The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 249 - 80%

Transcript:

Pete: Hello, Jennifer.

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: So I was lucky enough to speak at an event last week, a very large event here in Australia. And as is one of the benefits of speaking at a large event, you get to hear from amazing other speakers and hear their stories and their insights and their ideas and their aha moments. And there was one in particular that I wanted to bounce off you, and share with you and our listeners, that relates to failure. And I'm now starting to figure out how it applies to perfectionism, the stories we tell ourselves about failure, and all of the things, and it came from this brilliant woman by the name of Jacqui Cooper.

Jen: I can't wait to hear. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Okay, so let me set a little context. So Jacqui Cooper is an Australian aerial ski jumper. You know like in the Olympics or in the world championships, and you see...?

Jen: Yeah. They do crazy stuff in the air.

Pete: Right. The most absurdly outrageous sport that is, I think, so hard to even try and appreciate and learn from, was what I was thinking. And I was like, "How could I possibly learn anything from someone who can literally flip through the air and not be scared about it? Like, I just, it's so unrelatable in my mind." Anyway, so Jacqui Cooper, she's Australian. She no longer competes. She's a five-time Olympian. She has been to like a hundred and thirty nine World Cups. She's statistically arguably the greatest aerial skier of all time, male or female, in the world. And she's Australian, so we love Jacqui. Anyway, so she's like in many ways, I was thinking, unrelatable. Right? Like, how could I possibly relate to that? And then, she went into her story, which was great. But one thing in particular she shared or she asked the audience, having shared her statistics and her credentials and establishing that, "Yes, I am arguably the greatest aerial skier of all time," and then she said that she had reviewed every single jump she ever took over her twenty-year period in training and in competition, and she asked the audience, "Guess what percentage of jumps you think I landed?"

Jen: Oh.

Pete: Do you want to guess?

Jen: Well, okay, I immediately am pinging it off of baseball.

Pete: Oh right, right, right. Say more.

Jen: Well, if you're batting .300 or more then you're really excellent. So I'm going to say, under 30%.

Pete: Right, which is a pretty outrageous guess. Most people in the audience were like, "70%. 60%. Like, you are the greatest of all time. I'm pretty sure you're going to land 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%." And her answer was, "20%."

Jen: Wow. Okay, so that's even lower than I thought. And I thought I was so smart just now.

Pete: You did a very good job. I think 30% is a very good guess. But when she said that, it just like punched me in the face with just the realness of what that means, that the greatest aerial skier of all time didn't get the outcome she was seeking 80% of the time. Like, some people would obviously say she failed 80% of the time. She actually pushed back on that whole word or like that notion of "failure", because she's like, "No, I didn't. I learned from those, which made me the jumper that I am today." And so, she was kind of reframing this idea of failure. But just this notion that the greatest of all time didn't get the outcome she wanted 80% of the time, I was like, "Holy crap."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: How is that not relevant to every single person listening to this talk, every single person listening to this podcast, where we get so afraid of making mistakes or doing something for fear of what the outcome could be if it doesn't go the way we want? And she just so casually was like, "Yeah, like, I had to make 80% of the mistakes I made in order to be the 20% that made me the greatest of all time." So I was like, "This is rich. We need to talk about it. There are lessons here."

Jen: Oh my gosh, I have so many things I need to say. First of all, you just put the 80/20 rule into excellence in a certain field. That's so cool. The other thing is that at a certain point when she reached a certain skill level, she could have landed 100% of the jumps if she just did an easy jump that didn't require all of her skill.

Pete: Good point. Good point. Yes. So there's like a lesson there in constantly changing the difficulty, intentionally, to hone your craft, to be better, to strive to land a jump you've never landed before.

Jen: Yes. And then, the third thing that came to mind was I've recently had this conversation with some clients because I'm in the middle of my coaching program and many of them have supplied me with what's called a "talent report" from their agents, where they see everything their agent has submitted them for and everything they actually got an audition for. And it is so wild to have these conversations with them because they all assume that everyone else, when their agent submits them, like 80% of the time they're going to get called in. And I'm like, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I'm looking at all of these talent reports. That is not the case." And I had one client who had about 30%-35% of the things she was being submitted for, she was getting picked up for. I was like, "Do you have any idea how outrageous that number is? That's extremely high."

Pete: Right.

Jen: And she was like, "What?" So, we just assume that everyone else is doing better than we are.

Pete: Right. Yeah, there's something here around comparison and the stories we tell ourselves about "successful" people, and, you know, that they wouldn't fail or they wouldn't have struggles or they would master everything and be able to pull off the thing they want to pull off 100% of the time.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And it's just never true. So like, it doesn't feel like this idea is necessarily a groundbreaking idea that no one's ever shared before, right? Like, so many people have talked about the fact that most influential/successful (again, whatever that means to you) people are kind of standing on a pile of their failures or their missed opportunities or their experiences that didn't go to plan. But I just, I find it so helpful to hear different versions of that from different fields. And like I mentioned at the start, I was like, Jacqui was just an extraordinary person, like I was so enamored by her before she even started speaking. And then, I was kind of like, "I can't possibly learn something from this person. She is a superhero." And then, I was like, "Nope. There it is. Like, that is it. It's, what am I trying to avoid for fear of the 80%? Where, I'm not realizing that's actually the part that enables me to get to the 20%, hopefully."

Jen: Right. The other thing that just feels...I've never been an aerial jumping skier person.

Pete: I feel like you'd have a good go at it, though. Like, you're compact. You're...you know?

Jen: If I liked heights, maybe. But I imagine that falling is dangerous, that there are like real stakes attached every single time your skis leave the ground, and like knowing that it's dangerous and being willing to fail. I really admire that.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: I want to strive for that more.

Pete: There's a certain type of courage, as a layperson.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: But in hearing her talk about it, it's so interesting because the way that she grew up, and the way that she was introduced to the sport, and her relationship with courage and fear and all of that, it was just like she kind of had no choice.

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: You know? In the sense, it's like, this is the thing that she wanted to do and was more or less born to do. She was jumping on a trampoline from when she was like three years old, flipping and somersaulting. And like, there was kind of no consideration of the fear, in a way. So, it's so interesting, like the different relationship she had with the whole idea of the danger of the sport. Because I agree, and most people look at it and go, "I wouldn't even roll up that thing on a toboggan." You know?

Jen: I wouldn't even look at it.

Pete: But the other thing I take from that, like to your point, us laypeople can look at it and go, "Like, there are real stakes in aerial skiing, right? Like, genuine real stakes where you could seriously hurt yourself."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And yet, there are so rarely real stakes with the things that we avoid, or the stories we tell ourselves, right?

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Like this, to me, is the, you know, the Tim Ferriss fear setting exercise, which we've mentioned many times. I'll put it in the Box O' Goodies. But the exercise is essentially, you write down your biggest fears and what could go wrong if you do something or don't do something. And then, part of the punch line is you work through, "Well, how would you get back to where you were, if that became true?" And hopefully, what you realize is, "Oh. This fear I have is totally recoverable," or, "The impact of that, if this goes wrong, if this is one of the 80% of the failures, is actually not that great at all." But like the impact of not sticking an ariel ski jump, it's pretty severe.

Jen: Right. Right.

Pete: So I was kind of like left with a bit of a like, "What is your excuse, Pete? You know, like your fears, the things that you're avoiding, whether it's like having a difficult conversation or, you know, submitting a proposal for a client or whatever it is, and you're like, 'Oh, hold back. Maybe I'll perfect it. I don't want to get it wrong. I don't want him to say no. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do that.' And it's like, come on. The stakes are so low."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: I find that empowering.

Jen: So we recently had the Tony Awards here in the States. It was a great night for many reasons. And the person who won the Tony Award for Best Set Design is a designer named Beowulf Boritt. And he's just inspirational in so many ways, and so kind, and so generous, and such a good human who also happens to be a creative genius. But during his acceptance speech, he was holding a piece of paper which had the speech on it. And it was pretty steady and calm. And then all of a sudden, he was going to say this very, I suppose, risky statement about how poorly women are treated and represented in our industry. As soon as he started speaking, his hand was shaking. And because he's holding the white piece of paper, you just see it flopping. My daughter was like, "Oh my gosh, his hand is shaking." And I was like, "Yeah, because what he's saying right now is really scary, and it really matters." And it was like this visible moment of seeing someone take a big risk, and I was so impressed.

Pete: Yeah. I like that. It's like, the reality is everyone has the hand shake in some capacity about something in their life. And so the difference is, essentially, between those who do it anyway and those who don't. You know? Like, he could have written that down on his piece of paper, looked at the piece of paper, and gone, "Oh, absolutely not. I'm not saying that. I'm too scared."

Jen: Exactly.

Pete: But instead, he did it. That's like a version, in my mind, of showing up. You know? He felt the fear and he did it anyway. He showed up. He went, "Alright, I'm going to do it. I'm going to show up. I'm going to say this. I'll deal with the fear of me shaking my hands and perhaps the outcome that might come from it."

Jen: It's making me wonder, Pete...well, I'm going to question you while I'm simultaneously questioning myself about this.

Pete: Great.

Jen: How frequently are you failing right now?

Pete: That is a brilliant question. You know, I spent the drive home from this event thinking some version of this. The question I was noodling on was, like, "What is a failure in my world?" Because it's pretty obvious, if you don't stick an aerial ski jump, that you like didn't stick the aerial ski jump.

Jen: Right. Ouch.

Pete: Right. So I was driving home, thinking to myself, "I don't know if I have a version of this. Like, what is it? That we record an episode that gets put on the cutting room floor, or I deliver a workshop that I don't think got the cut through that I was hoping it got?" And even those, they felt so kind of naff. I was like, "Maybe I'm not taking enough creative risks. Maybe I'm not pushing the boundaries of the ideas I'm trying to generate." So I don't have a great answer for you in terms of what failure looks like for me, but it's kind of the reason this like hit me between the eyes, I think. It's like, what is my version of that, creatively or business-wise? What is my version of the failure that is recoverable and that can be gotten again? I mean, even thinking about it out loud, one version of it is so much of the work that we do, and people that run businesses too, is you're proposing solutions or ideas or workshops or coachings for a particular client or organization, and they don't always say, "Yeah, great. We want to do that." And so, I do have...I don't even think of them as failures. Because I just feel like it's, I guess that's my 80%. I just feel like there are certain projects that are going to go ahead and there are certain projects that are not going to go ahead. And so, I guess maybe that's one version of that for me. But I'm thinking more about it from like writing a blog perspective or doing our podcast perspective or delivering a keynote, like, where is the risk that I'm not taking?

Jen: Yeah. When I turn this question back on myself, I realize I have a different relationship with a macro failure, which I feel like I can immediately say, like, "This very epic failure happened. And in hindsight, I learned x, y, and z. And it was so helpful, even though in the moment I hated it." But the micro failures, the 80% failures, I don't know that I am self-aware enough right now to name what those are. And I think I might be missing a lot of learning opportunities. Like, this is making me want to actively pay more attention to the things that...even if it's just slightly off. Because I imagine in a ski jump, even if it's just a teensy tiny bit off, you're going to fall. Like, I'm curious where I am one degree off, and how I can learn from that more.

Pete: Yeah. It's almost like, the thing that is your 80% you don't even think of as failure, because it's such a just natural part of your work or your experience. That, from the outside, someone might say, "Well, that was a failure." But like, you, internally, are just like, "No, I think of that as as part of the process. I don't even think about that as failure." I think that's what Jacqui Cooper was trying to get across, was like she didn't even think of that 80% as a failure. She was just like, "Oh, I didn't stick it. I over-rotated. Great, I won't over-rotate next time. And move on."

Jen: Yeah. Now, of course, I'm going to go down the Google rabbit hole and have to watch every possible video I can find of her flying through the air. I can't wait to see.

Pete: Seriously. Her stories are outrageous. Like, you know, dislocating her hip, popping it back in place, going back to the top of the ski jump, and doing a jump having just popped her hip out. Like, outrageous. Again, so unrelatable, because I'm like, "If I popped my hip out of place, you would not see me surface for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. Like, what the hell?" Anyway.

Jen: Well, this, again, it's like such a beautiful metaphor for how much tolerance we have for discomfort. I imagine that was quite uncomfortable. Now, for her, that is like literal physical pain. For us, that might be emotional discomfort.

Pete: Yeah, yeah. And I guess it goes back to that idea that you and I have talked about before, where like, what's remarkable to someone else is often just ordinary...or what's extraordinary to you might be ordinary to me. And I often give the example of, you know, your amazing clients that literally sing and dance in front of people. That's normal to them. That's ordinary to them. And for me, it's like the most extraordinary fear-inducing uncomfortable thing I could possibly imagine.

Jen: Yep. And for them, it's just like oxygen.

Pete: It's weird. It's so weird. Yeah. Anywho, I didn't think, like I mentioned, that there was necessarily that much for me to learn from someone who was so accomplished and literally the greatest of all time in her sport, a five-time Olympian who had such a compelling story. But I think the most compelling part for me was that 80% of the time...80% of the time, I can't get over it...she did not get the outcome she was seeking.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.