How to Turn Failure into Fuel w/ Sean Casey
The Ed Mylett Show
Background
Sean Casey is a former MLB baseball player and three-time MLB All-Star. Sean played for five different teams over his twelve-year career including the Cleveland Indians, Cincinatti Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers & the Boston Red Sox before he retired in 2009. Sean is still very much around the game of baseball as he works as an analyst for MLB network. Although Sean is now widely considered as one of the best hitters of his decade, this was not always the case. In this podcast, Sean tells in detail about his experiences growing up playing the game, his lack of recruiting interest in high school, and some of the things he had to do to get where he is now.
Review
The podcast begins with Sean Casey discussing the status of his game freshman year of high school. As a freshman in high school, Sean was not starting on his JV baseball team in Pittsburgh. One day, he walked up to his dad & asked him if he would go speak to the coach for him and figure out why he isn’t playing, because he thought he was better than the guy in front of him. Anyone who has been around sports or especially coached knows this is a VERY common occurrence…. a parent talking to the coach behind the scene about why their kid isn’t playing. When Sean asked, his dad told him no and that although he also thought Sean was better, he obviously wasn’t glaringly better than the guy in front of him and that he needed to control what he could control and do the work to become glaringly better than the other guy. He made him a promise that if he would hit every day after school to get better, that he would buy him unlimited batting cage tokens. Sean said he knew this was a big deal, because his dad did not make a whole lot of money. Sean accepted this deal and began to hit every day at the batting cage in the town over and getting a lesson once a week. This is where Sean started to fall in love with the mechanics of a swing and this is also where he began to see the power of small, meaningful habits as well as marginal gains and compounding effects. Shortly after, Sean began to get exponentially better at hitting and took the starting position which he obviously kept the rest of his high school career.
Fast forward a few years, and Sean is starting and playing very well for his Varsity baseball team, but he isn’t getting any college scholarships or even any expressed interest. Again, Sean starts complaining about it to his dad and telling him that no one is coming to see him even though he’s playing so well. His dad responded with ‘You’re right. No one is coming. They are not going to come. You need to start playing offense and stop playing defense and waiting for them to come to you’. At the time, Sean’s dad had just started his own company and he and Sean had been writing out personalized letters and marketing flyers to send out every month looking for business. Sean’s dad told him to meet him in his office after school and that they were going to play offense together. After school, Sean and his dad wrote out letters to every college Sean could think of that he wanted to play at so that they could send them out themselves. At the end when Sean got up, his dad made him sit down and write one more to the university of Richmond, simply because that is the only school that had ever even expressed relative interest, and they only did so by the form of a flyer in the mail. A few weeks later, Sean had the game of his career, going 4-4 with 4 doubles and 8 rbis. It turned out that it was a great day to have a great day, because the University of Richmond coach had driven 6 hours to watch him in response to his letter and offered him his one and only scholarship after after that game. Sean ended up going to the University of Richmond, starting his freshman year, leading the entire country in batting his junior year and getting drafted by the Cincinatti Reds in the 2nd round after his junior year. After that, the rest of his career in the MLB is history.
There are a few key lessons and takeaways I got from Sean Casey’s story. A few of these takeaways include the importance of a strong support system, the idea of preparation meeting opportunity, the value of being proactive rather than reactive, and using failure as feedback.
The first thing I noted was the importance of a valuable and honest support system. Several times in this episode, Sean mentioned the importance of his relationship with his dad and that is easily noted in the previous paragraphs. Sean’s dad’s responses & advice when Sean came complaining to him in the aforementioned situations were painfully honest, but without those responses, Sean would likely not have ended up where he was. Instead of talking to the coach for him, his dad told him he needed to work harder so the coach would have no choice but to play him. When Sean complained about the colleges not coming to see him, he told them bluntly that they weren’t and encouraged him to start taking action. Not only did Sean’s dad tell him the brutally honest truth, but he also gave him the plan to go forward and began to get in the trenches and work with him. He bought him the batting cage tickets that developed his all-star swing and he sat down and wrote letters with him that ended up getting him his only college offer. This is the type of support you need to succeed in life. Hang with people that are going to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. Surround yourself with people that not only tell you the truth and tell you what direction you need to take, but also get in the dirt with you and help you push in that direction. For you to grow upward, you have to have a strong base… and every base needs a stable support system.
Another important thing I took from his story is the reassurance that ‘luck’ is the crossroads where preparation meets opportunity. A lot of people see success and chalk it up to luck without ever considering the work that was done behind the scenes to get it. This especially comes whenever the timing hits perfectly, and you are ‘in the right place at the right time’. What a lot of people don’t realize, or want to realize, is that without the hours and hours of preparation Sean did prior to that game, he wouldn’t have gone 4-4 when the Richmond coach was there. Without hours of campaigning for himself and sending out letters, Richmond’s coach wouldn’t have even been there. I plan on doing an entirely separate post about the parallels between luck and discipline, but this is something that I noted and wanted to point out from this episode. Success doesn’t come to those who start working whenever it is convenient for them or for those who wait for the ‘perfect time’. Success comes to those who work year-round so that they are always prepared when the opportunity arises. Often times people get opportunities for success, but they don’t even realize it because they were not prepared. Be prepared for the opportunity, go to the cage every day.
Yet another valuable takeaway from this episode is the value of being proactive, rather than reactive. This somewhat builds off of the idea of the ‘waiting for the perfect time’ concept I mentioned previously. The truth is, there are a lot of smart and talented people in this world. You can’t just sit back and wait for opportunities because 9 times out of 10, they’re not coming to find you. If the opportunity is good enough, it doesn’t need to look for you because it has people like you out looking for it. Yeah, Sean was obviously good at baseball in high school… but apparently there were lots of others just as good as him in the area. If his dad would not have shown him the importance of playing offense rather than defense, or being proactive rather than reactive, Sean would likely have never had the career that he ended up having. If there is something out there that you want, some goal that you want to reach, some accolade that you want to obtain – you have to go get it. Don’t sit back and wait for the perfect time, because the timing will never be perfect. You can’t just point the bow in the direction you want to go, you have to release the arrow.
One final lesson I want to note from this episode is the concept of using failure as feedback. Anyone that has ever played baseball knows that it is a game of failure, more so than any sport out there. If you succeed 3 times out of 10, just 30%, you are a hall-of-fame baseball player. When I played, I was not good at accepting failure, to say it lightly… but I think if I was better at using failure as feedback, I would have played a whole lot longer. Being able to use failure as feedback is being able to accept that you failed, and instead of getting angry about it, you ask yourself what you could do next to not let that happen again. If you blow a sales call, what could you have said differently? If you make a mistake at work, what could you have done differently to better prepare yourself? If you slept past your alarm for the third day, what can you do differently tomorrow to make sure that doesn’t happen again? This is something I am personally working on getting better at because I know that if you can accept failure and use it as feedback, you will be much more successful in the long run.
Although this podcast caught my attention a little more due to my baseball background, there are several key lessons mentioned throughout that apply to any area of life. Whether you are a sports fan or not, find some time in your day to take listen to this episode and Sean’s messages. Despite all of the good info mentioned above, there were a lot more nuggets he mentioned throughout the podcast that I didn’t write about here.
