Bio

Paul Shirley played for 17 professional basketball teams in a nine-year career, including stops in Spain, Greece, Russia, and with three teams in the NBA: the Chicago Bulls, Phoenix Suns, and Atlanta Hawks. He’s the author of six books, including Can I Keep My Jersey?, Stories I Tell On Dates, The Process is the Product, and The Art of Focused Work. He created a TV pilot for Fox based on his life as a vagabond professional basketball player.

Paul’s the founder of The Process, a workspace that helps creatives, entrepreneurs, and independent workers build systems so they can manage distractions and do focused work on meaningful projects.

In his talks, Paul combines the elements of humor and vulnerability that helped him win the Story Smash! storytelling competition at the Hollywood Improv in Los Angeles. He’s spoken at colleges, at conferences, for business groups, and at book launches as far away as Spain. His speaking superpower is his ability to turn intimidating concepts (managing distractions, doing focused work, dealing with failure) into digestible takeaways that leave audiences feeling connected with him and each other.

Speaking Topic 

Better Systems, Less Burnout

In the past 20 years, we’ve thrown all manner of gadgets and gizmos at workers in the hopes of increasing productivity and streamlining communication. It hasn’t worked and people are jittery, unsettled, and generally shattered by the demands on their time. The result: rampant burnout.

The answer: better systems – habits, rituals, and routines like the ones Paul embraced as a professional basketball player and the ones he uses even now in his life as an author and business owner.

In this talk, he explores his own rock-bottom burnout moments as a professional basketball player and shares how we can rejuvenate and re-engage with the work we once loved.

The Art of Focused Work

Work has changed. What we once did with our backs, we now do with our brains. The problem: no one taught us how to make sense of this new kind of project-based, cognitively demanding work. Making matters worse: the torrent of distractions aimed at us every time we sit down to work.

Using the lens of his basketball career, Paul breaks down how to focus in spite of all this madness. His perspective: focus is the same whether you’re trying to write one good email or standing at the free throw line in front of 16,000 screaming basketball fans.

This talk is based around Paul’s newest book, The Art of Focused Work; it features plenty of humor, storytelling, and even video of Paul’s mom in the crowd, hoping he can make that free throw.

How to Think Like a Professional Athlete and See Failure as Your Friend

For most of us, gone are the days of a 30-year career where we do the same thing every day. Even within businesses and departments, we’re expected to know how to pivot and “fail fast,” to steal a phrase from the startup world.

Failure, though, is scary. It hurts, it’s embarrassing, and it leave you wondering if you’ll ever figure it all out. Paul is intimately familiar with these feelings and knows how to sympathize. But thanks to a catastrophic injury that almost killed him while playing for the Chicago Bulls, he also knows how freeing it can be to fail completely, pick yourself up, and start fresh.

In this talk (which also features NBA footage), Paul doesn’t just make himself the hero of the story; he opens up about how we can actually manage and move through the failures that end up being our greatest gifts.