The Gunn Show - 6.30.24

What I'm Thinking, What I'm Reading

Good Morning Everyone!


And welcome back to The Gunn Show for Edition #21. This is an extra special one for me, as having pressed the ‘send’ button now means that I’ve hit the goal I had set out for the 2024 calendar year - to publish 26 articles on this Substack.


My initial plan was to shoot for one article every two weeks, to accommodate for the stressors and time constraints that come up throughout the MLB season. But then the weekly version of this newsletter came together in early February, and I’ve had too much fun writing it to slow down. So here we are in June, well ahead of pace and already across the finish line set all the way back in December of 2023 (which I thought quite ambitious at the time!).


I owe a great deal of where this is at now to those of you that read each week - the feedback and conversation that has come as a result is exactly what I was looking for when I wanted to start writing. So thank you for tuning in up to this point - 26 down, and many more to go.


Now, let’s get on to this week’s newsletter, featuring the biggest thing I’ve been thinking about this week: what the roller-coaster ride of Tennessee Athletics tells us about the value of top to bottom organizational alignment.

Organizational Unity through the Lens of Tennessee Athletics


Monday was one of the more exciting days I can remember as a Tennessee Volunteer fan, as the Baseball team clinched their first College World Series Championship in program history.


Two weeks ago, I shared a bit about my experiences growing up as a young Volunteer - and baseball - fan during the heyday of Tennessee baseball. It has been a joy to watch the success of the team over the past 4+ years and to see, as Karl Ravich said on the ESPN broadcast with the final out in hand, “Rocky Top reach the mountaintop of college baseball”.


In the aftermath of the championship series - a riveting three game affair that came down to the final out of game 3 with the tying run at the plate - I couldn’t help but reflecting on all that has transpired over the past 20+ years in Knoxville. It’s hard to believe the level that not just the baseball program but all of Tennessee’s major athletic teams are playing at right now. Because for much of the 21st century, I think there is a pretty strong argument that the Volunteers have been one of the most tortured fanbases in all of sport.


Prior to Monday, there had been zero National Championships won by Tennessee in any of the three major sports (football, basketball, baseball) since 1998. I was too young to even remember when the football team held up the BCS trophy after beating Florida State 23-16 in the Fiesta Bowl to claim the crown.


Things really started downhill in 2007 after the football team last played for the SEC championship. The following year, legendary coach Phil Fulmer was fired - a date in Tennessee lore that Vol fans like to mark as when it all went sour. The ‘lost decade’ of the 2010s followed suit quickly - from 2009 to 2020, the Big 3 programs saw the following:

• 12 different head coaches (6 in football, 3 in baseball, 3 in basketball)

• 5 different Athletics Directors

• 0 National Championships

• 0 Major Playoff Appearances (BCS/Playoff Games, Final 4, College World Series)

• 1 SEC Championship (Basketball, 2017-2018)

The Vols - regardless of sport, but especially in football - were a national punching bag. Turn on ESPN any day of the week and you couldn’t miss them in the highlights - clips of heart breaking losses (don’t click the links, to any Vol fans reading), head coaches leaving in the middle of the night for greener pastures, public PR disasters with hirings, and (yes, this is real) recruiting violations where cash was being handed out in McDonald’s bags.


For a lot of years, it was hard to wear your orange and white around with any sort of pride.


If you paid attention while all this was going on, you noticed something: this amount of consistent disfunction at the public level was only made possible by consistent disfunction at the private level. At a school like Tennessee, with a rich history of tradition across a wide variety of sports, the lack of on-field success was not a function of a lack of resources. Those have never been question. The only logical explanation was something else entirely: mismanagement at the decision making level.


No athletic department is without its challenges, but throughout the 2010s it seemed like Tennessee far outpaced the rest of the country with its mix-ups. Public recruiting violations, poor hires, budget mismanagement, and losses piling up - all a result of poor decisions compounding over time. Back office power struggles and inconsistencies in leadership - at both the department and coaching level - set the programs back years.


And then, things started to change. In 2015, Rick Barnes was hired to helm the men’s basketball program. In 2017, Tony Vitello was tasked with returning the BaseVols to national prominence. And in 2021, Josh Heupel was brought in to restore the crown jewel of Tennessee Athletics - the football program - back to its roots of dominance. Three outstanding decisions made that have proved fruitful at all levels, made within quick succession of each other.


It’s tempting to look back on this run of good decisions and try to find the turning point, the single moment in time where “Tennessee got its shit together and started making good decisions”. But in the case of Volunteer Athletics, I just don’t think that one exists. In fact, each of the current Big 3 head coaches were hired by different athletic directors and administrations - Rick Barnes by Dave Hart, Tony Vitello by John Currie, and Josh Huepel by Danny White. There was no singular knight in shining armor that came to save Tennessee Athletics - instead, it was a slow (and incredibly painful) evolution of getting the right people in the building and getting them aligned on the right things.


The point is this - as anyone that has worked in sports will tell you, the challenges of scale are daunting. There is an enormous amount of coordination required to get players, coaches, support staff, and administration aligned on a consistent vision - and even more importantly, working together to achieve it.


Rarely, if ever, does it come together overnight. There is no silver bullet. It is a much slower process instead - one of continuous tweaks and iteration over time, a trial and error experiment where you try your best to keep what works and discard what does not. It requires more than just one good decision - you need a number of them in lockstep with each other to get the pieces operating in the right way.


But when you do, it’s magic. You create a continuous flywheel effect where every piece of the operation reinforces the other, and it is almost as is the organization starts to run itself.


When I look at Tennessee Athletics today, that is what I see. Not the chaos that many of us had grown accustomed to, but something else entirely - a group of people that is aligned on a consistent vision for success, and working together to achieve it. No infighting. No clashing of egos. Only unity - between leaders, administrators, and coaches.


And the results are starting to show it.


For the first time since 1998, the Vols are champions in a major sport. In 2023, they accomplished a feat that had never before been done in the history of college athletics, becoming the only school to win a NY6 football bowl, have the Men’s and Women’s basketball teams both play to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament, and advance to the Men’s and Women’s College World Series - all in the same academic year. That success has continued into 2024, with Tennessee finishing 3rd overall in the Learfield Director’s Cup standings - which uses a points system to encapsulate success across the entirety of an athletic department.


With all that has transpired in Knoxville over the last two decades, I can’t help but be reminded of Harvey Dent’s famous quote from The Dark Knight. It is a sentiment Heupel echoed amidst a sea of orange after the Vols took the goal posts down against Alabama in Neyland in 2022. One he said again later that year after they thumped Clemson in the Orange Bowl. And one Peyton echoed in Omaha on Monday night.

“The night is darkest before the dawn. And the dawn is coming.”

The night was long, no doubt. But today Vol fans can bask in the light because that dawn is no longer ‘coming’ to Knoxville.


It’s here.

This Week’s Finds

Storytelling

On Writing Better: 43 Things I Learned from My Insane 2 Years of Study - Nat Eliason (~30 min)


This is a depth-y article, but worth its weight in gold for anyone interested in borrowing some hard earned lessons on how to write more effectively. Nat has been head down for the last year plus working on his new book Crypto Confidential, and he synthesized all of his biggest lessons learned from the process into this piece.


Some of my favorites:

• Don’t Be too Concise - This is about knowing your audience, and knowing yourself. Write the thing both you and your reader want to read - and for books, that necessitates some depth.
  
  

• Be Much Simpler - The goal is to be understood, not to sound smart - and to do so often requires stripping out detail that appeals to the top 1% in order to make your work understandable to the 99%. But make no mistake - this is not about being short, but instead about being clear.
  
  

• Protect Your Subconscious - This could very easily be rephrased to go for a walk. In a world where we are constantly flooded with information, creating space for our minds to wander is often the clearest path to finding the things worth saying.
  
  

• It’s Okay to Ask Someone to Tell You You are Good - Loved this one, and see application beyond just writing. Too often when we try something new - a new skill, a new job, etc. - the challenges that come as a result can quickly erode our self-confidence. This was a good reminder of the value in surrounding yourself with people that will provide support along that learning curve, as well as a reminder to try to be that person for others.
  

The Future (AI, Tech, etc.)

Turning the Tables on AI - iA (~4 min)


This was a great, quick read that hits on a topic covered frequently in this newsletter: what are the implications of AI for how we work? It argues that there are two routes you can travel: you can use AI to think less and worse, or you can use it to think more and better.


This is a critical distinction for me - I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to properly use AI in such a way that I am enhancing my thinking rather than outsourcing it. My general rationale is the following - the mind operates like a muscle, and the less we use it the more atrophy we need expect. I don’t know about you, but I’d like my mind to get stronger over time - not weaker. This piece provided a great framework for how to think about doing so.

Mental Models/Principles

Looking for the Anti-Mimetic Doctors - Daniel Turski (~9 min)


I’ve shared some resources in here before from Luke Bergis, author of Wanting and a deep thinker on the concept of mimesis, which involves thinking about why we want the things we want and do the things we do. This was a great guest share on his Substack recently that looks into the challenges of non-conformity in the field of medicine. While I’d encourage any of you to read through as it is an enlightening perspective for navigating our own medical experiences, I found this piece from the closing argument to be especially interesting:

Thinking in order to do better in a system that rewards doing over thinking is a core, anti-mimetic feature in medicine. And it’s especially difficult for two reasons: The first and obvious is letting old habits die while facing potential rejection from professional colleagues. The second and more subtle one is that doing better can mean doing less. It might mean making less money, acknowledging that we’re not as important as we’d like to be—and that somehow, in some way, out best intentions can make things worse. Those are tough pills to swallow. But maybe those pills are just the medicine that Western society needs right now.

13 Ways to Spot High Agency People - George Mack (~3 min)


Agency - the measure of how capable humans are of accomplishing things - has been on my mind a good bit lately. This was a great thread I came across from George that shares how we can spot people with high agency in the world and - if we invert this - how we can think about cultivating it ourselves. I’m working on a more in depth piece on the concept that I’ll share soon, but these were my two favorite points from the thread:

• Ask The Golden Question - If you could only call one person to get you out of a 3rd world prison, who would it be? That is the highest agency person you know.
  
  

• Build Unique Language - High agency people often create their own personal version of the dictionary. As George says, they have “isms” - Musk-isms, Bezos-isms, etc. They don’t conform to the ‘rules’ of language - they bend it to their will instead.