It was the winter of 2018 and we had just finished up fall practice at Saint Petersburg College, where I was coaching at the time. It was a good fall, but I was about to have a 6 week period where I wouldn’t have much to do. If you know me, you know I don’t like to just sit around. Florida is one of the few places in the country where you can still have showcases on the field during the month of December. This is great for all the volunteer assistants across the state, because we have the opportunity to make money every weekend and stay busy. The previous year I just settled for doing, and my weeks were very unproductive. I knew this needed to change. My wife made enough money for us to be comfortable- but I wanted to carry my weight. I started looking for jobs and amazon delivery popped up. I applied and immediately got an interview. I got dressed up for the interview the next day but little did I know I was going in just to sign the contract, and the job was mine. 

My first day on the job I got to the famous dog track in Saint Petersburg. Just to give you a visual, it’s the Dog Track that Danny goes to meet Saul in Oceans 11. I pull up behind a hop in my massive Mercedes Amazon truck and drive to the warehouse. It’s tough to visualize how hectic these mornings are for pickups, but I’ll try to paint the picture for you. They have a system where you pick up certain racks labeled such as A110. The private company that I worked for gets rewarded for how fast we get in and out of the facility. It’s just like travel baseball tournaments, hurry up, wait, and then hurry up again. Once we get out of the facility, we start our day. A normal day is around 8 hours of work going to houses and workplaces. I did not start at a normal time, though. I started right before the biggest delivery holiday of the year: Black Friday. They give you lighter workloads to get your feet wet but that didn’t happen during this time of year. You start out with the lighter workload but once you’re done you have to go help other people who have packages left. Now that you know all that goes into these days, they went from 8am-11pm. Safe to say that I did not want this to become my living. For the next 4 weeks my life this would be this Monday-Thursday and showcases Friday-Sunday. 

This time in my life sucked, but it was what I had to do. After the first two days of delivering packages, I knew that I needed something other than just listening to music in order to pass the time. I had listened to a few podcasts and one book over Audible. I decided to get back in and I’ve never looked back- it is a part of my daily routine now that I will never stop doing. I would get through half a book a day and the light bulb went off in my head of why books are so important. I was finally retaining information that I could never do when just reading a physical  book. When I read physical books, I could get through a few pages and then instantly zone out. This would make me feel defeated and I felt like I had no other options to learn. I mentioned that I had listened to a couple books on audible before, but comments from people stopped me in my tracks. I would say I read a book and they would say, “no you didn’t you listen to it, and  that doesn’t count.” I know this shouldn’t have impacted me the way it did, but it did. This is the same thing as being labeled a players coach. When people called me that, it had a negative connotation. As I grew to understand that being a players coach was a good thing in my book, I also learned that listening to books on audible was a good thing as well. Also, no one else should be telling you how to learn or grow. That is all up to you.

I busted my butt over the month and ended up finishing over 20 podcast episodes and 6 books. I then had a busy spring/summer where my listening slowed down. I started back up last fall when I was driving to recruiting events. It was around this time that I had put myself in a box again. I was only listening to these educational pieces when I had a big chunk of time that I was driving. I started listening whenever I had any amount of time. The question I asked myself was, “If I listen for 20 hours and retain 10 hours, isn’t that better than listening for 5 hours and retaining all 5 hours.” We all catch ourselves at times where we don’t do something if we can’t do it perfectly. This is very flawed thinking. It was perfect timing because little did I know that quarantine was coming. I started using audible during this period all the time. I would go for long walks with my dogs while listening. I would do yard work and things around the house and listen to Audible. Quarantine, like any other portion of your life, was what you made of it. I told a friend of mine that I believe that I sped up my learning curve of coaching by over 5 years during this time period. When are we ever going to have that much time to just sit in the house? Hopefully never. But this was a positive I found during quarantine and it’s one of my favorite things to do.

I am now approaching 50 books that I’ve read in a two year time period and I’m still finding new ways to get better at retaining this information. One way is the speed up option on the Audible app. I did not realize this was a feature until a couple of months ago. I am currently listening to books at 1.2x the regular speed. There is currently a player on our team that listens to books at 1.9x the regular speed. This seems crazy to me, but he has been building his listening speed over the span of a couple of years. Crazy concept right? Taking time to get better at something. The next thing that works for me is using twitter posts to share my favorite thoughts on the book. When I’m listening to books, I’ll stop what I’m doing sometimes to write down notes but most of the time I just keep going about my business. These twitter posts are good for my followers but even better for myself because it helps me retain. I’ve started to think about my twitter as my public jornal. Another way that I just started was going to goodreads.com and looking up quotes from the books that I’ve listened to. Quotes are a controversial topic in coaching right now. They are often misused and just thrown on walls with no context. This is how I feel with most twitter posts. It is good information but there needs to be more behind it. With the method that I’m using right now, the context is there. I’m just getting a nice refresher on the book and getting usable quotes that could be great for certain guys on the team. Phil Jackson talks about this in his book ‘11 Rings”. He would give quotes that are for certain players and suggest books that could be life changing to certain players. This is how I see looking back on quotes from the books that have had a big impact on myself. They mean so much more to me after having the entire message of the book delivered to me. 

This is just my personal journey of how I found that Audible could be a life changing tool for myself. It could be completely different for you, but one rule that applies to all of us is finding out how YOU learn and not how others say you should. If you don’t know what type of learner you are, then how can you help your athletes understand what you’re teaching? I learn by listening and writing. Now tell me, how do you learn and retain information?