The Gunn Show - 6.23.24

What I'm Thinking, What I'm Reading

Good morning everyone!


And welcome back to Edition #20 of this newsletter. A couple of announcements before we get going.


First, in case you missed it - I published a long-form article this week titled Simple is No Guarantee of Beautiful. It is a dive into a pithy phrase that has been making the rounds of late - “Simple is Beautiful” - and why I think it misses the point. I had a lot of fun writing it and hope you get some value out of it.


Next, as I’ve mentioned in past editions of the newsletter - I’ve been experimenting with the format, attempting to find the appropriate balance between breadth of resources and depth of discussion. Over recent weeks, the scale has tipped much towards the later as I’ve been going much deeper on a smaller range of topics. While I’ve enjoyed thinking more introspectively about a narrower band of ideas, I’d like to find a happy medium - something that blends the best of both approaches, providing a sufficient level of depth to be insightful and that challenges my thinking while also covering a broader range of topics.


In response to this, I plan to shift towards a two-pronged newsletter for the foreseeable future. Each week, rather than going deep on 4-5 topics I’ll instead choose one - something that has been top of mind for the week and I think merits diving into more deeply. I will then follow that up with our normal programming - the best resources I came across that week for our normal topics (Sports, Health, Communication, The Future, Personal Growth, Mental Models/Principles) with brief supporting commentary.


We’ll see how this goes, and, as always, make adjustments as necessary. If you prefer one style or the other, please feel free to shoot me a note.


Also, with the focus shifting more so towards what I’ve been thinking and less so what I’ve been reading, we are going to rename this newsletter to the name of this site - The Gunn Show.


With that said, let’s kick this week’s edition off.

July is but a week away, meaning we are on the precipice of the busiest month in the professional baseball calendar. Whether you work for a club or the league office, there is no more jam packed portion of the year: the All-Star break, MLB Draft, and Trade Deadline - three of the biggest events of the entire season - all happen within a mere two weeks of one another. It is one of the most stressful and exhausting periods of the season, with the gauntlet of October being the only other thing that can possibly compare.


Yet even so, it is perhaps my favorite part of the calendar. Because for as challenging as July, I find it to be equal parts rewarding.


Why? Because in my opinion, there is no portion of the MLB season that challenges your ability to think like July does - whether as an organization or as an individual. The amount of high leverage decisions made in such a short time frame is astounding - you select players, trade for players, or trade away players all in the span of but a few weeks. The implications of any one of those decisions is remarkable - make the right (or wrong) one, and you can drastically alter both the short and long term future of your club.


As a result, strategy becomes paramount. You have to have your ducks in a row as best you can, thinking through all scenarios and choosing the optimal one - as you see it - based on the board in front of you.


To get aligned on a strategy requires a large amount of conversation, and the setting for those conversations is one with which we are all familiar: meetings. As much as you could say July is the month of the MLB Draft, the MLB All-Star Game, or the MLB Trade Deadline, you could equally say that for front offices, it is the month of meetings. So. Many. Meetings.


Typically, the gauntlet starts in late June as clubs begin breaking down the Draft board. They continue on from there, gaining speed into the three days of the Draft and maintaining a break neck pace all the way up until the Trade Deadline bell rings on July 30th at 6PM ET.


To put it simply, July is both a marathon and a sprint - the pace is unrelenting, and you have to keep up.


I love the grind of the month. Don’t get me wrong - it is a challenge, for sure. But it is also extremely invigorating at the same time if you have any penchant for deep conversation on players, strategy, philosophy, and the like. And while the meetings themselves are great, some of the best conversations happen completely unscripted - during a break in the bathroom or while you are heating up your lunch. To me, this is most frequently where the magic happens. And every once in a while, you come away with an idea that changes not just how you see the game of baseball - but how you see the world.


I had one of these conversations recently, when a coworker and I got into discussion on a concept called ‘Pay Now, Pay Later’. Frequently thrown around in Draft circles, the idea revolves around top tier HS players that have strong college commitments. The logic goes like this: either you take him in the draft out of HS and “pay him a lot of money now” to make sure he never gets to campus, or you wait for him to go to college and “pay him a lot of money later” when he is inevitably a top performer - and therefore a top pick. It’s your choice on when you are going to pay him, or at least the logic goes.


But as my coworker pointed out - there are two fallacies in this argument. First, you may never get the chance to “pay later”. Some players simply become so good in college that they play themselves up to the absolute top of the draft board - and depending on where your pick is, you may have no opportunity to select him. Secondly, “pay now, pay later” often assumes that the dollar amounts of both cases are the same - pay him $1 Million now, or pay him $1 Million later when he comes out of school. But for this to happen, a player’s value has to remain equivalent from high school to college - and anyone that has followed the draft knows that the cases where this happens are few and far between. Very frequently, a player you could have had for < $1 Million in HS suddenly costs $7 Million+ after winning a bevy of NCAA awards and going in the top 5 picks. Ouch, talk about a missed opportunity.


That conversation opened my mind in more ways than one. I couldn’t help but leave it thinking that while we’d just had a conversation on baseball, we’d really had a conversation on life.


To highlight what I mean, let’s flip this to our own experiences and ask a simple question: how many decisions in our lives can we think of as “pay now, pay later?”. My guess is it is significantly more than we think.


As an example, I’ll share how this concept really hit me in the face. Over the last year, my wife and I have been making a concerted effort to live healthier lifestyles - especially when it comes to what we put in our bodies. As such. we’ve put a heavy emphasis on the quality of our food, eliminating any type of processed items in favor of natural, organic, single ingredient foods.


The results have been amazing - we feel great, look great, and are functioning great. Yet the process hasn’t come devoid of hurdles, namely one big one with which we are all familiar: shopping healthy is more expensive when compared to not shopping healthy. Avocados cost more than crackers; wild caught fish costs more than farm raised. Simply put, it’s not quite as fun to get the receipt at the grocery store now as it used to be, even though we know it’s the right decision for us to make.


‘Pay Now, Pay Later’ has been extremely helpful to keep in mind when I swipe my card at checkout. My goal here is to my make the best decisions in the short term - now - to set myself up for an optimal life in the long run - later. Through this framework, I can rationalize my decision at the counter like this: if I don’t pay for this now, it’s pretty likely that at some point I’ll be paying much more in the future - in the form of poor health, excess medical bills, and more. And that’s assuming I even have the opportunity to pay at all, which is no guarantee.


This is only one small example, but I think there are a many aspects of our lives where ‘Pay Now, Pay Later’ applies. To name a few more:

• Fitness - Work out now, or pay a higher price with a failing body later
  

• Relationships - Spend time with friends and family now, else you may not have the chance later
  

• Procrastination - Do it now, or you might not have the chance to do it later

I know there’s more to uncover here, other areas where the principle can be put to use. But that conversation shifted my perspective greatly, and I hope that in sharing my experience it can help some of you all do the same.


What are you paying for (or not paying for) now, and what does that mean for later?


- CG

Weekly Finds

Sports/High Performance

Inside the Mind of Jaylen Brown - GQ (~8 min)

One of the things I enjoy most about Championship runs is the stories about the people behind them that get uncovered in the process. This was a great piece on Jaylen Brown of the newly minted NBA Champion Boston Celtics, revealing a person that is much more a polymath than a basketball player.

Health/Fitness

Your Health is An Investment, Not an Expense (~1 min)

A good thread that has some parallels to the message above - decisions we make in relation to our health are investments, not expenses. Personal investments I’ve made off this list that I’d highly recommend: stainless steel pans, blue-light blocking glasses, a juicer, and high quality nutrition.

Mental Models/Principles

Attention Residue - Sahil Bloom (~2 min)

I’ve talked a lot on this Substack about focus, and this concept ties in well. Attention Residue, as identified by Dr. Sophie Leroy and defined here by Sahil is “the cost of shifting our attention from one task to another”, such that when we do so a “residue” remains and impairs our performance on the new task.


Something I’ve noticed this personally with: using my phone first thing in the morning. The more I use it to start the day, the more I find myself using it throughout the day. It seems to leave a ‘residue’ such that I have a harder time focusing on deeper work tasks for longer period of times.

The solution to this problem I’ve found to work the best: no phone for the first 30 minutes of the morning upon waking, to the extent possible.

Turning Life Into a Video Game - George Mack (~5 min)



I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept of incentive design lately, and found this to be a good read from George on how we can take the principles from game design and apply them to creating motivating environments. As he highlights, the more manageable we make our tasks and the better we track our progress, the more likely we are to gain forward momentum and accomplish our goals.