you want to know what excellence looks like behind the scenes, Tools of Titans contains the answers within its pages.

But for all the powerful insights packed in the book - from things like Jamie Foxx’s commentary on the value of adaptability or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s discourse on the importance of vision and goal setting - one stood out in particular: to get all of that information in one place, someone had to go collect it. And so, after a 672-page journey of insights into some of the world’s most famous and successful people, I unexpectedly came away most intrigued by the person that had managed to put those pages together. Tim.


After I finished Tools of Titans, I went down the Tim Ferriss rabbit hole. I bought and binged three of his other books (The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4 Hour Body, and Tribe of Mentors), scoured the archives of his blog, and listened to over a hundred of his podcast episodes where he interviews world class performers. As a self-admitted nerd that has a major interest in high-performance, the content he was consistently putting out fit my inclinations to a tee. But the more of Tim’s content I consumed, the more I started to notice something: the magic of what he did was not in just getting access to some of the most impressive people on the face of the earth - that was table stakes in his profession as an interviewer and podcaster. Instead, it was what Tim was able to get those people to reveal when he had the opportunity to sit down with them that truly sets him apart.


From my perspective, there is something important to be learned from observing Tim’s success as an interviewer: the value of asking good questions. Because while the information he is able to parse out of his guests is ultimately what shines in the light, it is important to recognize that the insights only come as a function of the inquisitive journey that Tim takes them on. There is an order of operations at play, such that good answers can only come from good questions. Or, as Tim himself has said before: ‘Want better answers? Ask better questions.’


This interplay between questions and answers stands out to me as a key concept for creating a life of value for a couple of reasons.


The first is quite simple - at some point, life is just one big exercise in asking the right questions to get to the right things. Humans are a problem-solving species, such that the mechanism for us moving forward in the world is to find ways to solve problems that stand between where we are now and where we want to be. But to solve those problems requires us to find solutions - how do we do so? You guessed it - we find solutions by asking questions. To tweak an old adage - it’s questions, all the way down.


The second reason is for something I’ve been observing of late, which has caused me to think more deeply on the concept: it seems to me that one of the clearest commonalities amongst the highest performers is that they are excellent at asking the right questions.


Any easy place to see this in action is the business or investment industry. If we consider a ‘question’ as a foundational starting point for an idea, then it becomes quite clear that many businesses are simply products of people asking the right questions at the right time. Mark Zuckerberg started asking the right questions on what an online social experience could look like, and voilà, Facebook was born. The same could be said of Peter Thiel and Pay Pal, Elon Musk and Tesla, and Jeff Bezos and Amazon. For this group specifically and many of their peers, it’s notable how many of these successful CEOs are ‘serial entrepreneurs’ rather than ‘one hit wonders’ - they have carved careers out of multiple successful ventures and big wins rather than just one at a single point in time. And when we view it through the lens of questions and answers, it makes sense why - they are elite question askers that dominate a simple formula: Right Questions + Right Time = Powerful Answers.


The more I’ve been around high level decision makers and executives, the more I’ve come to believe this to be true. The way I see it, the people that are the best at getting answers do so only because they are the best at asking the questions that give rise to them. They ask good questions and then get good answers, not the other way around.


When viewed through the lens of personal growth - whether in your career or elsewhere - I think this provides a helpful framework: focus on asking better questions first, and let everything else fall into place later.


Admittedly, this piece of advice is tougher to execute than it might seem - likely because I don’t think question asking mode is our default programming. From a young age we are taught that the way to sound smart or be smart is by having answers - not necessarily questions. You only get points on a test by answering the questions your teacher asked, after all - not by asking her your own in return. The same is true when you first start a job as intern or in an entry level role - your boss or some executive has questions for you that they want answers for, and you get your credibility by providing them. They ask, you answer.


But again, there is a catch here: in order to provide answers you have to ask questions. So regardless of whether your primary responsibility is as the question answerer (like an intern) or the question asker (like a CEO), at some point your ability to get what you want out of your life will depend on whether or not you can ask the right questions to get the right answers. The more we can think about life in this way, the better off I think we’ll be.


So I’d encourage us all to take a page out of Tim’s book, and recognize that the formula for success is relatively simple: Better Questions → Better Answers. That is the game to be played, and the order in which to do so. Because as Tim himself has said life rewards the specific ask, and who wouldn’t want that?

Reading

Thought Partner - Greg Shove (~8 min)


If you can spare the 7-8 minutes to read through this, I’d highly recommend that you do so. A great share in Scott Galloway’s weekly column, the piece focuses on a core idea I’ve discussed frequently in this newsletter: how to use AI as a tool to upgrade what you are capable of. I liked the manner in which Greg frames AI’s potential as a ‘thought partner’ such that it can help us think more clearly and effectively - but only so long as we know the right questions to ask it. There are some helpful ideas in here on how to properly pair up with AI as a cognitive teammate - something I think will be critical for success in the future, because as the piece notes “AI won’t take your job, but someone that understands AI will.”


Tell Good Stories - Jack Raines (~6 min)


I have become endlessly fascinated in recent years by the inner-workings of good storytelling, and this was a great article by Jack on the power that good narrative can carry. As Jack writes, it is hard to beat a good story when it comes time to make an idea stick because stories, at their core, are ‘mediums for helping an audience ‘get it’, whatever ‘it’ may be'. Good stories create a sense of relatability and lead us as humans to form some type of feelings associated with them - it is these feelings that in turn give the stories their power by creating a ‘hook’ that an idea can neatly attach too. So let this piece be both a reminder and a challenge - a reminder to recognize that stories are the best medium humans have invented for communicating our ideas, and a challenge for each of us to get to telling them.

Public Speaking Mastery - Sahil Bloom (~6 min)


It’s not too often anymore that I come across a completely new framework or mental model that makes me stop and pause, but that happened to me this week after reading through this piece from Sahil. In it, he provides a great concept for how to improve your public speaking: Winston’s Star. Coined by late MIT computer science professor Patrick Winston, the technique centers around making sure each speech you have is centered around 5 key ‘points of a star’ - symbol, slogan, surprise, salient, and story. I like having the ability to condense big, often amorphous public speaking opportunities into concise and executable checklist type items, and will be giving this a go at some point in the near future.

Hey Everyone!

Welcome back to The Gunn Show. A day late here as a function of some travel over the weekend/today, but hope you all had a fantastic Labor Day weekend and carried that momentum into the short work week.

I was able to spend the week back home in Dallas in advance of heading out to Arizona for our three week Instructional League, and flew to Charlotte to watch the Vols dominate NC State in Bank of America Stadium, home of the (once) proud Carolina Panthers. It was a collision of two worlds with having spent countless Sundays growing up making the trek east from Kingsport, TN to the Queen City to watch the Panthers play.

With both NCAA and NFL football back in full force, it is not lost on me that Tennessee is likely the best team that will inhabit the South sideline benches (where the Panthers normally sit) for the 2024-2025 season. Saturdays will be fun this year….. Sundays, not so much. Oh well. On to a tune up game in Knoxville against Kent State next week to set up what I think will be the defining game of the Tennessee schedule this year - Oklahoma on the road in Norman. Looking forward to a big one two weeks from now and the trash talk to come (looking at you, Gels).

As promised last week, back to sharing some more in depth thoughts on a topic I’ve been thinking about: how changing inputs doesn’t always give you the outputs you expect. I’ve taken to calling this the ‘Superstar Slider Fallacy’ (borrowed from the Madden NFL video game) and think it is a great example of the importance of understanding the inter-connectedness of systems, and subsequently how we need to think carefully about what trade-offs are worth making.

Let’s get to it.

- CG

Thinking - The Superstar Slider Fallacy


If you are anything like me and grew up in what I would consider the golden age of video games (circa 2000-2010), you’ve likely spent some time at one point or another playing EA Sports Madden NFL. It is one of the most iconic sports video games of all time and the longevity of its success speaks loudly to the quality of its design.

One of my favorite components of single player gameplay in Madden has always been the Superstar mode, where rather than taking control of an individual franchise you are instead tasked with taking control of an individual player. With the goal of guiding a self-created player from rookie to NFL legend, you become responsible for every aspect of his character - from his name, to his position, the team he plays for, and even specific components of his skillset.

The last piece is ultimately what Superstar mode is all about. How do you make a better performing player? Simple - you change the quality of his attributes underneath the hood. Want to make a better quarterback? Enhance his throwing accuracy and decision-making. Want a more dynamic wide receiver? Bump up his speed and explosiveness, and sprinkle in some enhanced catching abilities on top.

Since the inception of the mode, Madden has always represented the attributes of a player in the same way: ‘slider’ bars for each individual trait that range numerically from 1-99. The number on the slider contextualizes the overall quality of each individual skill, such that the higher the number the better that specific skill will perform when game time arrives. Each player is then given an overall ‘grade’ that stems from the sum combination of each individual attribute, making a pretty clear recipe for success: increase the sliders for each skill, increase the total talent of your player.

Yet while the road to greatness in Superstar mode follows a pretty clear blueprint, improving your player’s skillset doesn’t come for free - you have to earn it. To do so requires that you build up XP (experience points) by putting your player to the test by way of games, training camps, and various other events. The more objectives you complete as you play with your character, the more XP you’ll earn. And only once you have acquired a necessary level of XP can you then alter the individual attributes of your player.

One of the beautiful things about Superstar mode is how closely the process of upgrading your player mimics the acquisition of skills in real life. So much so, in fact, that we can say the two recipes are actually but one and the same: put in the work, earn insights from your experience, and then use those insights to refine and sharpen your skills. Unfortunately, the game of life doesn’t come with an XP bar hanging over each of our heads to track our progress like in Madden, but we can be confident that the same underlying principle of effort applies: the more effort you put into something, the better you tend to get at it.

And although Madden’s Superstar mode provides a great proxy for the process of growth in real life, there is one specific area in which it does not get the story quite right: when you move one slider, all of the others stay in the exact same place.

What this feature tells us is that the designers of the game made a deliberate choice to ignore the reality of trade-offs, the process of sacrificing one benefit to gain another. Unlike real life where improvements in one area often necessitate sacrifices in another, Superstar mode sets up a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ type environment whether rather than making a trade-off to level up one skill at the expense of another, you get to have the best of both worlds; you can upgrade Skill A with the peace of mind that Skills B, C, and D will all stay in the exact same place. To borrow a phrase from finance, Superstar mode is an ‘up only’ type of gameplay where every aspect of your players always has 100% opportunity for improvement with a 0% probability of regression.

In the context of a video game, this design choice is perfectly acceptable - if not even desirable. Part of what makes these games so great, after all, is that while they are often close facsimiles to real life they are not exact replicas. Video games are virtual reality as opposed to actual reality, offering us the ability to take certain aspects of life and imagine what they might be like if we were able to change some of the rules. That is a powerful promise, and is a key part of what makes video games like Madden so enticing in the first place.

The trap here is that all too often, it is easy to forget where the line is drawn between the rules of the video game and the rules of life itself. If we wrongly assume that real life operates in the same way as our favorite game, we can very easily come to the wrong conclusions, and thus the wrong decisions.

In the case of Superstar mode, there is an enticing but dangerous line of thinking that constitutes the essence of the Superstar Slider fallacy: inputs are isolated and trade-offs don’t exist; any one slider can be moved without coming at the expense of another.

This would be a great idea, were it actually true, as a trade-off free environment would give us humans something we so desperately crave: certainty. We have a natural inclination to predict how the world works, and the more closely correlated inputs are too outputs the better we are capable of doing so. But unfortunately this is not how the world works in actuality, as one of the iron truths of life is that in order to get something you very frequently have to give up something in return. Sacrifices and trade-offs are very real, and to think any differently is a fool’s errand.

But not only are they real, but they are also very messy. More often than we’d care to admit, we seem to have a very limited understanding of how changing one thing will affect something else.

There are a number of reasons why this is true, but two in particular stand out to me.

First is the concept of nonlinearity, which teaches us that the correlations between inputs and outputs are not always 1-1. In the case of your Madden Superstar, you know with high confidence that improving one of his specific attributes will enhance his value as a player - as you move the slider up on his ability to break tackles or change direction, you know without a shadow of a doubt that his overall ‘grade’ will go up as well. But life doesn’t always work in the same way - we do our best to draw correlations between certain variables, but very rarely is the R squared 100%. More frequently there is some component of variance present, such that you might have a general idea of changing input A might change output B but the lack of a direct 1-1 relationship means you can’t say for certain what will happen.

A simple example from the baseball realm to help contextualize this concept: we know bat speed has a high correlation to exit velocities, and that exit velocities have a high correlation to batted ball value. We thus might make the following conclusion: improve bat speed → improve exit velocities → improve production. And in general for most cases, we would be right - but the correlations aren’t 1-1 between bat speed and production as variables, and thus we cannot say for certain what the outcome of increasing speed will be. There are plenty of stories of hitters training for speed and getting better results from it, but also a somewhat surprising number of the opposite side - hitters that have acquired more speed and somehow gotten worse. In sports and in life, things are often much harder to predict than we think.

There’s a logical segue here into a second and equally important concept for understanding the Madden Slider Fallacy, interdependence, which tells us that all variables within the same system will tend to have some reliance on each other. As such, changing any one variable can (and very frequently does) lead to a change in the other variables connected to it, compounding the difficulty of predicting how inputs will affect the outputs.

Interdependence between variables extends to virtually every system in real life, but as we’ve discussed so far Superstar mode instead makes the opposite assumption - it opts for an independent variable environment, where changing one attribute has no affect on any of the others. And that causes some problems if we are to use the slider model to guide decision-making and skill acquisition in real life.

Lets extend the bat speed example from above to see why. Through the lens of interdependence, we can start to understand where some of the non 1-1 correlation between speed and performance comes from. Bat speed is without a doubt one of the most critical pieces to the puzzle of hitting, but at the end of the day it is still just that - a piece to the puzzle. There are a wide variety of other variables that also constitute the skill of hitting, things like how much contact you make, how good your approach is, or the quality of your movement patterns and swing. Each of these are ‘attributes’ of a hitter, and while it is tempting to think of each as isolated skills experience will quickly teach you that they are all more connected than you might think. Speed and swing quality as a pair of traits are a great example of this - you can train yourself to move a bat faster, but how you do that will have implications for the overall quality of your swing. The goal thus should be to do it in a responsible way, so that you gain speed while preserving (or even improving!) upon the quality of a hitter’s swing. Sacrificing quality of movement to sell out for more speed is a dangerous recipe, and helps explain why the equation is not as simple as ‘more speed = better performance.’

Tying the above pieces of non-linearity and interdependence together, we can thus make a few tweaks to how Madden’s Superstar mode represents the concept of skill improvement that better aligns the process to the way the real world works:

• (1) Account for interdependence by assuming that anytime you move the slider on a single attribute up (say, by raising weight/physicality), there will be some associated change to another variable (such as a decrease in speed or agility).
  

• (2) Account for non-linearity by recognizing that improving one attribute might not have a 1-1 ratio to improvements in the total all-around skillset.
  

With these pieces in mind, the goal of skill development and enhancement in life thus becomes to understand as best you can how all of the variables in the equation fit together.

Each of us plays our own version of Superstar mode on a daily basis, trying to level up as best we can to accomplish the things we wish. Whether our physical health, emotional wellbeing, skillset at work or what have you, we all have sliders that we are trying to move the needle on. And so when assessing any of these aspects of life that you would like to improve, it becomes critically important to recognize how the pieces will move in conjunction with each other. Trade offs and correlations are integral components to the game of life, and in order to make the most informed decisions we must be cognizant of which sacrifices are worth making in order to get what we want. Because at the end of the day, everything is context dependent on your goals as an individual. Want to maximize your physical health? Might be worth skipping out on that beer after work. But if you want to enhance your emotional connection with friends, that same beer might actually be exactly what you need. Different priorities should necessitate different decisions, and thus determine the trade-offs that we should make.

The ultimate point is the following - don’t fall prey to the Superstar Slider Fallacy and the inclination that inputs can be changed in isolation. Make peace with the reality that trade-offs are a necessity to life so that you can move forward with confidence in the decisions that you’ve made, all while being willing to surrender the outcome at the same time

Because after all, many things defy prediction and life is full of surprises. And thank goodness for that, as it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without them.

Reading


Science Fiction Prototypes, Pent Up Data, and Product Leader Expectations - Scott Belsky (~11 min) - Scott writes one of my favorite under the radar newsletters out there, which centers around the implications advances in new technologies will have on the world. This was an especially good edition with a mix of insights such as how science fiction serves as a whiteboard for future ideas being brought to reality, why AI is poised to unlock value when given mountains of personalized data, and some insights he has picked up on leadership from leading and investing in product managers.


Founder Mode - Paul Graham (~5 min) - A short read from the founder of Y Combinator that gives an alternative perspective to the “manager mode” style of leadership companies are typically recommended to adopt as they scale. Inspired by a speech from Brian Chesky, founder of Air BnB, Graham comments on the feedback he’s heard from a surprising amount of founders - that the optimistic advice of “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs” falls short more times than you’d expect. By creating too much latitude and removing the unique skills of the founder from the equation, Graham argues that ‘manager mode’ actually sets businesses up for failure by removing the key variable that made them success in the first place: the people that started it.

Hey Everyone!

Happy Labor Day weekend, and cheers to the triumphant return of college football. It’s been a great weekend of watching one of the greatest sports that this nation has to offer and can’t wait for what’s ahead. Eyes out for the Vols putting together a special season - it was an exciting home opener in Knoxville and I can only hope it is a launching pad for what is to come. Big one ahead in Charlotte next week against NC State - looking forward to attending and let me know if you’ll be around!


Brooklyn and I are spending the weekend in Dallas with two of our favorites (cheers Sam and Emma!), so this is a shorter edition this week featuring shares > thoughts. Back with more regular programming next week, talk then!

- CG

Weekly Finds

Brutal Pieces of Advice - Sahil Bloom (~8 min)


My recommendation of the week - a high quality list of some hard truths. Three that hit me at the core:

• Advice is overrated (and action is underrated).

• External competitiveness is a curse, internal competitiveness is a blessing.

• Reliability will take you much further than brilliance.

The Mantra of This AI Age: Don’t Repeat Yourself - Dan Shipper (~5 min)


An important contextual piece on the future implications of AI for the average person (re: you and me). The gist: AI models are very good at something that humans spend much too much time on: repetitive tasks. A good rule of thumb moving forward - if you find yourself repeating something over and over, it’s likely worth exploring if AI can help you automate it.


Choose Good Quests - Trae Stephens (~8 min)


One of the pieces that I find myself coming back to again and again. After reading a piece from Sahil on the value of missions in transforming your life, I found myself thinking deeply yet again on building a life oriented around ‘good quests’. I’m a believer that life is a video game and we are all players with different goals. The better aligned those goals are with something outside of ourselves, the better off I think will be. This is a great guide on how to think about designing a life of impact and the value that can come from doing so. Because, as the authors write, history is the record of top players completing good quests. Lets play good games, together.


Nicola Marasco on a Simple Daily Goal (~1 min)


A new and simple daily challenge that I’ve picked up: 4 sets up pushups to failure each day. A good amount of recent research on strength training has shown that the key for muscle growth is not necessarily weight nor ‘high volume’, but rather pushing your body to a point that it has not been to before. Specifically, pushing it to failure. Planning to test this out for 30 days and will report back. Anyone want to join?


Cultivating a Bias for Action - Shaan Puri (~ 2 min)


Loved this short piece from Shaan on the value of building a life that is optimized towards action. I find myself frequently falling into the traps of ‘planning’ or ‘thinking’, and this was a hard gut punch on why both of those states are often a waste of time. The tl;dr: action is a skill and we need to cultivate it. The next time you find yourself thinking, recognize that you’d likely be much better off doing.