The idea for this piece comes from two podcasts, one I listened to and one I was part of. While I am going to share some thoughts about the second podcast and about some other conversations I’ve had recently, I want to start with the larger idea that ties all those conversations together: the porch.
I mentioned here that I was recently a guest on the MasterCoaches Weekly Buzz. There’s something I find so interesting about what Bob, Mick, Jim, and Tom are doing in their weekly conversations. Fortunately, I had listened to Mark Manson’s most recent podcast (10/15/25) with Ryan Holiday (link below) shortly before my appearance on the Weekly Buzz. That podcast gave me some valuable perspective on what the master coaches of MasterCoaches are doing.
As Manson and Holiday talked about ancient Greek philosophers, they shared the history of the Stoa Poikile or “painted porch” in Athens, Greece. The authors recounted with wonder how basically everyone who became anyone in ancient philosophy hung out at this place at one time or another. They went to teach but they also went to just converse with one another. Manson and Holiday referred to them as “porch guys”. (Philosophy, at the time was almost completely composed of men1.) “Porch guys”, to Manson and Holiday, are people who are really into something, think about it often and deeply, and like to get together with others to kick their ideas around.
It occurred to me that the master coaches are porch guys. They care about volleyball and about coaching, among other things. They take time every week to engage with each other, as well as with other people, around ideas. While they hope to learn things, it’s also important to them to share their thoughts with the outside world in hopes that others may learn as well. Whether I agree with them about all the things we discussed or not, they helped me recognize that I want to be a porch guy too.
One could certainly argue that this Substack is an expression of my desire to share my thoughts with a larger community. But it is, in many ways, unfulfilling because it usually feels so one-way. I think about stuff on my own, I write about it on my own, I send it out for others to read, and that’s sort of where it ends. (It doesn’t have to, but y’all haven’t been posting comments or replying, so here we are.) The thing about porch guys is they go to the porch to be part of a community.
You would think philosophy is about people thinking and writing but I disagree. It’s the interactions with real people in the real world that make philosophy worthwhile. That’s what makes the porch so important. It’s a place to have discussions in the flow of life and in front of others. The original porch guys often met privately, having dinner at one another’s homes but they ultimately brought those discussions into the light and out to the public. That’s what made what they did into philosophy instead of having it just remain as dinner conversations.
My current job as VolleyStation’s Coordinator of Client Education is often about helping people use our software but it also offers me opportunities to be a porch guy. In the last week I’ve had some wonderful opportunities to have both discussions on the porch and one-on-one conversations that can be brought to the porch.
The first discussion I want to highlight is the one I had with the master coaches. It was a great opportunity to renew my relationships with a couple of the coaches and get to know the others. It was a great opportunity to delve into topics in ways I hadn’t before. I hope it provides future opportunities to explore these topics with others. To keep the discussion going, I want to share some of my post-podcast thoughts.
First, Jim had an interesting observation about service errors that made me think. He pointed out that side out efficiency is highly correlated to winning sets. He went on to say that, if a team makes service errors, they are effectively increasing their opponent’s side out efficiency, which increases their likelihood of winning. The conclusion, then, is that service errors should be avoided because they increase the opponent’s chances of winning. I agree with his entire line of thought. And yet, I continue to not be as concerned about service errors as Jim is. Here’s why. I think discussing only the opponent’s side out efficiency misses the fact that side out efficiency correlates to both teams’ winning probabilities. A team can allow/ignore/overcome small increases in their opponent’s side out efficiency so long as their own efficiency remains higher than their opponent’s. That’s a restatement of a point I made elsewhere in the podcast, that scoring points is more important than making errors. It’s not that errors should be encouraged, but they can be seen as part of efforts to score. As long as a team is creating scoring opportunities, points are far more likely to happen than errors. I understand the desire to not give anything away to your opponents and I acknowledge that errors do matter. I also choose not to consider errors in a point-less vacuum.
Continuing with ideas from the podcast, Mick revisited the Stanford-Louisville match after I departed the conversation. He reiterated his competitiveness and his desire to find ways to win. He also expressed his disagreement with how he perceived Stanford made decisions as the match progressed. I want to revisit this because I think Mick’s disagreement illustrates a behavior that many people, coaches in particular, demonstrate as they watch competitions they aren’t directly involved in. The behavior in question is resulting and, once you start looking for it, you’ll realize it is everywhere. Resulting is the act of evaluating decisions on their outcomes rather than evaluating them on the process that led to the decisions themselves. (I was first exposed to the idea in Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets.) Mick’s observations about Stanford’s strategies and choices evaluate those strategies based solely on the fact that the team lost. To an observer who is resulting, the team’s chosen strategies were wrong because the team lost. What observers are typically not aware of is how the team came to their decisions. Did they choose a course of action that gave them the best probability of success, but that probability still wasn’t high enough to guarantee a favorable outcome? This highlights the idea that teams are always trying to shift probabilities, not selecting from a menu of certainties. When you’re resulting, everything seems guaranteed to end up the way that it turned out and all the competitors needed to do was choose differently and the outcome definitely would have changed. It’s never that clean.
In the interest of keeping this post to a manageable length, I’ll pause here and pick up in part 2, where I’ll give a few more ideas of what that engagement can look like and, hopefully, inspire you to join me on the porch.
If you’re interested, here’s the MasterCoaches episode:
And here’s a link to the Solved with Mark Manson podcast with Ryan Holiday:
As much as I dislike the gendered term “porch guys”, everyone I’m referring to in this piece is a male. Also, I tried to think of gender-neutral terms to replace “guys” but everything that came to mind sounded just as problematic to me. So, for now, I’m using “porch guys” but I’m open to suggestions.