What Do Sports Teach You with Justin Bookey

george grombacher 0:02
Just a book. He is a global ping pong player. He’s a US Open medalist, the best selling author of ping pong leadership 18 principles to succeed at any table in business, sports and life. Welcome to the show, Justin.

Justin Bookey 0:15
Thanks, George. I’m stoked to be here. excited to have you on

george grombacher 0:19
Tesla, right? personal lives more about your work and why you do what you do. Sir, I

Justin Bookey 0:25
grew up in Seattle, rainy place. That means we have a lot of time in the basement at the ping pong table. You know, it gets dark at 3:45pm When I’m walking home from school, and yeah, my parents were pretty good players. So when we moved into this house with a ratty old table in the basement when I was six, they’re like, oh, we’ll tell you all about this table, what it can do and how much fun it is. And I just never left the game. And I beg any house guests, cousins, friends, anybody let’s play let’s play. Let’s play. That was a shrimpy crit kid growing up. So basketball, football, we’re kind of out of the question. Now, of course, I’m big and five foot seven inch. So totally different story, though. And so even in high school, I, I played a lot of sports and wrestling and track and soccer. And I was a decent athlete, but I just always stuck with table tennis. It just had this special allure to me. And I was pretty good. And I realized I could beat up on all these big basketball and football players who would be pushing me around otherwise. And they would Strangely, I would actually get a little respect from it. I wasn’t expecting that. But like, Whoa, dude, that’s pretty awesome. Wow, that’s a cool sport, what you do with the ball and all that, that was a little surprising. And it actually gave me a little more currency than I thought I would get from that. That was really just icing on the cake, though. It’s not why I play but it was a nice, pleasant surprise. Anyway, fast forward through schooling. And I became a lawyer and digital strategist, brand strategist. I always kept these two worlds separate. I would study hard, that was important to me, and my parents and our family. And I would work hard at my jobs. Definitely worked hard at being a lawyer and law school and being a lawyer. At the same time, I would then go home at late at night or on the weekends. And really, really pursue table tennis and train hard and do competitions from a young age. And I never realized those two worlds would cross. And you know, I would be in my 20s and working in a law firm or at agencies, digital agencies and would have a table maybe. And I was so grateful for that. Because finally, I could experience that in a little bit of both worlds. There’ll be a table in the hallway or a separate wing of a large agency and why would play at 4pm, just for 20 minutes just to get my brain going. It’s better than a shot of espresso, and a built community. And I would meet people in my office who I wouldn’t otherwise know in a big office, right. And then pandemic came along, and I finally had a chance to sit down and really distill all these principles. I had learned over the years. principles that I had learned from amazing table tennis coaches, I was so lucky because I could learn from some of the best in the world, Olympians, national champions, world champions in the table tennis world, and they get deep. Like my coach is an Olympian. I’ve been training with her for 20 years. It’s not about just, here’s the correct angle on a Forehand drive. Yes, but it’s also what are you afraid of? What’s holding you back? Where do you want to be? What kind of player do you want to be? Where do you feel comfortable standing? Where do you feel comfortable? As a person? What are you trying to achieve is victory your only goal? I mean, these are really philosophical questions, right? And she’s like, so she’s more than a trainer. She’s a, she’s a guru, in a lot of ways, right? Anyway, so that’s, that’s one side. The other side was working at places like XPRIZE, where I was working with Peter Diamandis, the founder of XPRIZE. Or I got to work with Paul Jacobs, the, the CEO of Qualcomm, and I’ve learned from guys like Nolan Bushnell and founded Atari. They have really amazing stories and amazing things that drive them to success and they’ve had failures and they’ve had amazing successes. And so gradually, I learned maybe, I don’t know. A dozen years ago, it started to finally dawned on me that these principles that help these amazing table tennis, elite players succeed. They’re really the same principles that help really innovative leaders. succeed. And so getting back to pandemic times, I had a chance to sit back and really distill these principles. And I came up with 18 for the book, these Pong principles I call them and distill that and you know, there’s 18 chapters in the book 18 Pong principles. And I got to I interviewed one leader that exemplifies a principle for each chapter. So that’s what the book is about.

george grombacher 5:28
I love it. I were talking earlier, I played tennis growing up. And now as an adult, looking back, maybe similar to the process, you went through the pandemic of distilling down your principles. sport teaches us so much. And there’s so much to be learned from it. And I think that anybody who ever played high school football, will tell you all about how important that was. But it’s true of tennis, or golf, or ping pong, if you take the time to really think about it. So one of the principles that he talks about is is your ready position. I’d love to dig into that a little bit.

Justin Bookey 6:06
Sir thing, yeah. So that is all about identifying yourself, your style of play, and how you can most adapt to whatever you want to do. Whatever quirks you have to the game in hand, and the point at hand, that I should back up and say each chapter is as two parts. One is in the game, and one is in leadership. So there’s 18 chapters, and each is divided into two parts. Here’s the pawn principle in the game. And that’s what Pong principle number six, what’s your ready position. So in the game that’s like, they can table tennis, you’re like, you know, you’re crouched down, angled certain way, elbow, paddle more or less in the middle of your playing field division. So you can quickly go forehand or backhand, depending where the serve is. And the thing is, there’s not one exact ready position, because we’re all different players. And we have different priorities, strategies and different physical characteristics and playing styles. Same in tennis, you may be a little more adept at, I don’t know if it’s a faster blocking it or slicing it or going just for a pure smash or maybe more touched topspin, whatever. Right. So that probably affects how you’re standing. And of course, it’s dependent on who’s serving to you and what their strengths are, right. So that’s the part of the game. And then in leadership, I was talking with Wil shorts, he’s the New York Times puzzle editor. And he’s on NPR that the puzzlemaster top of the game, because that’s like, the pinnacle of his position. And he’s always done games. He’s always created games. When he was a kid, he used to make him for his mom and his brother. And then he joined clubs. And he sold his first puzzle to a magazine when when he was really young, 1211 or 13 years old. He is drawn to that so much no matter what his other job was, he actually went to law school, because he thought that was the right thing to do. Never in his heart, though, he was always doing games, in a way that was his ready position. Because no matter what his other job was, he would stay in tune with the gaming community. And he would then he would go and he would run these competitions just because he loved it. And of course, the more you do that, the more you are called to do that, because people recognize your efforts. And so when finally the New York Times, lead editor position came out came open for the the crossword puzzle, New York Times, which may be the most famous crossword puzzle in the world. He was so ready for that anyway, because it was his natural ready position to be always in the puzzle world, that he was kind of unnatural, and he got the job. Right. So that’s where you’re ready position is something that is an immediate by the fraction of a second position, and it’s also a long term, lifetime decision. Are you going to be ready? You could be a graphic designer, you ready position is definitely going to involve AI these days. Right? You could be a car mechanic. ready position is going to be working with electric electronic vehicles. It’s probably as well as internal combustion. Whatever, right? Lawyer, you better be getting used to new developments in AI, and so forth. I mean, depending on the course there, there’s many variations depending on your specialty. Anyway, so that’s kind of ready position as a tennis player. You must you must have altered you already. position depending on the circumstances, right?

george grombacher 10:02
Sure, sure. And same thing goes the pickleball, today, and pickleball. And that, fundamentally, is, as so many people are coming into the world of pickleball, that don’t have the tennis or ping pong background, so they don’t necessarily understand, I need to get my racket up, and I need to be on the balls of my feet. And I need to be too ready and do a split step when the ball is coming to me so that I can respond appropriately, whatever comes my way. That’s just not an obvious thing to people, because I watch them and they just don’t understand that they’re just kind of standing around and, and reaching versus moving and bouncing around the court. But that’s also true of the temperature. Is the Sun gonna be in my face that the last point go? Great? Did it go terrible? What did I do last night? How do I feel that I have a fight with my wife. So the right position, from my perspective just means whatever’s coming my way, I’m going to position myself to be able to handle it.

Justin Bookey 11:03
Yes, it’s highly situational, highly adaptive. And so that’s why I see the audience for the book is anybody who envisions themselves as a leader. And that could be a food truck owner, an independent UX, professional graphic designer, all the way up to you know, regional sales manager to manager to Fortune 100 CEO. We’re all leading ourselves or others, to greater opportunity for success, okay? You take that group, and anyone who can appreciate ping pong on any level, you might have played it a few times in kindergarten, or anything, or substitute basketball, or field hockey or lacrosse or pickleball. Because we all have our either sports or hobbies. Anything can pertain to a ready position, it doesn’t necessarily need to be ping pong, that just happens to be my main channel of influence. But for you now, it could be pickleball or tennis regulation, recollection. Maybe you were a high school wrestler, there’s certainly, you know, ready position in that. And depending on whether you’re on offense or defense or trying to go for a reversal or takedown or whatever.

george grombacher 12:18
Yeah, so it’s certainly been a parent, I need to, I need to have a ready position and a husband, they need to have a ready position and just all of it I, I have to have that understanding about myself. So I think that could translate to everything.

Justin Bookey 12:33
Yes, absolutely. And it’s it’s physical, its mental, its strategic. Your resume is part of your resume ready position. Keep it fresh, that’s being ready. Because you never know. Keep your LinkedIn profile, fresh, your photo fresh, because that’s already positioned. Because my favorite definition of luck is when preparation meets opportunity, right? The preparation is half of it. That’s the ready position, the opportunity you can strike at any minute from any direction. If you are prepared, that’s it. You can respond in a blink of an eye.

george grombacher 13:14
Yeah. How did you pick which was going to be number one and what is what is the number one principle

Justin Bookey 13:20
number one is be careful what you measure and why. Okay, that that was inspired partly by the Prime Minister of Iceland. That’s why I interviewed for that Katrine, Jakob Stott, here. I thought that was a natural start. Because whenever we look at any body of information and strategies and principles, let’s be careful. Because there’s a lot of rabbit holes, not all of them are good. In this day and age, we have virtually unlimited data at our fingertips more than ever before. When I was first doing brand, strategy, content strategy, web 1.01, he 25 years ago, it was a precious thing. We had to pay a lot of money for a lot of metrics analytics data right now. It’s it’s big data is everywhere. It’s easy to it’s easy to find and package. The human element of interpreting and having an intelligent filter system is more important than ever. So if you choose to just look at the raw data, you can see patterns however you want. So just be careful. What you look at I’ve seen when it comes to coaching table tennis to start off that chapter. I’ve seen a coach and a kid talking about this match. This kid who was maybe 1011 years old, a junior at a fantastic coach. They’re warming up for the US Nationals. The kid got a silver medal in this regional tournament. Coach asks them Okay, so how would you rate your performance today? Oh, hey, well, maybe a minus. I mean, I didn’t win it. But I got the silver. I went seven and one in my matches. That was a good day. Coaches. Okay. Fair enough. And congratulations, I was, you know, with a strong performance, I’d give you a c plus b minus kids go what? Like, yeah, well, you lost your temper twice. That almost cost you that one match. What’s your best stroke? Oh, my forehand loop drive. Okay, you used it, I counted 38 times, that’s actually a really small amount for your primary weapon, you should be using at least double triple that. You You missed three out of your nine best serves, you did your best serve nine times. In the last match, you missed it three times. That’s a horrible percentage. We can’t have that used to be either perfect, maybe one miss, but really super perfect. If you’re only doing items. These are all things that I’m counting. The coach said, these are important metrics. Because what’s the objective? This regional tournament, you’re going to have plenty of small regional tournaments, we want to get you to win at Nationals. That’s the overriding metric. The kid was just looking at today, the kid was in a way measuring the wrong things. So there’s so many things we can measuring, and so many missteps and blind out wrong alleys, we can go down. And that’s just an example. Getting to the prime minister of Iceland. She talks about GDP, that is a woefully inaccurate, singular source, one number that’s been used for decades to measure an economic growth and development of a nation. It discount so many things are actually important. And she quotes RFK, the original RFK, not RFK, Jr. About GDP measures everything except what is important. Paraphrasing. So she’s come up with in conjunction with New Zealand, Scotland, Wales, and a couple other countries, a wellness index 39 indicators, because they pulled the people of Iceland, and they said what is really important in your life. It’s not GDP, that’s a this macro measure of a nation at large. That doesn’t matter to the people in the schools and the homes and the streets. Health, healthy family, healthy relationships, healthy neighborhoods, good jobs and job security, social connections with small circles and large circles and community things like that. Environmental Health, those are metrics that matter. So if we measure the wrong thing, we’re gonna get a really distorted picture of how well our society is doing. America has a great GDP, number one in the world, China’s number two, there’s a lot of other issues we have to deal with, though, that go well beyond GDP. The counts the number GDP accounts for the number of cars produced, but it doesn’t account for pollution, from fossil fuels, for example, or accounts from the number of sodas sold and produced, it does not account for obesity and diabetes that can be caused or that from that. So that’s just an example of we really got to be careful of how we’re measuring why we’re measuring what we’re measuring.

george grombacher 18:23
Yeah, so easy to track. Everything you’ve just been saying. And being mindful of what is truly important, what really matters versus what feels good or what’s what’s vain, or what is just commonly been talked about or tracked. So I appreciate all that. I love it. Well, Justin, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? Where can they get their copy of ping pong leadership 18 principles to succeed at any table, business, sports and life.

Justin Bookey 18:57
Easy enough just to go to ping pong leadership.com You can read all about the who’s involved the principles make and get in contact with me. And then it’s the book is available on Amazon and other fine retailers. And just want to note also, we’ve been talking about some pie concepts here. And on their practical level, all of them do boil down to what you can do in your daily life and your daily challenges. And there’s game points at the end of each chapter that really helps you hone in on what you’re going through and how you can apply it to your daily and weekly and monthly experience. So I don’t want people to get the impression this is high minded academia only.

george grombacher 19:45
Love it. Super practical. Take an apply to immediately get better. That’s what we’re all about here. Absolutely

Justin Bookey 19:53
man, you enable and we all have our tables. So just identify what table you have and you’re facing in your life.

george grombacher 19:59
Love it. If you enjoyed this as much as I did, or just in your appreciation, share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas, go to ping pong leadership.com Check out all things, Justin and get your copy of ping pong leadership wherever you buy books on the Amazon would link that in the notes as well. And get better whatever table that you are at. Thanks again, Justin.

Justin Bookey 20:24
Thank you so much, George. See what the pickleball courts there

george grombacher 20:27
you go man till next time. Remember, do your part by doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.