The Power Of Playing Offense With Paul Epstein

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

06.04.22

How do you execute purpose-driven leadership? Today, organizations everywhere are struggling and looking for ways to thrive. When you’ve lost motivation, how do you spark the hope and light within you so you can continue making a difference? Learn about the power of playing offense with Paul Epstein. Paul became the go-to fixer for NBA teams, NFL franchises, and league executive offices because he mastered the come-from-behind win. He recognizes that victory comes from the inside. In this episode, he dives into his book The Power of Playing Offense and how you could use this to develop your leadership skills fully. Tune in to this episode to listen to his deep insights on leading with purpose and how to win big.

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Listen to the podcast here

The Power Of Playing Offense With Paul Epstein

Our guest is Paul Epstein, the author of The Power of Playing Offense. He talks about how people can go from having a job to a career to even having a calling. The through-line of all of his work is helping people find their purpose and he shares his own story of how he discovered his purpose that will tug at your heartstrings. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Paul Epstein, who I met at a speakers boot camp. To understand how he has become a leading speaker and thought leader in the world of purpose-driven leadership, you have to begin with the path that brought him to finding his why. He has been in the sports industry since his career began, serving in the NFL League, a lot of national sales campaigns for Super Bowls and managing a record-setting sales organization at the San Francisco 49ers.

He’s also been very involved with saving New Orleans, which was once at the bottom of the league attendance and they were in danger of being relocated before he helped rally the city to save their now beloved team. Before all that, we’re going to hear about his own story of origin, where he was working in an entry-level sales position for the LA Clippers, making $7 an hour on a four-hour shift with no promise for growth.

He went on to lead the New Orleans Pelicans, named the Hornets. This development team as they struggled to stay relevant in a football focus region. He realized that sports are a lot more than just sports. It’s a civic pride thing but as big as a leap of faith was to come years later when he discovered his own personal why, which we’ll be certainly asking him about. Welcome to the show, Paul.

Hi, John. I’m fired up to be here. Thank you, my friend.

It’s always fun for me when some of my previous guests know each other and we were talking about Gary Sanchez, a previous guest on my show with the WHY Institute and you’re all about the why. Let’s go into your own story of origin. You can start with making $7 an hour, or you can go even further back on how you’ve been passionate about sports all the time? Do you get that from your dad or how’d that all come about?

[bctt tweet=”From a job to a career to a calling.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Why don’t we start at the $7 because maybe the more compelling part of how you land on $7 is to imagine leaving six figures to make $7? Not a lot of people do that, but in my case, I was one of the crazy ones. It was because prior to that, the six-figure opportunity fresh out of undergrad at USC, I was working for a Fortune 10 organization.

Everything was great. It was rolling and I still remember the story, where for those that are sports fans reading and maybe the name Mel Kiper rings a bell. He is known as the top NFL Draft Guru. He’s a very high-energy type of guy, a fiery personality like I’m talking right now. I’m driving around in my minivan, which was a company provided at 21 years old in ESPN Radio and Mel comes on. He says, “Have you ever wanted to work in sports? Have you ever wanted to work in the NFL, NBA, NHL?” I’m driving. I’m speeding down. “Yes.”

The call to action at the end of the commercial was call 1-877-SMWW-NOW. SMWW stands for Sports Management World Wide. I gave them a call and took their online course. Their promise was if you’re one of the top students, we will open up our Rolodex and network to you in the sports industry. Not only is there a happy ending to this story, it’s the biggest no-brainer in my life to go from six figures and comfortable, but having not feeling a purpose in what I was doing. It was just the paycheck to now. I would have done it for free.

When I think about the things that are best in life, I know we have a great sales audience reading in. What you do if there were no money on the line? Whether it’s a check someone is cutting to you, or it is you as an entrepreneur. Would you sell, whether it’s yourself, product or service, if there was no economic gain in it for you?

When you can answer, not only yes, but hell yes, that’s when there’s a deeper burn in a belief, passion and purpose because that’s how you matriculate from job to career to calling. I went through that journey and transformation. People always ask me, “How do you know?” I always bring it back to when you’re not chasing something. When it feels like, “I would do this for free every day.” I felt blessed that they even paid me $7.

I love what you said there, how to go from my job to a career to a calling. We’re going to tweak that out. That’s great. That’s the ultimate hero’s journey. Now you also wrote a wonderful book called the Power of Playing Offense, which is a playbook for leaders, not team transformation but personal transformation. Let’s dive into the story of origin around that. How’d you come up with the title? Let’s start there.

The Power of Playing Offense: A Leader’s Playbook for Personal and Team Transformation

Spending fifteen years in the NFL and NBA, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. When you think about the mentality, that in my words, I like to attack each day with a mentality of playing offense, that is this all gas, no brakes type of approach, where we all know there are two types of people in the world. As I spent fifteen years in a high-performance environment like sports, I clearly see the delineation and there are two groups.

I want to ask the readers, think of these people in your life. You know folks on both sides of the fence. One always seems to play on their toes. The other is seemingly always on their heels. One has a mindset where it’s always, “Let’s not lose.” They play not to lose. They’re never going to fail big but they’re never going to win big versus the other feels like, “I’m blessed to have this house money and I am playing to win every day.”

The first group, market, external circumstances always seem to dictate their terms, but the second group operates on their terms. I like to describe that as the first group plays defense, the second group plays on offense. When you play offense, you not only play with purpose and passion, you take control of your future. That is the spirit of how I landed on the Power of Playing Offense.

When you talk about leadership, this was the playbook that I never had because I did positional leadership has all called for a decade and a half. Everyone taught me how to hit goals, metrics, numbers and KPIs. Nobody taught me how to lead people. To me, that’s the secret sauce of business and life. I said, “What is the book that I needed a decade ago and it never came?” I had to fail, fall, pivot, reinvent and go through all of these things and I have no regrets. I’m happy that I didn’t have the book. I wanted to make sure that people in the future didn’t experience some of the same pain.

You’re tapping into a big struggle. I was working with the healthcare tech company and they’re not the market share leader. They want to be, but they’re not. One of the reps said, “We’ve got to stop playing defense because every sales pitch is us defending against the leader of, why aren’t you doing this? They are, whatever the issues are.”

This concept of offense or defense in terms of presenting your content, message or story against someone who has bigger leadership is your area of expertise because you told me before the show that you’ve been selling the underdog your entire career. Let’s transition from top playing defense and start playing offense even if you’re the underdog. How does someone do that?

For context and backstory, I did fifteen years in the industry and for those that are sports fans, if you root for any team for fifteen years, you’re going to make the playoffs, 5, 6 maybe 10 times, if you’re lucky. How about in fifteen years, I enjoyed the playoffs once. I sold a playoff team, 1 out of 15 years, whether I was directly in a sales seat or I was leading the entire sales enterprise.

Now you talk about an underdog. It was a joke in the industry that I was the black cat, wherever I went on the corner of the field of the Is. They’re saying they are going to be a lot of Ws. The first one was the LA Clippers. This is not the Clippers of nowadays, where now they are winning. They were in the shadow of Kobe and Shaq, Lakers. ESPN called us the worst brand in sports and Sports Illustrated said, “You are the worst franchise in sports history.” We had to sell that.

[bctt tweet=”Choice is when your fingerprints are on the blueprint.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I shared this story of the underdog to say that even from a recruiting perspective, if you want to talk about the pitch, what’s the pitch to get somebody to come work for the Clippers at that time. That’s the situation that I found myself in every single day. Over time, we couldn’t house enough people that wanted a bite at the apple because the pitch which came from the heart was, this is not for everybody. A tribe either needs to attract or repel you.

Imagine you’re in the boardroom right now and Paul is the hiring manager. I said to the group, “My job is to hire the best talent. Your job is to control the controllable. I’m not even putting pressure on you to sell.” It was the opposite of what everybody in the industry says, “Where it’s about metrics, goals, numbers and KPIs.” I said, “No. That’s my part. Let me remove that pressure from you, but here’s the hard hat and here’s the lunch pail. I need you to show up with every single day.”

There are three components, work ethic, positivity and coachability. You give me those three things. I’ll take care of you for the rest of your career. This was for a job that had a 6 to the 9-month runway, 10% usually made of the promotion to a senior role. I had what I called the constitution, which was on a whiteboard in my office and everybody could see it. I had them sign. I put the date of 6 to 9 months from their hire date.

I had them sign it and said, I made it sound like a constitution, “I will commit to the values of work ethic, positivity and coachability.” I would sign it right under them. I said, “You give me those three things and in that three-month span, 6 to 9 months from now, I got you and take care of you, not only for that first promotion but for the rest of your career.” That is how we pitched it, fulfilled it, delivered on it and I’m still fulfilling those promises to this day, years removed from the sports industry.

Instead of trying to get people to work at a place that might be seen as, “I’m working here because I didn’t get any other offers.” It became, “This is my first choice because the culture cares about me and it’s a fit with my mindset. I’ll feel proud of working here as opposed to embarrassed.” By taking the external judgments of what you decide, whether something’s good or not. Flipping it internally is what I’m hearing.

I’ll piggyback on that because years later, as I’m recruiting for the 49ers Academy, which I was the proud founder of. This is a decade gap in between stories to show you the matriculation of how this surfaces. At the time of my Clippers story, I didn’t know the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Those terms had not entered my vocabulary.

Playing Offense: Anybody interested in more of the research, scienceofpurpose.org is a massive accumulation of how purpose connects to the bottom line and to individual performance.

For everybody reading, into a simple way of thinking about it is, carrots and sticks are the extrinsic motivators. If you do something, I will give you a bonus. If you don’t do something, I put you on a performance plan or you lose your job. That’s a carrot and stick. The intrinsic motivation is, are you motivated from the inside out? Is there a level of internal success, significance, happiness, fulfillment and purpose that you feel in work? Me, as your boss, don’t need to hold you accountable. You hold yourself accountable because you believe in the place, me as a leader, the team and the culture, all that.

I had four cornerstones at the 49ers Academy, the same type of pitch at a time where not a lot of folks were wanting to come to the organization. It was after the honeymoon period, the first 2 to 3 years of Levi’s Stadium. Here are the commitments we make to you. There are four cornerstones, purpose, choice, progress and impact.

Purpose, we will create an environment where the why is greater than the what. Crossed us that we can guide you on the how and as Nietzsche once said, “When your why is strong enough, the how will take care of itself.” We focused entirely on purpose as the foundation and then choice. Rather than saying, “Here’s the playbook, go execute.” It became, “What kind of plays do you want to run?”

Now I’m giving everybody a voice, even as a recruit to say, “What’s the environment that you thrive in? What leader do you love? Just because Paul is wired a certain way, maybe you want some tweaks to that and I’ve got to have some empathy. I’ve got to listen to that. Otherwise, I’m not going to have you maximize your potential.” That was choice. The way I describe choice was your fingerprints will be on the blueprint and people take more ownership when their fingerprints are on the blueprint.

The third cornerstone, progress, I’m a massive believer that if you can make a commitment that when somebody leaves the office, they are better than when they showed up that day. They will keep coming back. Whether you’re the underdog or the market leader, it is equally effective because now it’s not about the paycheck. It’s not even about the company, brand, product or service. It’s about me as a person.

When Paul feels that my company and my leader care about me enough, that they’re going to invest in my development and I’m going to be better when I left than when I showed up, I’m going to keep coming in and grinding. The blood, sweat and tears are going to be organic and authentic, and that’s the third one.

The fourth one is impact. My firm belief is that everybody in life wants to make a difference and feel they matter. They want to do what matters and make a contribution. That impact is the driver of all things good. Whether you’re the Clippers, the 49ers or anybody in between, I said, “Purpose, choice, progress, impact.” If that is you, this is your tribe. It wasn’t for everybody and thanked God it wasn’t, but the people that wanted it made leadership so easily.

[bctt tweet=”Every day is a pitch like life, life is a sale. If you’re not living and leading with purpose, then you’re building your house on quicksand.” username=”John_Livesay”]

They felt like they had found the water in the desert, I’m sure because most players aren’t that clear on what the culture is. You don’t know what you’re signing up for. This concept of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation is worth double-clicking on. I first came upon that concept when I was selling advertising and Lexus was launching here in the states.

They said, “We compete with BMW and Mercedes. We have done all these studies that certain people buy the BMW like if you’re an agent in Hollywood, you have to wear the Armani suit and drive a BMW because that’s external motivation. I want to impress people with my labels and country club, whatever.”

There’s a whole group of people that buy BMW and Mercedes that are internally motivated. They aren’t trying to impress anybody. They want the car to be well-made and that’s who we have to target because we don’t have the history of branding. Once you have that awareness of it’s not a recruiting tool, it also becomes a marketing and branding tool.

I couldn’t have said it any better and case in point because I’m a big sucker for stats, especially when you’re talking about something like purpose, as much as I do. I think there are a lot of folks that feel like, “It’s a little up in the clouds and that doesn’t connect to performance or the bottom line.” Anybody interested in more of the research, ScienceOfPurpose.org is a massive accumulation of how purpose connects to the bottom line and individual performance.

One of my favorite stats and it ties to what you said is that we’re trying to switch consumers. You’re trying to take somebody that’s not participating or engaging with your brand, product or your service. You’re trying to get them on board with your team. Purposes, one of the greatest drivers, there is about a 73% clip of global consumers that will pivot and change brands based on connecting with the purpose of the brand.

That to me is that intrinsic piece because it’s not the bells and the whistles. I could watch a commercial and I got that. It’s why do you exist as a company, as a person? Are you communicating with your purpose? Are you communicating to the outside world? What your intrinsic motivation is because that will create a pull effect versus in sales. It’s often a push effect.

Playing Offense: If you’re trying to switch consumers, you’re trying to take somebody that’s not currently participating or engaging with your brand or your product or your service. You’re trying to get them on board with your team’s purposes.

As I think about pulling, that’s intrinsic and what’s fascinating about this when I saw the stat of 73% in purpose-driven brands. That’s how global consumers shift. I thought, “This is bigger than branding a company.” You are the brand. We are all our own brands. How we show up each day is how we represent our brand. If we’re not showing up with purpose, we’re going to miss the mark on 73% of the market.

Your book is talking about these five pillars of playing offense that we lead ourselves, others and then, of course, what the future can be as some legacy. The through-line that I see is it all has to start with purpose, especially in certain industries like sales or lawyers, known for being extremely competitive within the same company. That doesn’t work on a sports team and yet in business, you’ve got people who are supposed to be on the same team and yet there is so much infighting going on. Do you think part of that’s because there is no through-line of a bigger purpose?

I think there are two sides to the coin, transactional or transformational. The more that we walk through life and sift through life in a transactional mindset, that’s where the whole scarcity versus abundance piece came from. Here’s a real example. We’re both speakers and we both speak about sales. Do I view you as competition in the sense of is there only so much food to eat that I shouldn’t be coming out on your show? I share it with my audience and now more folks are going to say, “John is pretty awesome. We want to hire him as a speaker.” That’s a scarcity mindset. Versus abundance is there’s enough for all of us and not just enough. We can grow the size of the pie when we support each other. I think that’s the real win.

Here’s the piece on sports and I’ll go back to offense-defense. Everybody loves to be on a winning streak and when there are blue skies. The weather is perfect and I can do no wrong. In that case, the purpose is an inspirational thing. I think the purpose is more effective in a storm. It is more effective when the defense is pushing back.

Take the pandemic as an example, very unexpected and unanticipated. Depending on our age, it was something that most of us had never seen and experienced. The fear, risk, uncertainty and anxiety, defensive elements in life, a lot of them not only external but also in our mind, we housed a lot of those negative thoughts, emotions and feelings. My piece is how deeply do you believe in what you do and why you do it? That’s the purpose and the greater your purpose will be the fuel of your eventual resilience.

In other words, if I believe in what I’m doing, I’m going to continue to get up off the mat because it’s not about a single day, a moment or a transaction. It’s about this long game. The job career calling transformation, as I said earlier, that’s what this is all about. It works on the field, court or ice. It works in the boardroom or the sales trenches. Having that deeper belief and purpose can keep you on the treadmill, especially on the days you want to get off.

[bctt tweet=”One has a mindset where it’s always, let’s not lose. They play not to lose. So they’re never going to fail big, but they’re never going to win big. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

We can all relate to that. There are certain days you feel like exercising and certain days you don’t. You don’t feel like exercising even if you get yourself on the treadmill. You might go, “Just ten minutes. I’m not doing the full 30 or whatever it is.” There has to be some bigger purpose to get you to do something when it’s so easy to stop doing it.

The purpose is to hit a certain goal of your weight, body fat or whatever, like certain goals of hitting a certain sales quota. That’s not nearly as impactful or it doesn’t have the longevity as, “I’m doing this I can live to see my grandchildren.” If you’ve been diagnosed with something or it’s a bigger purpose to why you want to get healthy versus vanity. It suddenly becomes, “We’re speakers. We have to have some endurance on changing time zones and fleet. We got to show up fully present.”

Nobody expects a Broadway star or an athlete to show up on the field, not being in training, rested, ready to go and practice, yet a lot of us show up in our own lives going, “Swing it when I get there. I lost my voice.” Whatever the issue is. There are so many things that we take for granted when we see a professional perform, whether it’s an actor, athlete or a speaker.

I think that all of these things that you’re talking about explain what it is that makes you so successful as an expert on helping people find their purpose so that they can lead others to success, whether it’s in sales or any other endeavor. I want to ask you, as we wrap it up, to give us a story about your own purpose. How did you find your purpose?

I’ll explain what’s more important, which is the color and the background of it. The statement is my purpose is to inspire purpose in others so they can play offense in life and we’ve appreciated the context to this conversation of what those things mean. The Latin definition of inspire is to breathe life into. I’m here in this world to breathe purpose into others.

My purpose is to help you find your purpose. My mission is to help you not only have a mission statement but to be on a mission. My cause is to help you find your cause. That is how I breathe life into people, teams and organizations. I found it at an offsite leadership retreat with the 49ers and frankly, it’s what led to my eventual Jerry Maguire leap out of an industry that I never thought I would leave. I thought I would still be here decades later and be riding the sexy train of the sports business. It was an amazing ride.

Playing Offense: What your intrinsic motivation is because that will create a pull effect versus in sales, it’s often a push effect.

Once I tapped into purpose and I started to understand my core values and my biggest value is impacted. I asked myself a simple question, “Can I create more impact inside of the walls of this team, this industry or beyond those four walls?” When I evaluated the decision like that, I knew that I had to leave and take a leap, but the reason and part of the purpose discovery process is you have to do a lot of life reflection to tap into your authentic purpose.

The biggest memory for me comes from the biggest pain in my life and often, for those reading, your greatest pain can often be tied to your greatest purpose. For me, the greatest pain was losing my dad at nineteen. As an only child and I still remember picking up the call where I got the word that I picked up as a boy, and I hung up as a man. My mom went from a parent instantly to a partner.

What I got to appreciate over the years, because I don’t know if somebody is reading and maybe this will resonate, but I’ve learned more from my dad since the day he passed than when he was alive. It’s because of the stories that I’ve heard from his former students. By trade, my dad was an educator at a continuation high school. For those that are not familiar with continuation high schools, it’s typically a kid’s last chance. They’ve been kicked out of traditional schools. They landed a continuation and there is no next step. The next step is no school will take you.

In a lot of situations where you come from a broken home, you’ve been given up on, disadvantaged backgrounds, the hope and the prayer is that you don’t become a statistic on the street. That’s the environment that my dad chose teaching. Years after he passes, I’m at a barbershop, a few blocks away from the school that he taught at. I’m sitting in the barber’s seat and walks in a 7-foot-tall man, tattoos on every square inch of his body and his face. If you saw it in a dark alley, you are running the other way.

He and I locked eyes and he’s coming right at me. I saw his hand go up and I fully expected that a fist was about to impact but instead, I opened my eyes and I saw a finger that was pointing right at me. He says, “Are you Mr. Epstein’s son?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I wanted to come over to say thank you because your dad was the first person that ever believed in me. I’ve had a job for two consecutive months now, and that may not sound like much to you, but it means the world to me.”

John and everybody reading this next part is what got me. This gentleman said, “Your dad gave me a reason to think that tomorrow was worth it.” When I heard that, it changed my entire vision and meaning of life. I understood the impact that he made on people’s lives. That’s why impact is so important to me. It’s not a core value. You asked me what my whys and I gave you the marketing answer along to inspire purpose in others so they can play offense in life. You know what it is, the spirit under that because there’s always a why under the why? The deepest why that I have is to make my dad proud.

[bctt tweet=”The intrinsic motivation is, are you motivated from the inside out? Is there a level of internal success and significance and happiness and fulfillment and purpose that you feel in the work? ” username=”John_Livesay”]

It’s heartwarming. As I say, when we tug at heartstrings, that’s what gets people to open purse strings and gets us the emotional connection that we need because people buy emotionally. If people want to find out more about you, that your website is PaulEpsteinSpeaks.com. The book title again is the Power of Playing Offense. You have something relatively exciting and new to share with us in terms of a partnership you’re doing with the WHY Institute. Why don’t you tease that out a little bit for us?

It’s pretty hot off the press and I’m now as Senior Advisor for the WHY Institute. I know Gary Sanchez, who’s a dear friend. He’s also been a guest on your show. He’s an amazing human being and on a mission. It came from Simon Sinek’s old work and the Golden Circle why, how, what. The problem with the why are most people cannot directly explain it.

Imagine the magic that’s possible when you not only know your why but you know the why of every person on your team and in your organization. I see this tool being able to unlock all of our potentials because we have so much greater empathy when we understand how to speak the other person’s language. That’s what the WHY Institute and the assessment does.

From the heart, that once you can tap into your why, the world starts to become a lot clear, there’s a lot less burnout, fatigue, and you’ll start to feel alive. That’s the closing piece that I’ll share with everybody is a simple thing to share is when you’re living on purpose and life is no longer happening to you. It’s because you’ve activated and aligned your head, heart and hands. When your head and heart are on board, your hands will follow. That is the equation to living and leading on purpose. Align your head, heart and hands, game over, lights out.

Thank you so much for sharing your passion, your why, your stories. I think it’s going to be something that’s going to help a lot of people. Thanks again, Paul.

John, thank you so much.

Important Links

• The Power of Playing Offense
• Paul Epstein
• Gary Sanchez – Previous episode
• WHY Institute
• 49ers Academy
• ScienceOfPurpose.org
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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