09 Ed Baker - An Executive's Thirst for Self-Improvement

Purple Patch Podcast

Matt Dixon

Humanpotential, Nutrition, Education, Empower, Fitness, Executive, Coach, Strengthtraining, Purplepatch, Sleep, Cycling, Performance, Running, Recovery, Health & Fitness, Ironman, Swimming, Timemanagement, Triathlon, Meditation, Yoga

4.8 • 647 Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2018

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ed Baker has most certainly lived an accomplished and fulfilling life. He was captain of his cross country team at Harvard and then went on to Stanford School of Business. While there, he trained and ran in the Olympic Marathon Trials in 2007. Baker’s business credentials are also rather impressive, serving as Head of International Growth at Facebook and then VP of Growth and Product at Uber until the Spring of 2017.

What more could one person want to accomplish? What could possibly be next for this elite performer? Triathlon, of course!

Ed recently joined the Purple Patch team under the personal direction of Matt Dixon and this conversation takes place while Ed was at the recent Purple Patch Pro Camp in Scottsdale. Yes, Dixon threw this triathlon newbie to the professional wolves and they had a feast.

They also came away with many insights and lessons for any high-performing individual, and these are the nuggets that Matt and Ed discuss so thoroughly in today’s episode, including the:

Benefits of maintaining an exercise or training routine even as a busy executive
Value of having a coach to help you define goals and realize your full potential
Similarities between sport and business - setting small goals and having the ability to check in frequently, embracing baby steps
Many parallels between professional athletes and executives, including an insatiable thirst for personal evolution and growth
Importance of nailing the basics both in work and life since that makes up 95% of performance success
Qualities of successful people - humility, friendliness and a good sense of humor
Word of the Week: Residence

This is an episode for those who are on a constant quest for learning and self-improvement. The pursuit of success, whether it’s in business or sport, is truly all about the journey and putting yourself in situations where you can learn from others; even if those others happen to be professional triathletes!

:00-:20 Recorded Intro

:20-2:05 Matt's Weekly Welcome

2:05-6:15 Word of the Week: Residence Your rich history of training and experience have taken residence in you, both physically and emotionally. Draw confidence in your training consistency.

6:30 Matt's conversation with Ed Baker

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Matt Dixon and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and
0:05.8	educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential,
0:11.5	you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere
0:17.3	integrate sport into life. Welcome back guys, Matt Dixon here once again with the Purple Patch podcast, and on the
0:25.0	docket this week, serial achievement, disappointment, and hopefully humiliation.
0:31.1	Yes, we have a special guest, Ed Baker. You may or may not have heard of Ed, but I'll
0:35.3	give you a little bit of background straight away. He was the captain of Harvard in the cross-country team.
0:40.6	When he went there, he went to Stanford Business School.
0:43.4	And among other things, professionally, it was the head of international growth at Facebook.
0:47.3	And most recently, the head of growth and product at Uber.
0:50.5	But the real essence of this story is that Ed joined Purple Patch,
0:54.5	oh just under about three months ago with lofty ambitions in triathlon.
0:58.9	He hasn't really done too many triathons yet, but he hopes to go well in the amateur ranks.
1:04.4	He had a great running career.
1:05.8	He's obviously then taken over with some entrepreneurship, business and family.
1:10.6	Ed's got three kids. And now he wants
1:13.5	to challenge himself athletically. Well, you know what I did? I sniffed a chance at humiliation.
1:19.2	So I invited Ed to join the Purple Patch Pros at our camp in Scottsdale. He could start his
1:25.0	triathlon journey with our female athletes beating up him across swimming,
1:28.7	cycling and running, just like the military, stripping down before we build them up.
1:33.8	Well, maybe perhaps unfortunately for me, it didn't quite end up like that.
1:37.7	So we catch up of Ed at Camp and we're going to talk about aspects of elite performance.
	...

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