Intro [&] Simplicity → Clarity → Confidence → Creativity
How athletes can simplify their surroundings to be more creative.
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Transcript:
Kyle: Uh, hi everybody. This is Kyle. I used to work with Ryan back in the day. We’re kinda doing a podcast type of format. Basically, he needs someone to interview him to get thoughts off his chest.
Ryan: Right, and that’s exactly what I need. I tried doing, you know, speaking to a camera alone. I can’t stand it. I can’t think. I, I guess I just need someone to bounce my thoughts off and things like this. So yeah, let’s get into it.
Kyle: All right. First thing is SCCC, which stands for simplicity leads to clarity, which leads to confidence, which leads to creativity. Can you explain that?
Ryan: Yeah. So I kinda came up with the, uh, SCCC thing, uh, probably like 13 or 14 years ago. Uh, and a short way to put it is when things are simple, your mind is clear. When your mind is clear, you’re confident, and when you’re confident, you’re more creative. So if we back this up a little bit and think about it from an athletic point of view, athletes, as they get deeper into their careers, uh, things get more complicated. Uh, the training gets more complicated. Their lives get more complicated, especially if they’re dealing with NIL or the professional ranks. The thing I noticed with the best athletes in the world is they were really good at simplifying everything. Maybe an example might be something like the weight room. You know, there’s so many people out there trying to hack the best way to train or the best way to do squats or whatever the case is, and they read, you know, ridiculous books like Supertraining, which are just way beyond even the most elite athletes out there. It’s a great scientific book, but nothing in it really you can apply, or very little of it you can apply to your everyday life. If you’re doing perfect squats and they’re simple, those are gonna be valuable to you throughout your entire career, regardless of what sport you’re in. Yeah, you might do them heavy, you might do them light, depending on if you’re a marathon runner versus if you’re a sprinter or a lineman in football, but at the same time, you gotta do it right. So you know, you really wanna keep things simple. You wanna simplify everything as much as possible because when you do that, it clears your mind. It, it gives you a level of clarity. You know what you’re doing, you know how you’re doing it, and therefore you’re confident in what you’re doing, so you don’t have to think about it. You can kinda throw it off to the side and think more clearly about other things. When you go out onto the field, uh, that’s when things start to change. You start to do things that you’ve never even trained for and that the audience has never even seen before. I find it funny when athletes are asked after they make an amazing play or something, you know, like, “Oh, how’d you do that?” You know, when they’re being interviewed by ESPN or something like that, and they literally don’t know how they did it,
and they kinda shake their head and, well, that’s the reality. Uh, they don’t know how they did it, but their body is programmed i-in a very simple way usually, and, um, their mind is programmed in a simple way. But what gives them access, I believe, to whatever it might be out there on the, on the field, was that they had the confidence and the simplicity of their game. And when you have confidence, that’s when you become creative because creativity is a risk in sports. If you want to be creative in your sport like the best athletes in the world, you’re gonna have to take some risks, and if your training or your background is super complicated, you’re focused on those things in particular. The problem with focusing on those things is those things are not the end game. The end game is to be able to be creative out on the field of play and be unpredictable, be hard to cover, uh, be hard to run past, whatever the case may be. In order to be these things, you have to be constantly improving your game, and those who are the most creative are the most dangerous athletes out there.
Kyle: So what you’re saying basically is like simplify the stuff that isn’t the game itself? Kinda sounds like that.
Ryan: Yeah. I, I’d say that’s kinda what it is. It’s simplify everything, and that doesn’t mean automate everything. It doesn’t mean ignore everything else that isn’t the game. But what it really means is put it in a position where you don’t have to worry about it, and actually in a lot of cases, discard experts because as you get better, you’ll be able to understand them in a way that allows you to set it aside and say, “Okay, when I’m in the weight room, I’m doing things this way. When I’m in the psychologist’s office, I’m doing things that way.” When you leave, you wanna forget those things and just perform.
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