The Gunn Show - 7.21.24

What I'm Thinking, What I'm Reading

Hey Everyone!


Hope you all have had a great 7 day stretch and are enjoying your Sunday.


It was a big and exciting week in Texas, as we selected 20 new Rangers in the MLB Draft and celebrated afterwards by hosting the All-Star Game in our home ballpark. It was my first time going to the Mid-Summer Classic and what an experience it was. I couldn’t believe the amount of talent put together on the field, and came away thinking about how great of a platform it was for the game of baseball to showcase the best it has to offer on that stage.

The Gunns at the 2024 All-Star Game.

We have another big stretch coming up with the Trade Deadline fast approaching on July 30th and Draft Camp in Arizona this week to welcome our new players to the organization. So with that said, let’s get into this week’s newsletter - which features some in depth commentary on optimism, pessimism, and what I think is missing in the distinction between the two.


Hope you enjoy, and catch you next week!

- CG

What I’ve Been Thinking - Optimism, Pessimism, and Why the Distinction Between the Two is Not Enough

This year’s Draft process was an enjoyable one as always. As I’ve written about for the last couple of weeks, this is one of my favorite times of the year because it is the period in which I find my thought processes being challenged the most. And subsequently, the period of the year I always come away feeling like I have experienced the most growth.


With the acknowledgment that it is difficult to pause and catch your breath in the fast paced rush up to the Draft, I always try to create some time for reflection in the immediate aftermath while things are still fresh. I find it a great opportunity to assess the effectiveness of my personal processes for evaluating, presenting, and discussing players - while also revisiting any interactions I may have had with others throughout the course of the meetings.


As I’ve been reflecting towards the end of this week, there was one moment from Draft meetings that stood out to me above all else: an interaction with one of our scouts that caused me to think more deeply on the lenses each of takes to our jobs - and the broader world as a whole.


Without revealing too much of the specifics, the general construct of the conversation was the following: the two of us were discussing a high profile player with some very clear, very major offensive flaws. His perspective was that the flaws were nails in the coffin to the player’s value at the next level, regardless of the natural talent he possessed. It was an especially jarring perspective because this scout in particular is one of the top 2-3 evaluators of pure talent that I have ever had the pleasure of being around. I respect his opinion heavily, and so when he runs away from talent because of flaws, I know my radar needs to go up. We generally see things very similarly, but in this case I had the opposite viewpoint - I fully recognized and acknowledged the flaws the player possessed, but felt we were in a position as a developmental group to help him overcome them. A great back and forth ensued that led me to think more deeply.


In sports, business, and life, disagreements like these are common. In fact, I’d go even further to say that they are not only common but also healthy - without them, we cannot fully appreciate the arguments that exist on both sides of an issue. The more we work through differences in opinion to arrive at consensus, the more confidence we can have in that decision as a result. And as I wrote about last week, these differences in perspective are a unique and special piece of what it means to be human in the first place.


So at the end of the day, it wasn’t the disagreement itself that got me thinking, but rather a small yet powerful comment that got dropped in at the end: “See, I get that you think you can help him - but that perspective is skewed considering that your job is to be an optimist.”


I didn’t respond in the moment, but it was enough to get me thinking: is that statement really true? Is being an ‘optimist’ a defining aspect of my job? And if so, what does that even entail?


The more I’ve thought on that question, the more I’m reminded of something I heard when I was first starting in professional baseball: “I want my scouts to be pessimists and my coaches to be optimists.” I disagreed with that statement then, and still do today for a simple reason: optimism and pessimism depend heavily on what what we like, not necessarily on what we do. This is a defining factor of behind the scenes player discussions, regardless of whether you are a scout or a coach. We tend to make optimistic arguments for a player’s future if we like the player, and pessimistic ones if we do not. This is ‘confirmation bias 101’, and I’ll be the first to identify myself as an offender.


Now, everyone tends to have a natural bent, a personality orientation that draws them closer to one side or the other regardless of the issue at hand. Some people are wired to see the glass half full, others to see it half empty. Neither is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ - both just are, and that is entirely okay. Simply acknowledging that these biases exists is a start in each of us being able to think - and disagree - more appropriately.

Which one are you?

|But what I would argue to all of this is that while understanding the distinction between optimism and pessimism is a start, it is by no means a sufficient way to think about the problem. You need to add another axis to the chart, one that moves beyond preference and deals with the facts. Because it is not merely enough to be an ‘optimist for optimism’s sake’ - or vice versa - you have to deal with reality too. The evidence matters every bit as much as what you want it to mean.

The facts and your preference. Both matter.

And so, when we layer in the dichotomy of rationality vs. irrationality to the debate, we see that there are four distinct profiles that emerge:

1. Rational Optimism - Arriving at a positive outlook from a foundation of evidence.
   

2. Irrational Optimism - Arriving at a positive outlook from speculation or exuberance.
   

3. Irrational Pessimism - Arriving at a negative outlook from speculation or exuberance.
   

4. Rational Pessimism - Arriving at a negative outlook from a foundation of evidence.

Similar to how each of us has either a natural bent towards either optimism or pessimism, it seems to me that each of us likely gravitates towards one of these buckets when we layer in our willingness to deal with the facts in front of us (ie our ability to be rational). Speaking for myself, I’d like to think that I live my life in quadrant I, rational optimism. I tend to take a more positive stance on the future, and like to think I do a decent job of being rational in the face of evidence.


But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to think that this is not so much a static graph as it is a dynamic one. As much as I’d like to live every moment of my life as a rational optimist, there are inevitably situations that dictate I be something else. Two examples from a baseball specific context to illustrate this point:

• In the context where I am working with players, my job is almost certainly to be a rational optimist. I have to believe there is a path to helping them be better, and ground the path to achieving that in the facts as they stand.
  
  

• In the context where I am evaluating players, my job is to be as rational as possible and move along the optimism/pessimism scale according to experience. There are certain cases where I should be rationally optimistic because experience has told me that we can fix or overcome the player’s issues. But there are other cases where I should be rationally pessimistic - in situations where I know a players flaws are difficult to both fix and overcome, there should be no shame in sliding further to the left on the scale. The point is to get the evaluation and projection of the player as right as possible, personal bias to optimism or pessimism be damned.

So, rational optimism and rational pessimism can both have their place. But is there no case for the lower quadrants at all? No case for irrationality? Not so fast.


While I admittedly struggle to think of cases where it is beneficial to be irrationally pessimistic (if you have any ideas, please feel free to send my way!), there is a very clear area of the world where I think irrational optimism is a great thing: sports fandom.


As a sports professional, my job is to be as rational as possible, while blending in my personal spice of optimism to the recipe. But as a sports fan I am decidedly irrationally optimistic. I start every fall football season thinking that the Tennessee Volunteers have a greater than zero percent chance of winning the National Championship - recruiting rankings, depth charts, and schedules be damned. Week 1 rolls around, and I think the Vols are going undefeated. The first loss comes, and I’m still crafting playoff scenarios in my mind. Hope exists under the guise of irrational optimism until the last possible moment.


And to me that it is exactly what makes being a fan so exciting - the fact that we can have a little bit of irrational hope, a small shred of belief that greatness is possible even in light of all the evidence that diminishes that possibility. It is what makes the pain of the valleys so sharp, but the euphoria of the highs unlike few feelings on this earth. I see irrational optimism as part of what makes sports sports - the pageantry, the passion, the excitement. Stadiums with thousands of people screaming in unison, all thanks to the existence of belief.


With all of this in mind, I’ve started to think of life as a game in which we get rewarded for being in the right quadrant at the right time - oscillating back and forth between optimism and pessimism, between rationality and irrationality depending on the environment at hand.


What I’m trying to get better at personally is identifying two things: (a) where I should be depending on the issue and (b) where I actually am. I’ve come to view these two questions as especially important to answer, as I see them as the main reasons for why I may have ‘missed’ on player evaluations or recommendations in the past: I either think I’m somewhere I’m not (ie I think I’m being rationally optimistic when I am in fact being irrationally optimistic) or I misdiagnose the appropriate perspective to take (ie I think I should be rationally pessimistic when I should be rationally optimistic).


And so, returning back to the initial conversation that sparked this whole thought, I think I’ve figured out how I’d respond. It would be something along the lines of “My job isn’t to be an optimist - it’s to be what the situation requires.”


Because like most everything in life, it will always depend.

What I’m Reading

Health/Fitness

A Lesson in Overtraining - Peter Attia (~3 min)


While most of the modern discourse centers around the issue of not getting enough physical activity, this was an insightful read from Peter on the perils at the other side of the equation with overtraining. As a result of travel, he was forced to take a week off from his upper body lifts - only to find that when he came back he set personal bests in every single exercise after the time off.


A good reminder that there are two buckets we can fall into rather than just one - under-doing it vs. over-doing it - and the later can cause just as many problems as the former.

Writing and Creativity

Creativity - Jared Dillian (~6 min)


A good read on the creative process and the necessity of realizing that not everything will be perfect, and not everything has to be. Two great pieces that struck home especially:

“I just have to accept that was the best job that I could do at the time, with the information I had available to me. And part of being a creative is knowing that not everything you do is going to be perfect, and you have to accept that. This is no business for perfectionists.”

There is a quote: “I only write when inspiration strikes, but fortunately it strikes at 9am every morning.” Writers write. Painters paint. If you’ve ever run into a writer who’s always “working” on a book, and has been for ten years, and can’t seem to finish it, that is not a real writer. That is a writer who waits for inspiration to strike.

How to Think in Writing - Henrik Karlsson (~12 min)


This piece shares some similarities to the above in it’s discussion of the writing process, namely in drawing the distinction between writing to think vs. thinking to write. Henrik does a great job arguing that writing is best used as a tool to clarify your thinking, to bring take your fluid ideas and make them more rigid, more concrete - all while exposing and filling in the gaps in your logic. Here’s a great quote from the article:

When I write, I get to observe the transition from this fluid mode of thinking to the rigid. As I type, I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas. What seemed right in my head fell to pieces on the page.

Seeing your ideas crumble can be a frustrating experience, but it is the point if you are writing to think. You want it to break. It is in the cracks the light shines in.

The Future (AI, Tech, etc.)

The Purpose of Doing Things is Not to Stop Doing Them - Jack Raines (~7 min)


I’d put this up there for one of the best - and most important - pieces of content that I’ve come across this year. Last week, Jack shared his thoughts on a concept I’ve written about a lot on this newsletter, which he calls “the dangerous idea that we should outsource many aspects of our lives to technology”.


It is great commentary on the downside risks of using AI, and subsequently how we should think about using it to amplify our skill sets rather than replacing them. Two quotes that I found especially insightful:

The problem with taking an AI-first approach to tasks is that it robs you of everything that you would have gained by doing the work yourself.

⁠First, folks who are willing to go out of their way to add a human touch to their work will only become more valuable as more people elect to outsource their work to AI. A thoughtful email (or, even better, handwritten note) will standout in a sea of AI-generated messages.⁠⁠

Second, the ability to discern value and insight from a flood of information will grow more and more important as the cost of producing data approaches zero. Models and reports that took days to build can be AI-generated in seconds, but what are you going to do with their results? The world will only grow noisier, and your ability to answer the latter is what really matters.

Personal Growth

How to be (Reasonably) Hard on Yourself - Nat Eliason (~5 min)


In this piece, Nat shares one of the biggest insights he has taken away as someone that has high standards for his work: there are both right and wrong ways to be hard on yourself. As someone that tends to expect a lot of himself - and sometimes too much - this hit really hit home.

The four part mantra to keep in mind for all high performers, according to Nat:

1. It’s Good
   

2. It Can be Better
   

3. Eventually it Will be Good Enough
   

4. Next Time will be Even Better