Taylor Rochestie: A New 20/20 Vision

Our interview of Taylor Rochestie for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere. Taylor is the author of A New 20/20 Vision: Cultivate Joy, Reprogram your Mind, and Define a Life Through an Authentic Lens. And by the way, he is also a professional basketball player.

Taylor shares his fascinating journey and insight about finding happiness in the 95 percent of life that we tend to ignore. He also talks about his use of social media in promoting his book and shifting his social media persona and posts from personal to public-facing.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

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Jon Pfeiffer:
I am joined today by Taylor Rochestie, welcome to the podcast.

Taylor Rochestie:
Thanks, man. Excited to be here, thanks for having me.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You are the author of a book, called A New 20/20 Vision. Cultivate Joy, Reprogram your Mind, and Define a Life Through an Authentic Lens.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You're also, as we'll come to find out, you're also a husband and a father, and a speaker, and oh, by the way, a professional basketball player. You are a point guard, correct?

Taylor Rochestie:
I am. And I respect you so much because you put basketball player last. Usually, that's what started with, so I love it. I love that the book came first.

Jon Pfeiffer:
We're going to take a deep dive into the book, but I want us to kind of set the scene on who you are. You went to high school, excuse me, at that hotbed of all schools known for basketball legends, Santa Barbara.

Taylor Rochestie:
Yeah, we got a couple of people up on the wall, we got Jamaal Wilkes, we got Don Ford, so we've got a couple of guys that people might know, but it's not the typical place to come out and play basketball for sure.

Jon Pfeiffer:
But you were the... When you left you were the all-time scoring leader in school history, and then you went to Tulane. How do you go from Santa Barbara to Tulane?

Taylor Rochestie:
Well, I was really not recruited out of high school, and I don't blame that on anybody. I think recruiting is such a difficult process. There's so many kids coming out of high school trying to play basketball. So I was thinking of walking on, I went on a couple division two and division three recruiting trips. And then my AAU coach asked me to come play in a couple more tournaments, my senior year of high school, towards the end, which is really late for recruiting process.
And I ended up playing really great in this one tournament down in Houston and against a team and against a player, and I can't remember the name now, that everybody was there to see play. And that was just right place at the right time, and Tulane was one of the teams there and they offered me a late scholarship to come to New Orleans, just from the tournament down in Houston, Texas.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then something called Katrina happened.

Taylor Rochestie:
Yeah. Second day of my sophomore year, I got there with most of my stuff, let's just call it a Thursday. And then, Friday morning I woke up, a couple people were crying and the place that I was... Around the place that I was staying and saying, we've got to evacuate and there's different stuff going on with family. And luckily, my mom lives in Houston, Texas. And I took half of my stuff, thinking I'd come back for the rest of it, and drove to my mom's apartment in Houston and ended up riding out Katrina there for a little while.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then eventually transferred to Washington State.

Taylor Rochestie:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And had two real good years at Washington State, led them to the tournament. Recently... Well, when you were playing basketball in college, you could not capitalize on your name, image and likeness. And the NCAA recently changed the rules as of July 1. What's your take on that?

Taylor Rochestie:
I was prepared to talk about a lot of stuff, but this is maybe too intense for this. It's a difficult one because I come from a very lucky upbringing, being from Santa Barbara, California, and having incredible parents and incredible childhood, it's hard to comment on the needs and the wants and the desires, and the whole idea of what everybody is going through as a college athlete. I always knew I was going to go to college. I was very focused on academics and sports, and knew that I wanted to play sports. So when I got to college, college is so pure and I liked the purity of college sports. Now the NCAA might not necessarily be so pure, but I feel like the college sports itself for the players is so pure.
You're playing the game you love with friends, with your teammates, but not only that, but with all the people that you're living around, it's a community, college sports is just so incredible. And so I hate the idea of changing it, as long as we're changing things for the better and it's benefiting people, and people are finding happiness and joy from that, and it's helping the game get better, and helping to enhance the student athlete experience, then I think that's great. At the same time, I hope to not see the purity of the sport, at least from the athletes side, go away.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, we'll see how it shapes out. It's here to stay. And you have been playing professional basketball, is this going to be your 13th season?

Taylor Rochestie:
Finished my 12th season, yeah, 13th is coming up right now. I have a contract to go play in China. Although they announced about a month ago that foreigners are not being included in the league. And then now they're reasonably saying that the foreigners will probably be coming back. So I'm going through a China visa process right now, and then looking to start my 13th season next month maybe.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And you've played all over the world. How has that been? I mean, you've played on teams I can't pronounce.

Taylor Rochestie:
Yeah. I played on teams I can't pronounce. And then the best part is, having all those teams trying to pronounce my last name, trying to say Rochestie in different languages, in different countries with different accents. It's been really fun. It's been the best experience ever. I met my wife while playing in France. Now half my family is in France, having to learn about different cultures, trying to learn different languages, just trying to open my mind up to so many different experiences, which helped shape ideas in the book, which has helped shape me as a person and definitely want to take all the best things that I've learned and kind of incorporate that into who I am, who my family is and who my kids are. And hopefully enhance their experience of real education, which is the world education.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I've read, when you were trying to learn French that you had post-it notes or index cards all over the house with the name of whatever the object was?

Taylor Rochestie:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Is that true?

Taylor Rochestie:
I think it's a perfect example for... I like to talk about highlighting happiness. And so with French, when you're trying to learn French, you've got to highlight it in your life and you got to make it part of your daily life, or learning any language. I was putting little sticky notes all over my house and trying to remember what this was, or that was, just so I'm walking by, I'm constantly reminded by the word, and the same thing deals with happiness. I'm trying to surround myself so much with things that create joy and happiness in my life, that makes it almost impossible to just walk down the hallway or walk by any room or any place without feeling some type of joy or happiness by these triggers that I can put around.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And I'm jumping ahead, but this is the perfect time to ask it. How has COVID impacted that journey to try to keep happiness right front and center?

Taylor Rochestie:
Well, first and foremost, COVID totally completely re-shifted everything when it came to basketball for me. I went to a city in a place that I really, really loved. I was playing in Athens, Greece for a team that's incredible, in a place that I really wanted to be. My daughter was young at the time, and we were pregnant with our second kid, and I really wanted to make that kind of a home and realized that... And I've been moving around a lot, but let's try to find some common ground and let's try to find some consistency for the family. And right when I was feeling that and trying to renegotiate a contract, that's when COVID hit, season ended, tried to figure out what's going on here, where we're going to have our son, where we're going to give birth. And so we flew to France, then we waited for China and China didn't allow visas. And so I couldn't get there. And so now it's waiting around to see what's next. And it really shook me up as far as the basketball world, which is also the family world.
Being a leader of the family and trying to provide for my family and take them to a successful place for us to be happy. That really shifted things up. But I think on a joy and happiness scale, I think that people lost out on being able to plan, and they lost out on a lot of optimism. And those are two big things that people need in their life to really cultivate that joy. People like planning things, people like being optimistic and looking forward to things.
And when the world is telling you how you need to live your life, it's a really dangerous place for a lot of individuals to be, they feel very victimized by what's happening around them. And they don't feel like they have choices, that they have control to cultivate that joy. And so you have to make a conscious effort every day to realize there are still choices to make, even if you're in quarantine, even if you're away from your family, even if you're not able to go to work or not been able to even walk down the street, there's different choices you can make each day to try to better your world and cultivate that joy for sure.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Now I listened to an interview where they were talking about coming out of COVID, that what you should do is make an inventory of the things that changed you want to keep in your life. So let me ask you this, what changed that you weren't doing pre COVID that you now want to keep in your life after COVID?

Taylor Rochestie:
It was interesting because I was lucky to have an amazing distraction, which was the birth of my son. So having two young kids, you're just dealing with the craziness that is having two under two and a half. And so I think my world was changing exponentially every day, as far as just learning how to be a good father, learning how to be a good husband, learning how to be a good friend, realizing that people need connection more than I ever believed before. And just reaching out and realizing, if I'm not having a good day or I don't feel purposeful today, that I can call someone and create joy for them.
And I can just help a lot of people that are in need and in need of that connection and in need of that communication that we missed out on during COVID. So I think realizing that you have a big impact to make on your own life, but a big impact to make on other people's life, was something that was very clear to me during COVID, that I want to continue, continuing to reach out towards other people.

Jon Pfeiffer:
We're going to get to the book in just a second, but it occurred to me that I forgot to ask, when you're playing on these teams with players from different countries, how do you communicate? How do you-

Taylor Rochestie:
I'm lucky because English is the language of basketball. It's the number one world language. So that's very, very lucky for me. So wherever I go, I might have like a Serbian coach, but I'm playing in Spain and I have a German teammate, I have an Italian teammate and then some Spanish teammates. So we have to have a common language. So most of the time, the common language is English. Every now and then I've had a translator. In China, my teammates do not speak English, so my coaches did not speak English. And I had a translator and the person will be giving us a five minute speech and then the translation would just be play hard. So there's definitely certain things that gets lost in translation, but you just have to be super adaptable and really be open-minded and really want to learn, not just the language, which I'm terrible at, and can't learn all these languages, but just learn how to read body language and learn how to ask the right questions and learn how to really focus in on everything that you can control.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Shifting gears, let's talk about the promotion of the book and your use of social media. You are a Twitter and Instagram person, and Instagram as far as I can tell, was used more for the promotion of the book. In prelaunch, you had a countdown. Who came up that idea?

Taylor Rochestie:
So, writing the book was one thing. Launching the book was so difficult and so much fun to learn as much as I could, because if somebody needed advice in the basketball world and they came to me, pretty much anything they came to me with, I'll be able to give them great direction moving forward. When it came to a book, I have a great network of people around me, through my parents and friends and family, but nobody had really written and launched a book anytime recently, or in this category. So I was learning so much. And then I realized that with my young kids and with my job, I didn't want to be on my phone that much. And it was really, really hard for me to be on my phone. So my teammate, his fiance, is a social media manager.
And so I started sitting down and talking with her and she helped me come up with a lot of different themes and different ideas, trying to move my social media stuff from more personal to more public, trying to have a different image, teaching me the importance of social media and how you can kind of leverage that with the book and creating a better profile for yourself. So she really helped me with that. She helped me with the countdown and then she helped me kind of spend a lot of time one day, coming up with a bunch of content and then knowing how to space that out and then not have to be on my phone all the time, trying to create new content. But it's a different world. I try not to be on my phone. I try to be very present. And at the same time, realizing that that's a big thing for trying to promote a book for sure.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Right, it was successful. I mean, it was enjoyable to go back... Even though the book has been launched, I watched the pre-launch sequence and it was fun to watch.

Taylor Rochestie:
Cool. Thank you.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So let's shift to the book. What inspired... I read that you wrote the book initially as a letter to your daughter, what was the thought process?

Taylor Rochestie:
So, yeah, my family has got some great traditions. We do some goofy things for Christmas and holidays and stuff like that. So I'm always constantly... I got a crazy mind that's constantly thinking of things that would be fun. What would be fun? What would be fun for the family? And I thought when my daughter was about to be born, what would be fun? I wanted to write her a letter to give to her when she graduated high school. And so she knew how I felt when she was born, and she'd be like, "Wow, 18 years ago, you wrote me this letter, how great," And I could really write down all my thoughts and ideas for her.
And I had all these goals and aspirations and ideas. And I wanted her to... I thought about it like a relay race. I wanted to give her the baton for life. So she's in the best way, best positioned to win, and kind of all the things that I've learned. And I just gathered all those things together and just started writing them down. And then when I had more and more time to write, I really loved the process and fell in love with writing. And then I went out to China and I had a lot of time to myself traveling and in hotels and trains and planes, and then created those into chapters, and then soon into a book.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I'm going to hit two chapters. Before is reprogramming the mind, and on page 70 you write, "When we talk about happiness, we must replace the idea of being, with the experience of feeling." What did you mean?

Taylor Rochestie:
I think a lot of people, they talk about this idea... First of all, happiness is lot to do with success. And these people have this idea, if I have this, if this is going well, I'm happy. And it's this statement, it's almost like a now, and there's a thing there. And if I have it, I'm happy. And we need to understand that we can cultivate this idea with whatever's going on, we can create happiness for ourselves and joy for ourselves.
We need to replace these norms that we've had over the years on what it means to be happy and create less ups and downs and have a little bit more sustainability. So we need to create that idea of feeling happy and being happy, and cultivating it from the inside, as opposed to having it just fall in our laps or just achieve something and becoming happy.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So getting my Ferrari is not going to make me happy?

Taylor Rochestie:
Definitely not. But I'm really excited about that for you. Ferrari's a good luck.

Jon Pfeiffer:
On page 71, you talk about reprogramming your morning intake. What do you mean?

Taylor Rochestie:
So this one's a big one for me and deals with the phone again, like we just talked about. I think the first thing that we do in the morning is we reach for our phone, and I like to talk about all the things that go into our mind before our feet even touch the floor from the bed. And so we have all this stuff happening. We check our phone, we turn off the alarm, whatever it might be, and immediately we see texts that we got, or we didn't get, we see what the weather is going to be like, we see what the stock market's going to be like. We see likes that we got, or we didn't get on Instagram. We have so many things that are going on in our mind that are telling us if we're going to have a good day or not, before we even get in touch with ourselves, before we even put a foot on the ground, we're already feeling a little bit gloomy because it's not going to be sunny out today, or the weather is going to be bad.
So we need to wake up and we need to get in touch with ourselves and realize our goals and aspirations for the day, how we're feeling, what motivates us. At night, there's a nightly intake. You can write down goals and write down lists and things that you want to accomplish. Things that can help you become better, things that can help you inspire others. There's all these different things that we can focus on. And I talk about that the internal needs to affect the external. And in the morning intake, most of the time, the external is affecting the internal. And we don't realize, man, why am I in a bad mood today? Well, I didn't check in with myself before I checked in with the world. And the world is telling me it's not going to be a good day today. And the world has given me bad news. But not really being able to hear that. So it's definitely has more impact on me than it would if I let the internal affect the external.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So what is your morning routine? There's so much written by different people-

Taylor Rochestie:
My routine is waking up, mine is two words. My first two words are thank you. I have an idea of seeking out gratitude and seeking out thankfulness. So if I wake up in the morning and I say, thank you, then I have to go out in the world and see all the things I'm thankful for. Then I do, sadly enough, I do 11 pushups because I told myself I was going to be 10 every morning. It's a way to shock my system, especially when I'm tired in the waking up. When I started doing 10, I realized I'm just going to do one extra. And then that became a thing.
And so I started just doing 11 pushups. I say, thank you. And then I seek out thankfulness. And then I can just look around and I can find 100 things in just my room that I'm thankful for. I'm thankful for having a bed, a roof over my head. I'm thankful for my incredible wife, I'm thankful for my family, thankful for so many things before I can even take a look at my phone. And normally I'm waking up at about 5:30 with my son crying. And I'm thankful that he's crying. I'm thankful that he's there. I'm thankful that I can be a dad and I'm thankful that I can impact his life and inspire him. So it just totally reprograms my mind just by saying those two words every morning.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How old is your son now?

Taylor Rochestie:
My son is 14 months, daughter will be three in October.

Jon Pfeiffer:
On page 80 of the book, you talk about reprogramming, I'm tired. So many of us say, "I'm tired," all day long. How do you reprogram, I'm tired?

Taylor Rochestie:
You realize how much you're saying it, first and foremost. The first thing about a problem is realizing you have a problem. And so with athletes, especially, oh my gosh, every day I come home, I'm sore, I'm tired, I'm sore, I'm tired, I'm tired. I don't want to do this. And once you realize that most of the time, it's just an auto response to things, you just get up and you just do it. You just tell yourself the next five things I'm asked to do, I'm just going to get up and do, and you realize that it doesn't take that much energy to be kind. It doesn't take much energy to have a good attitude.
It doesn't take energy to say nice things to nice people. And even if you're tired physically, you don't need to be tired with your communication. You don't need to be tired with your effort in other things. And so, just understanding how much you're saying some form of I'm tired, and you're giving yourself these excuses in your head and pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, and realizing that you have a lot more to give than you think.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then this is the last one on chapter four, but on page 88, "Reprogramming the fear of the unknown." That's so much of what we've been facing in the last year and a half. How do you reprogram that?

Taylor Rochestie:
Well, for me personally, I've evolved that into realizing there's so many choices that we have, and we just have to figure out, all these choices and all these decisions we're making, and getting excited and realizing all the good things that are coming from our choices, instead of focusing on the potential bad things, or the grass is always greener, and I would've, could've, should've, and all that kind of stuff.
So there's a lot of unknown, especially in my job. And right now, I don't even know if I'm going to be living in China in a couple of weeks, I don't know if I'll be living with or without family. I don't know if I have to fly my family to France. There's so much of the unknown, but I'm so focused on that gratitude and thankfulness, and I'm so much in tune with my love for life. In the Bible it says, "Perfect love drives out fear." So I'm choosing love over fear. And I'm going after things wholeheartedly because life is short, man. I'm watching my kids grow up and I don't want them to grow up any faster. They're just growing up too quick and I'm not going to be fearful of that. I'm just going to continue to love. And I'm going to continue to see all the great things that I have in my life.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Which is a perfect transition to chapter five is, finding daily happiness. And you write on page 133, "Be courageous today." How do you go about that each day?

Taylor Rochestie:
I think some people are... They get locked into different stereotype, different boxes, they put themselves in it. People put themselves in it. They've been a shy person, and so when they talk about it, they're like, "I'm shy. I'm not really going to go do that." And being shy is totally great, for people that are shy people, that's fantastic, but you can realize that at any moment, you can give yourself five seconds of courage, 10 seconds of courage, 15 seconds of courage.
If there's an attribute that you really love, and just add that to your life for one hour, just say that I can do that for one hour or one day, and just see how it feels. See if it can become part of who you are, do it two days out of the month, three days out of the month. And so realize that you can be who you want to be at any moment. And that doesn't mean you have to reprogram your whole life, but it just means that every moment is a chance to be courageous and tackle a fear that you might have or tackle an insecurity that you might have.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And this is like you planned this in the book, kind of flowing. On page 137, then you say, "Excel in your 95%." What do you mean by that?

Taylor Rochestie:
So we're all looking for our pinnacle 5%, and that's the reprogramming that we need to do. And that's the daily focus that we need to make, where it's like, okay, we have a promotion, we have a birthday coming up, we have a weekend coming up. We have a, whatever it might be that's the really exciting things in your life. You got to focus on the things in between the big things, because the journey is the outcome. The journey is the most important thing. And we're missing out on this 95% of our life because we're focused on that pinnacle 5, that 95 is the meat is everything. That's the small inkling we have, those are the little relationships that you have, go to the coffee shop and get to know the person that works at the coffee shop. Be kind to the people that you're walking by, realize that there's people that you work with that you don't even know and get to know them, realize their hopes and fears and desires.
Get to know yourself, realize what makes you tick. There's so many little things happening every single day around you that we're not focusing on because we're too focused, either on our phones, or some tiny thing that we're looking forward to. And it's great to look forward to stuff, but we can't forget what's happening in our daily life. And so when we say, hey, I'm going to focus on the 95%. I'm going to focus on all the little things today. I'm going to realize that this breeze feels good, something as small as that, and then you see and hear the day and realize that you have so much potential in each day, instead of just looking forward to, let's say the weekend.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I was remiss because I asked you before we started recording, but you are currently where?

Taylor Rochestie:
In Santa Barbara, California.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Which would explain the palm tree behind you.

Taylor Rochestie:
Yeah. I tried to get as stereotypical as I could. So I sat here with the Palm tree.

Jon Pfeiffer:
It works. What was your biggest challenge you faced when you wrote the book, in writing the book?

Taylor Rochestie:
I think the biggest challenge I have, probably in life, and this is a good thing to ask my wife, we call it, landing the plane. I have all these ideas. Okay, just land the plane and just finish something. So I think the book does a great job with trying to connect with as many people on as many levels as possible. It's not about my journey. It's about the reader's journey. And it's about sharing my journey in order to connect with the reader. And I think everybody can have something that they can connect with, but it's so broad. And there's so many different things that I try to talk about. I think that, that was the toughest thing for me to try to narrow it down, because the second that I finished it, I'm like, oh, I got all these other ideas that I want to add into it.
I got another book that I need to write, or this is not finished. It's art, it's never finished. And I just wanted to release it, get it out and have my thoughts and my love and my passion, and my feelings into a book and be able to share that with people. So I don't think there was too many big difficulties, but it was just a great learning experience.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Will there be a volume two?

Taylor Rochestie:
I definitely think there'll be a second book. If I go to China, I've talked with my wife about that, that I definitely want to start writing this second book and narrow down maybe a couple specific things from the book and really tackle into those and get really real and really intimate with only just a couple of different ideas.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I have three last questions, and this is famous for a lawyer saying, I only have three questions. Three last questions. The first is, what are you working on right now?

Taylor Rochestie:
I'm working on being a better husband. I'm working on being a better father. I'm working on being a better friend. I'm working on being a better basketball player, working on trying to write some stuff, cultivate some joy and happiness and working on it, inspiring as many people as I can, trying to coach and give all the knowledge I have to people. I could list 1000 things. I'm just constantly inspired to try to be better and to inspire people around.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And where can people find your book?

Taylor Rochestie:
Taylorrochestie.com. And I'm hoping that you can help people with the spelling of the name, or some type of link or something like that-

Jon Pfeiffer:
We'll put it in the notes, yes.

Taylor Rochestie:
Yeah, so taylorrochestie.com

Jon Pfeiffer:
Actually, because your name is on zoom. It is R-O-C-H-E-S-T-I-E.

Taylor Rochestie:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And T-A-Y-L-O-R.

Taylor Rochestie:
Taylorrochestie.com
Yeah. Instagram, you can find that, Twitter, @TRochestie, and my Instagram is @TRochestie. And so, I'm constantly updating, like I said, I'm learning so I'm constantly trying to help make a better website, make a better Instagram, make a better that kind of stuff, while still trying to be present in the moment and realize how special life is, and being off all that stuff at the same time.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So Taylor, this was great. Let me stop the recording and I'll come right back to you.

Taylor Rochestie:
Thank you so much for having me.