The chaos that ensues inside my head on a daily basis is wild. I go through moments of anxiety, moments of thought, moments of reflection, moments of regret, moments of joy. I glance at a picture of someone throwing, or I read a research article about something that conflicts with my beliefs, or I read some piece of social media marketing of someone promoting a product or service that I know is making athletes worse and my brain goes crazy. I question if my beliefs are legitimate which internally makes me feel like all of this time and effort to learn and grow is a waste. Deep down I know it's not, but good luck telling your ego that. This starts the spiral of thoughts and anxiety which causes any productive thoughts, idea, or work to come to a screeching halt. Why is does this happen? It's probably the ego. How do we prevent this? Here's what I do.
There are so many intelligent practitioners, coaches, and experts in the baseball and player development field. Sometimes to sell you have to stick to an idea and shout it to everyone. The odds of this working for everyone are incredibly low, but logic doesn't apply to selling, especially to the masses. You can learn and find inspiration from these people, but the info will be limited in comparison to the amount that they're in your feed and attention space. To limit this exposure I do quite a bit of muting on social media and I seek out the work of experts in other fields. In different sports, in art, in business, thought leaders, scientists, experimenters and risk takers.
I read research every morning and I attempt to review something about the body as well as something about baseball pitching player development, but to find true inspiration I observe other artists at work. Artists that have spent their entire lives learning different aspects about what they do so that they can refine and perfect it over many years. My favorite are chefs. Experts in molecular gastronomy. It turns my brain off of myself and my own insecurities and flips it to being in awe of theses masters and their art. It makes me want to work hard to mimic the expertise of these master chefs. My go to show is Chef's Table, which is a work of art in that of itself. If you have Netflix, start with one of my favorite chefs, Grant Achatz, in season 2.
There truly are this level of expert all over baseball and all over many other sports and professions. It's sometimes difficult to find them because they're not as active and openly accessible as others. You have to do some digging, look around, ask others for references. Find the master artists in the space you're interested in. Don't get me wrong, it takes years of work and learning to get to a point where you can turn the work into art, but if you just follow trends and the group think then everything looks the same and innovation is halted.
I know this will seem hypocritical because of what I've said early about selling, but if you do want to learn from some of this masters in the baseball space, especially ones that you may not be able to DM on the socials, you can learn from them at https://www.worldpitchingcongress.com/store.
I put together the World Pitching Congress with the intention of bringing this level of expert into one place to teach others that want to learn from those that have spent their whole life becoming really good at one thing. I feel so strongly about this that I literally put in all of this work during a time that I didn't have much time to do any of this to release another event totally for free. You can download that 2023 WPC for free at https://www.worldpitchingcongress.com/. I would highly recommend watching these presentations if you have that desire to learn and grow in this space. If not, no biggie, everyone has their own aspirations. For those that want to push through the crowd, the resources are out there, you just have to put some of the work in.
Tyler