Welcome to Episode 235 of What’s Your “And”? This is John Garrett. Each Wednesday, I interview a professional who, just like me, is known for hobby or a passion or an interest outside of work. If I put it in another way, it’s encouraging people to find their “and,” the things above and beyond their technical skills, the things that actually differentiates you at work.

I’m so excited to let everyone know that my book’s being pushed in just a few weeks. It’ll be available on Amazon and a few other websites. So check out whatsyourand.com for all the details. I can’t say how much it means that everyone’s listening to the show and sharing it with their friends and colleagues and then changing the cultures where they work because of it.

Please don’t forget to hit subscribe on the podcast so you don’t miss any of the future episodes. I love sharing such interesting stories each and every week. This week is no different with my guest, Sean Gallagher. He’s an Attorney and Managing Member of Gallagher Law in East Lansing in Detroit, Michigan. We went to Notre Dame together, both lived in Dillon Hall. Now, he’s with me here today.

Sean, thanks so much for taking time to be with me on What’s Your “And”?

Sean: Glad to do so, John.

John: This is going to be awesome. There’s going to be so much fun. I’m glad we’re able to make this work. I know you fairly well having lived and in Dillon together for years. I figured let’s do some rapid-fire questions so everyone can get to know Sean on another level. Here we go right out the gate. Favorite color?

Sean: Blue.

John: Blue? Nice. How about a least favorite color?

Sean: Least favorite color? Brown.

John: Brown? That’s a good answer. I figured —

Sean: No. No. Orange.

John: Orange. Yeah. Orange or brown together, I mean the whole Cleveland football brown jersey pretty much

Sean: Right. Two bad things that go bad together.

John: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don’t know why. How about when you fly, window seat or aisle seat?

Sean: Oh, I love the window.

John: Window? Nice. Okay. How about a favorite actor or actress?

Sean: Harrison Ford.

John: Oh yes, solid answer. Would you say you’re more early bird or night owl?

Sean: Wow. I’m both.

John: Both?

Sean: Depends on the day.

John: Impressive, man.

Sean: No, no. But if I’m exercising, it’s got to be early.

John: Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. When it comes to puzzles, more Sudoku or crossword?

Sean: Oh, Sudoku.

John: Oh, okay. Okay. Pens or pencils?

Sean: Mechanical pencils.

John: Nice, a little bit of both. I like it. It’s a hybrid. Yeah. But you can still make mistakes and erase them and no one knows.

Sean: That’s right.

John: That’s good. How about do you have a favorite number?

Sean: Forty-one

John: And why is that?

Sean: Because of that Dave Matthews song.

John: Okay. There you go.

Sean: My alternative answer there is any prime number. I love the prime numbers.

John: Oh, nice. Yeah. And 41, that’s a big prime number, set down there in the single digits. More cats or dogs?

Sean: Probably more dogs. But in our house, it’s fish.

John: Oh, okay. Okay. Fair enough. Do you prefer more hot or cold?

Sean: Hot.

John: Hot? Interesting.

Sean: Well, I mean hot food, cold temperatures. Hot food, cold weather.

John: Okay. There you go. Now, when it comes to your law, criminal or civil?

Sean: Civil.

John: Civil? There you go. All right. How about a favorite cereal of all time?

Sean: All-time favorite cereal? Honey Nut Cheerios.

John: Oh, classic. That’s a good one. Jeans or khakis?

Sean: Jeans.

John: Jeans? All right. Your computer, PC or a Mac?

Sean: PC.

John: PC? Yeah, me too. On your mouse, right click or left click?

Sean: Right click.

John: Right click? That’s where it unlocks all the cool stuff. Two more. This is a good one. Suits or law and order?

Sean: Law and order definitely.

John: Law and Order? Okay. All right. All right. The last one, the favorite thing you own or the favorite thing you have?

Sean: The favorite thing I have right now is my grandfather was given a silver dollar struck in 1882, e pluribus unum.

John: Wow.

Sean: Yeah. I carry it with me on a money clip. I hide it with $1 bills. I carry it with me pretty much everywhere I go.

John: That’s fantastic, man. That’s really cool.

Sean: I appreciate this I spoke with an actuary this summer who was a coin collector. He told me the name of the guy that designed this coin. Apparently, it’s referred to as this guy’s dollar bill because he designed it.

John: Wow. Look at that, man. But 1882?

Sean: 1882.

John: Man, like 140 years ago almost. That’s awesome.

Sean: It’s old school.

John: Yeah. That’s really cool. Also cool is you coaching baseball, especially youth baseball. How did you get started with this? Obviously, having kids is probably where it starts, but not everyone goes into the coaching route.

Sean: Right. Well, I played baseball from third grade through sophomore year in high school. Then I played on the Dillon Hall Inner Hall team, played one year of Inner Hall baseball with Dillon Hall, Dillon Hall. Rah, rah! Go team! That was I guess fall of ‘94. Then my baseball career took a semi-retirement until my oldest son — when he got into coach-pitch as a six-year-old or seven-year-old, I was up for coaching. He just turned 11. That was four seasons ago. So I’ve been coaching for five seasons. He was six when he started. That was what got me into it because I was like, “Well, I’ll coach,” because they needed a coach.

John: Right. Were you also the pitcher as well? I was the pitcher.

John: For people that are listening, the coach-pitch is to your own team, right?

Sean: Exactly.

John: Yeah. It’s not like you’re throwing heat to the other team. Well, that seems totally unfair.

Sean: When you strike out the side, you hang your head in shame. You strike out your own kid. I get five strikes. You couldn’t manage to put it over the plate. So the kids are crying. And yeah, you hang your head in shame.

John: People are hanging K signs for all the strikeouts. It’s like, “No, no. Put them away. Those are my own team.” That’s awesome, man. Just out of curiosity because I also played baseball for when I was very young, tee-ball all the way through. Tenth grade was when I stopped. What is it that made you stop?

Sean: I decided that I was going to play soccer in the spring other than baseball, in part because I liked the baseball program. I don’t know if I thought it was too political. My primary sport was basketball. After the basketball season ended, I was like, “I’m going to play soccer this spring, rec soccer.”

John: Yeah. For me, for some reason, around — I don’t know when but the ball started hissing when it came to the plate and when I was hitting. I did not like that. That was bad. I mean because when I was in sixth grade, we lived overseas. My dad was in Air Force. I was lumped in with eighth and ninth graders. I was in sixth grade and also small. So I got hit a lot. And I was just like, “Man, this hurts. This is dumb. What am I doing?” If I can be all time fielder, I would totally do that. But yeah, when the ball started hissing, I just was like, “Whoa, soccer it is.”

Sean: The real reason in the game is I couldn’t hit a curveball to save my life.

John: Right. Yeah.

Sean: It was coming at me. I couldn’t —

John: It’s going to hit me in the face. That’s my moneymaker. What are you doing?

Sean: That was probably the thing that really put my career to bed.

John: Yeah. Yeah. But that’s so cool that you’re out there again and coaching and sharing the love of the game with your kids. Yeah. That’s really awesome. Are there any more rewarding stories that you’ve gotten from your coaching experience?

Sean: My favorite story just this year is what I like to refer to and will, if I ever write the book about coaching youth baseball, will be the title. It’ll be the reluctant catcher. I had a six-year-old on the team this year. It’s boys and girls. Boys and girls get to play, so that’s fun. You see the interactions. It’s six and seven, eight-year-old years old. They’re all just out there playing.

But this one young lady who is the same age as my youngest son — they’re in class together — her dad is a big-time college basketball player. She’s a spitfire. For six years old, she’s got personality that just does not quit. If she decides she’s going to do something, well, she’s going to do it. The problem is if she decides she’s not going to do something, there’s no way to convince her otherwise. She’s got a strong personality.

So about the fourth game of the season, I do the lineup such that every kid rotates the batting order. They all get to be first and keeps the same batting order. But in the field, I try to rotate them around so that they’ll get to play their positions. Well, she was up to play catcher. I started putting the gear on her. She’s standing there. She’s like, “I don’t want to play catcher.” I’m like, “No, no. It’s okay. You want to play. It’s okay. You’re going to be fine. You can do great.” I did the sales job of the spring or the summer, the early summer in getting her from the dugout 57 feet over to behind the plate where she stood for an entire inning standing there. She didn’t move. She just stood there and would look over. She’s got glasses. She’s a six-year-old with glasses looking at me, glasses with the face mask on, just looked at me like, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this.” But I convinced her not to say no. I convinced her not to decide no. And I convinced her to play catcher for one inning, which I thought was a huge success. Because if any of those 57 feet between the dugout and behind the plate, had she decided no, then it might’ve been some other kid out there and it wouldn’t have been as great. But I kept talking and kept talking and kept distracting her and distracting her and finally got her out there and she’s playing. Pretty soon, the inning was over. She’s like, “Get this gear off of me.” I’m like, “You’re fine.”

John: Right. “Never again.” Yeah. That’s impressive. Yeah. Because I mean it’s one thing to teach the game but then, yeah, when you have such young kids out there, I mean there’s so many other levels of stuff that’s happening that you could never be prepared for.

Sean: When it’s 80 degrees and then it’s humid outside, no one wants to put the gear on. There’s that one kid that always wants to put the gear on, but this one did not want to put it on, did not want anything to do with catcher. Yeah. That was cool. It was something she didn’t want to do. Sometimes, that’s the thing, John, that I find about baseball.

On one baseball and games — and I consider baseball a game. It’s a game. It’s a game with rules. It’s a game with really abstract rules. It’s a game with not a lot of fairness and not a lot of equity. In the law, we’ve got the law, the legal rules. Then we’ve got equity. We’ve got, well, what’s fair. At least in the United States, those things work hand-in-hand. There are two courts that were merged. They were separate course in England back in the day. They were merged in the course of the United States when we brought the English common line. So we got rules and you got fairness. You had both on the court.

Baseball has rules and there’s not a lot of fairness. There’s just not a lot of equity in baseball. In six and seven-year-old coach-pitch baseball, the equity is you get five pitches, not three, before you strikeout. So they play five pitch baseball. But I feel like baseball is one of those games that you learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about the kids you’re coaching. They learn a lot about themselves. And you learn about what?

A quote — the man I play basketball for in high school was a Polish dude from Southwest Detroit.

John: Oh, boy.

Sean: Yeah. He just coached basketball and baseball and football. But I played basketball for him. He used to say, “As you live, so shall you play. And as you play, so shall you live.” So if you play hard when you compete, you’re going to get out to the world, you’re going to compete hard. And if you don’t, well, then maybe you need to keep playing and keep learning how to compete.

The other thing about baseball, in six-year-old hitting a baseball, hitting a baseball is one of the hardest things to do. I’m just saying. Hitting a curveball, it’s one thing to hit a curveball. Try a straight street ball.

John: Yeah. Then within the lines, like nothing just hit it at all. Hit it like 90 degrees.

Sean: Yeah, 90 degrees. That’s right. Yeah. And the best players in the world, they only hit it a third of the time. They’re the hall of famers. And the rest of us are just – man, if you make contact once, that’s fantastic. The other thing about it is you have to take a risk to get the bat off your shoulder and take a risk that you’re going to miss. You’re going to swing and miss. Then in business and in life, sometimes you swing and miss. Sometimes, there are tears. Sometimes, there are not. But it’s another one of these lessons where, “Yeah, you struck out this time, but great job swinging the bat. Great job swinging the bat. We’ll work with you and we’ll get you in contact.”

The other great thing about six-year-olds and seven-year-olds and eight-year-olds, you see a progression over six weeks or over eight weeks. They come so far so fast. It’s not immediate gratification, but it’s — you invest a little bit of time and you see a lot of improvement.

John: I love that. You’ve got to swing the bat in order to get the hit. And how much that translates to life and especially your corporate life, your professional life, yeah, I mean that’s really profound. That’s fantastic. And you’re teaching the kids that, yeah, you swing. You miss. You had a foul ball. You get out, whatever. It’s not the end of the world. Failure is okay.

Sean: Right. And it’s like a Thomas Edison thing, failed 10,000 times and then you get to win. I mean most of us will get 10,000 chances or we make 10,000 chances, if we need to make 10,000 chances to take 10,000 chances. But things like – and the kids, they don’t need to hear about this or want to hear about this at six-years-old or eight-years-old, but submitting a job application or sitting for professional examination, you only get that day. You only get that shot.

In some circumstances, law school for example, most of the courses are — you don’t get a grade all semester long. Then one day, at the end of the semester, you get one test. It’s curved and you get one shot. And that’s the only grade you get. That translates to the practice of law in that you stand up before a judge, you get one shot at this. You don’t get multiple shots. You may have put something in writing ahead of time, which may be the more important thing, probably is, usually is, but you get one shot. So you want to make sure you make contact.

John: Yeah. Is this something that, the coaching, that you talk about with colleagues and clients and people in the business world, corporate law world if you will?

Sean: You know what? At times, yeah, during baseball season. I consider baseball season for these kids to be late April to the end of June. So I’m talking about it because two nights a week, I’ll be coaching for two nights a week during the entire month of June. Then maybe a couple of weeks during May, I’ll be peeling off to go ahead to the field for a 5:30 game or 7:15 game. So it comes up. It’s not something that I have found myself talking with clients or colleagues about that much. They know that I do it.

John: Yeah, but it’s the thing that they know about.

Sean: Right. And I’ve had a few clients that have hired me in part because of the relationship that I built with them coaching their kid. When you see a coach out there — I had this experience this year trying to wrangle all kindergarteners and first graders, because I had all six-year-olds and seven-year-olds this year. It’s like, “Eyes and ears on me. Eyes and ears on me. I need your attention. I need your attention.”

Particularly early in the season, they’re just learning about being on a team, learning about paying attention, learning about listening, learning about — I had to do things like say, “Okay. We’re going to race around the soccer goal that’s out there in the middle of the outfield. Who’s going to be coach? I’m going to beat you guys,” and have to flat-out run and get them to get their wiggles out, like doing that stuff.

Then you see — this is the other interesting feature of coaching these days. It turns out practice is a spectator sport.

John: Oh boy.

Sean: Or a spectator activity where parents come to watch practice as like an evening – this is a fun thing to do. It’s just to go and watch their kid practice. I don’t know about you, but a quarter century ago, but my parents never came to watch practice.

John: No, that was freedom. Yeah. You can ride your bike home as a matter of fact.

Sean: Right. My dad was there. He was on the field helping and that was it, but couldn’t generally be there to practice. In high school, my coach would lock the gym doors. No one was allowed to practice. He didn’t care. As long as he was the coach, the players and the coaches and that was it. But then all things have changed. Parents come and watch. So they get to see how you approach coaching their kids. So a couple have hired me because of that. That’s not my primary marketing tool, particularly because my specialties are so deep in the weeds. It’s not where I expect to find the people that need my help.

John: Right. Yeah. And it’s always interesting to me how when we’re doing our hobby or passion or outside of work interest, it’s easy for us to tell people what our job is. But then when we’re in our job, it’s not easy for us to share what that passion is. Everyone that’s at the baseball field knows, “Oh, Sean’s a lawyer.” But not everyone in the law world knows all the time that you’re a baseball coach. It’s not you — it’s everyone. It’s just for some reason, when we walk into a corporate setting or a networking event or whatever, we shut that side down. And it’s really perplexing to me because I was the same way back in the day as well. And it’s just trying to get people to see that the magic happens once you open up. If none of the parents have known that you were a lawyer, then some of those business opportunities wouldn’t be there to help them out.

Sean: How did you first come to that?

John: I’ll ask the questions. No, no. I’m kidding. No, that’s true. I was just too dumb to know. Basically, someone would ask, “So what’d you do this weekend?” just trying to be nice. Then I guess you’re supposed to say, “Nothing,” or, “Well, I didn’t do anything.” But I said, “Well, I drove to Springfield, Illinois and did a comedy show at the Funny Bone. And they’d be like, “Wait, what?” All of a sudden, now we’re having a real conversation like two adults, like people that are interested in each other.

See, it was just somebody asking, probably just going through the motions. Then you give them a real answer. Then now, you’re having a conversation. A big part of it is just showing a genuine interest in each other and the people around you. And there isn’t a charge code for that all the time. That isn’t how we get paid or how we get promoted or how we get bonused. But that’s really how it happens, right?

I mean I’m just curious. From your experience, how much do you think it’s on an organization to create that culture, if you will, where, yeah, having outside of work things is encouraged and share them? Or how much is it on an individual to just create their little circle amongst themselves and get it started that way?

Sean: That’s a million-dollar question. I don’t know. I think it maybe starts with expectations. What do you expect from yourself? What does your employer expect from you? Maybe it’s part of the conversation of — I don’t know how many corporations prioritize this, but it’s maybe part of the conversation of, “Why are you a fit for us? Why are we a fit for you? Do we want you to lose yourself in this job and not have a life? How do we encourage you to have a life and not make work your everything?”

There are different kinds of businesses. I mean there are certain kinds of professional businesses where they’re going Monday through Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I’ve read some things recently where maybe the idea of work life balance is may be kind of a falling apart. And maybe there is no work life balance. It’s just how you figure it out. It’s just life, which makes some sense. Maybe it’s, “How much does the employer want from you? And how much do you want from the employer?”

John: And just have an open conversation about that. Yeah, there was a guy I had on several years ago, Chris Hooper. He has a firm in Australia. In the interview process, he straight up asked, “What’s your dream job? Because I know this isn’t your dream job. So what’s your dream job? Then how can we help build you up to get that dream job later? Because right now, you’re not qualified for it or you’d be applying for that.” And that’s cool because then it shows that someone actually cares about you and not just the part that you can give them.

But I love how you said it’s expectations. And it’s why are we a fit. And I’m going to assume that fit goes above and beyond the technical skills because the people with the same technical skills are a dime a dozen. That’s a hard pill for people to swallow especially after you go to law school. You pass the bar exam. You’re like, “Look at all this work I’ve done.” Then you get to the table and it’s like, “Well, so is everyone else,” and be like, “No, no. I stand out.” “You mean, just like all these other dozens of people that are here?”

Sean: Right, who all want to work and all want to find success. Many of them may not know what that means or what it might mean for them. But then there are other people that know exactly what they think it should mean.

John: Yeah. It’s a weird thing to me. And I feel like I don’t know if it’s TV and movies or if it’s just professionalism feeds us these lies that this is how you’re supposed to behave or how you’re supposed to be. If you’re a lawyer, this is how you’re supposed to act. It’s like, “What? No. Just be you. You don’t have to act like something else.” It’s always so mind blowing to me because I feel like it’s easy to fall into that trap.

Sean: When it’s safe, right? It’s safe not to be different if the corporate theory is, “Okay, there are all these people that can do these different things. We want to work with people that we feel like we can work with. We want to work with people we like that are like us.” Well, then, “Okay. We’re like us. We have shared values. We have shared ideas about how we want to do what we’re doing, whatever that service or widget making operation is.” We have shared values, but then recognizing that we’re not all the same and we can’t all be the same. We’re not all going to be able to be successful in the same way that somebody else is successful. What works for Ms. W may not work for Mr. S. But there may be a way for it to work for them, to be successful in whatever field they’re in depending on their personalities and what they’d like to do and want to pursue. It may look very different. It may or may not lend itself to success in that organization. Very few people stay in one endeavor. At least, it seems like.

John: Right. Yeah. And I mean because things change. The organization or you as a person, what you think is important or what matters or what success looks like, certainly changes. Yeah. But that’s great, man. It makes it harder to manage as well because you’re not hammering everyone flat into a commodity. “We’ll just grab a staff person. It doesn’t matter which one.” Well, it does. It really does. It’s easier to manage that, but it’s not necessarily best. Yeah.

Now, this has been interesting for sure. Do you have any words of encouragement for anyone listening that thinks, “I’ve got this hobby or passion or what. Maybe it’s coaching youth baseball. But it has nothing to do with my job.”

Sean: Oh, keep doing it and learn about yourself the best you can by doing it. I would say just think hard about how it fits into your life and how it may or may not fit with your professional endeavors.

Over the last five years, when spring would come around, I would really look forward to coaching. I knew I would be making time that I probably didn’t have. I had it but it’s a matter of time and attention and priority when you’re in a situation where you’re working in what we lovingly referred to as BigLaw. I worked in BigLaw for about nine and a half years fulltime. In the last half of it, I was doing coaching youth baseball. There’s a trade off when you’re expected to build a significant number of hours per year to clients and their expectations for how that model works. Not necessarily work hours but you’re putting in four to six or more hours per week for two months or more than that sometimes that you could otherwise be building. That’s a week’s worth of time or more. You make a couple of weeks’ worth of billable time that you could otherwise stay in the office and build, build, build.

John: But there’s other things to who you are. It’s not all law all the time. Clearly, from coaching, you got better at your job and even developed some business. There’s definitely a positive to that as well, it sounds like.

Sean: Yeah. And I think I got better at life in part because I really found myself committed to it and realized that in part, being able to be committed to something like that, at least for part of the year, was something I wanted to continue. I’m looking forward to the next baseball season.

John: Next spring?

Sean: Next spring.

John: Yeah, man.
Sean: There is one other thing I wanted to mention, John. That is thinking about baseball and teaching just illustrates how abstract the game is. That’s Abbott and Costello, Who’s on First?

John: Oh, yeah.

Sean: So my challenge of the day would be explain balls and strikes to someone who knows nothing about the game of baseball other than involves throwing a ball.

John: I had this happen. My brother, the football coach at Cal at Berkeley — Jeff Tedford was the coach. I helped him drive across the country and get settled there. We went to a San Francisco Giants game with a couple of staff. This was when Barry Bonds was still there and hitting homeruns into the water and all that. We were standing in the outfield there. About the third inning, a guy standing next to us says, “Hey, can you explain to me the rules of the game?” I’m like, “Wait, what?” He was from Switzerland and was on college break and came to California and had done like Yosemite and stuff and was catching a baseball game. So, “Yeah. Sure. Why not?” I mean it’s baseball. That’s easy. Then you start explaining and you’re like, “This is the dumbest game I’ve ever heard of.”

Maybe lacrosse is the other one where you’re like — I even don’t know the rules of lacrosse. Every time I think I know them, I’m wrong. But baseball, everything was going okay. It was like, “There’s two strikes. Then there’s a foul ball.” So it’s like, “Well, that’s not actually a strike if it’s the third one.” Then you’re like, “This is so stupid.” But then in the eighth inning, pitcher balks. I was like, “I don’t even know what to tell you. I don’t even know. I can’t even tell you. I’m done with this. This is the dumbest game.” Yeah. It was so hard. Somebody from another country where they do not play baseball at all, period. And it’s like everyone here in the US makes fun of soccer. It’s so easy, so easy. Just don’t touch it with your hands. Done. That’s it.

Sean: And it’s linear, right? It’s one way or the other way.

John: Yeah. Then the clock doesn’t stop. We’re just done at 90 minutes. Then everybody goes home. Yeah, but it’s totally true. It’s hilarious. Well, before we wrap this up, it’s only fair that I allow you to question me if you’d like. So fire away.

Sean: It’s been a while since I took somebody’s deposition, but I will do my best.

John: Nice.

Sean: Okay. They’re great together, but if you had to pick one, milk chocolate or peanut butter?

John: Oh, wow. That is a tough one. I’m going to go milk chocolate.

Sean: Okay. The use of red ink when editing, is it angry or is it easy on the eyes?

John: I guess it’s easy on the eyes. It just stands out a lot easier. So then you know where to go. It depends on how much writing, I guess. If it’s more than half the page, then it’s angry. If it’s less than half the page, then it’s easy on the eyes.

Sean: I wish you had used blue. It stands out, but it’s not as angry.

John: Right. Right, right, right.

Sean: Finally, what is your favorite island?

John: Oh, wow. That’s a good one. Favorite Island? I’m going to have to say, Zanzibar. It’s off the coast of Kenya in the Indian Ocean. It is an amazing place. It’s a very different place as well. But the Indian Ocean is just so beautiful. So really anything there is good with me. It’s not as funny, but it’s legit. It’s an interesting place.

That works, man. Well, thanks so much, Sean, for taking time to be with me on What’s Your “And”? This was really fun.

Sean: Yeah. Thank you, John. I really appreciate it.

John: Totally. Everyone listening, if you want to see some pictures of Sean in action or connect with him on social media, be sure to go to whatsyourand.com. While you’re on the page, please click that big button. Do the anonymous research survey about corporate culture. Thanks again for subscribing on iTunes or whatever app you use and for sharing this with your friends so they get the message that we’re all trying to spread that who you are is so much more than what you do.