The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 298 - Flying Time

Transcript:

Jen: Hi, Pete.

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Guess what's coming up?

Pete: Ollie's first birthday?

Jen: Well, that, yes. But also, the three hundredth episode of The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Three hundred...I'm shaking my head. I cannot wrap my head around it. That means three hundred weeks in a row of us having conversations.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Have not missed a week.

Jen: That is unbelievable.

Pete: Well done, Jen Waldman.

Jen: Wow. And so, listeners, to celebrate our three hundredth episode, we have decided to invite you to come take a peek at what recording an episode of this show actually looks like.

Pete: Chaos ensues.

Jen: So on Monday, June 17th, at 6pm Eastern Time...

Pete: (Which is Tuesday, the 18th, 8am Australian Eastern.)

Jen: ...you are invited to join us for our weekly Zoom session, where we will be recording Episode 300. It's going to be an Ask Us Anything episode. And if you want to attend...

Pete: You can head over to thelongandtheshortpodcast.com/300 (the numbers 3-0-0) and there will be a little form on there where you can pop in your registration to attend. And we're going to have a field for you to ask questions, so please submit your questions even if you can't attend. We recognize this time might not work for everyone. Even if you can't attend, but you still want us to answer one of your questions, please head over to thelongandtheshortpodcast.com/300, submit your questions, register to attend, and we hope to see you on Zoom for the most chaotic, hopefully enjoyable and fun three hundredth episode recording that you will ever be a part of.

Jen: And now, on to this week's episode.

Jen: Hello, Pete.

Pete: Hello, Jen.

Jen: Once upon a time, I was directing a production of Oklahoma and came across, in one of my research books, this quote, and I typed it out onto a sticky note on my computer where it has been sitting on my desktop ever since. And I recently saw it there and thought, "Ah, this would make a good episode."

Pete: Wow. I love this. Like, letters from a past version of Jen. Am I right in thinking this was years ago that you would have been directing said show? Yes,

Jen: Yes, it was probably somewhere between eight and ten years ago. And I know that it is bothering you right now to know that I have had a sticky note on my desktop for that long.

Pete: How did you know that that was the thing that was bothering me? That is so funny. That's all I could think about, was, "Has she not cleaned her desktop for nine years?"

Jen: No, I have. I've just left it there because I thought maybe someday I would use it, and that day is now. I want to talk about this concept of flying time.

Pete: Flying time...okay, yeah, I've been doing lots of travel lately. I can get down with this. Flying time. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Well, Pete, we don't mean flying time like on an airplane, but good guess. Good guess.

Pete: I mean, I feel like it was a pretty solid guess based on the information I had.

Jen: So solid. But this is a quote from the book Overture and Finale, by Max Wilk. And this part of the book is about the creation of the 1943 seminal American musical, Oklahoma, by Rogers and Hammerstein. Long after the fact, a friend asked Rogers how long he had taken to compose the entire score. "Do you mean flying time or elapsed time," asked Rogers. When pressed for a definition, he explained, "Counting everything, overture, ballet music, all of the songs, the most I could make it come to was about five hours flying time. But the total elapsed time covered months of discussion and planning."

Pete: Yeah. Okay, this is good. This is good.

Jen: Right? It's good.

Pete: Agreed. It's good. I mean, gosh, there's so many directions to take this. The first thing that pops into my head is related to...it's actually related to like pricing and the story we tell ourselves about pricing in certain contexts. So I know a weird place to start, but maybe this will make sense in my context and in context of people who are facilitators or executive coaches or working in leadership development, which is where I spend 90% of my time. The thing that comes to mind is, so often I might be asked, "Hey, Pete, can you come and deliver a workshop for a group of leaders that we have? We probably have about two hours. So like, could you come and deliver a two-hour workshop? And what would that look like? And what would that cost?" Now, sometimes (not every time), you get people who assume that the investment in such an exercise would be the fly time, which is two hours. Like, "Oh, we're paying Pete for two hours of his time. So I'm expecting a quote that would be suitable for two hours of someone's time." And what they might be surprised to discover...which I don't think should be that surprising, but it is, for some people...is that the elapsed time to deliver a two-hour workshop is way more than two hours. There's the pre-work. There's the fact that you have years and years and years of IP and experience, which has to be worth something, which is hard to quantify but is a whole thing that you have to do. Maybe there's the commuting or the traveling to the actual workshop itself. And then, there's the flight time. And so, the elapsed time is often like a multitude of days. Can be a few days, to deliver something which its flight time might be two hours. So that's just one example of many I could think of, where, yeah, the story we tell ourselves about flight time might not actually capture the full amount of effort or elapsed time that's gone into something.

Jen: And that pricing example can also be flipped in the other direction, that sometimes we devalue our own work.

Pete: Oh, yeah.

Jen: Because we're only thinking about the flight time versus the elapsed time. I mean, I know I've told this story on this show before, but it's probably been a while.

Pete: Repeat it, repeat it.

Jen: Yeah. Several years ago, I was offered an opportunity to fly to Paris and deliver a forty-five minute keynote. And the amount that they initially offered me made my eyes pop out of my head, because at that point, that was the most I had ever been paid for a keynote. And I told the person who was booking me that I was feeling a little bit uncomfortable about that, and he said, "Jen, they're not paying you for a forty-five minute keynote. They're paying you for two-and-a-half decades of experience."

Pete: Yes, the elapsed time. Hmm.

Jen: And I was like, "Oh, okay, got it. Understood."

Pete: Love that.

Jen: So yeah, I was mistaking elapsed time for flying time, and it was good to have that reframed for me.

Pete: Yeah. I so agree with you on like, the other side of the coin is how often we underestimate our own effort or work that's going to go into something.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And we go, "Yeah, sure, I could get that to you by tomorrow and for $200." And then, you like spend a week working on something and go, "Wow, I've really undercooked this. Like, what am I doing?"

Jen: Right. "What am I doing?" Yes. Okay, so that's a really interesting application of this idea. The thing that first occurred to me, and probably because I'm reading this quote in a book about a creative project, is it's a really useful way to think about some of those frustrating slog moments when you're trying to build something new, where you're like, "Nothing is being created. All I'm doing is thinking or all I'm doing is sketching, and like I'm never getting to the actual making." But all of that pre-work (it's one of my mottos) is, "Go slow to go fast." And it feels like this is such a great example of, "Go slow to go fast." You've got to do all of the thinking and the planning, and then, when it's time to actually make the thing, your flying time can be quite short.

Pete: Oof, yeah. I feel called out. You know, I feel like this is an interesting story I tell myself, that you just kind of articulated. Which is, because I spent many years, almost a decade, working in an organization where there was a set structure for your hours, essentially...you know, like the classic nine-to-five, but it was more like eight-to-six...I still, even though I've been running a business for seven years and have control over my own time, I still grapple with the story of if I'm not working at 3pm or 4pm or 2pm, I grapple with the guilt that I'm not doing enough, and I grapple with what constitutes work and what does not.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And we did an episode once upon a time, which I'll put in the Box O' Goodies, called The Reading is the Work.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Which I think is sort of what you were getting at, which is if we take a lunch break and listen to a podcast or read a book in our lunch break, for example, that is feeding the work. Because the thing that you might learn in that passage that you read or listen to might actually then be something that you use in your work in the future. So all of this to say, I like this as a challenge for, "What do you define as work?" Because I agree with you. I know it intellectually, that like whether it's reading a book or like you're doing some thinking out on a walk, and you feel like you're not "working", but actually, you're thinking about something that then is going to be helpful to get clarity on moving forward. Or you're doing some drawing, and you're like, "This drawing sucks," and then eventually, it's good. You couldn't have got there if you hadn't have thrashed. So it's, I don't know, it feels like a tool of permission, to be okay that elapsed time might be longer than flight time. I mean, it has to be.

Jen: Yeah, it has to be. It has to be. And, that we eventually have to get to flying time.

Pete: Yes. Yeah, touché. Yep. Eventually, the seat belt sign is on, the doors have been disarmed and cross-checked, and it's time to fly. It's time to fly.

Jen: You'll have to fact check me on this, because I might be getting some of the details wrong, but I remember hearing that when Lin-Manuel Miranda first landed on Hamilton as something he was going to write, that his flying time and his elapsed time were the same thing. And it took him like two years to write the opening number. And then, the director, Thomas Kale, was like, "Dude, I'm giving you deadlines. Because we can't take two years to write every song." Now, you know, fact check the timing on that, but that's the basic gist of the story. And what's interesting in this Rogers quote, is he mentions months of discussion.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: Which does not suggest working alone, but working in some sort of a collaborative environment. Which sounds, to me, like Thomas Kale provided for Lin-Manuel.

Pete: Mmm. Yeah. I'm reminded...I feel like I'm just circling back to old episodes...but I'm reminded of an episode we did called Ride the Wave (which was relatively recently), and I was sharing a frustration I had of when you hit this wave of momentum or when you finally are on the plane and you're ready to fly, a frustration I have is, you go, "Oh, the flight time was only an hour. What the hell? Why have I been putting this off for four weeks? It took one hour." And then, what you helped me realize is like the lead up in the four weeks, the elapsed time, was actually informing the one hour. And the reason it only took an hour is because you have four weeks beforehand, plus the years before, of thinking, of reading, of procrastinating, which is part of the process, in a way. So yeah, I just remember being really frustrated when I discover, "The flight's actually only forty-five minutes. So, what am I doing? Why don't I just do this for forty-five minutes?" Because there is a bunch of elapsed time that needs to take place, certainly for my process, anyway.

Jen: Also, from a creative perspective...you know, now that we're nearing Episode 300, I'm like, "Have I told these stories before? Hmm." Do you have that?

Pete: I know. But also, it could have been Episode 10. And then, like people don't remember Episode 10, let's be honest. So, just tell the same story.

Jen: Okay, okay. So I have a client who I've been with a very, very long time. And I'll just never forget this moment, because it was so astonishing to me that she had been working really, really hard, and just she felt like she was not seeing the breakthrough or the progress that she wanted to make in the way she wanted to make it. And then, in one session, the way I described it to her, it's like she had a slingshot and a boulder, and she let it go all at once. And like, every single brick wall in front of her, she just blasted through all at once. Like, you saw all of this progress just like zoom in this forward moving direction. And that didn't happen because all of a sudden she had, you know, the new skills. It's because the elapsed time of those several years that she'd been working so hard finally came together. And so, the flying time was like two minutes. It was crazy.

Pete: That's awesome. I love that story so much. The thing that that makes me think of, for some reason, is how this plays out when it comes to comparison.

Jen: Oh my gosh. Wow. Okay.

Pete: So if I'm a budding anything (entrepreneur, author, actor, whatever), I might look to people who are the best in their class at this particular field or I look to someone that I really admire. And I'm realizing, in this moment, usually what I'm looking at...and this is like, you know, amplified by social media and other mediums. But, I'm looking at flight time. And I'm looking at them, going, "Goddamn it. They do this so effortlessly. It takes them only like this amount of time. And look how incredibly effortless everything is for them. Why can't I do that?" And I feel like the summary is, because you don't see the elapsed time.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Because you know that the people who have written that book or have built that business or done the thing that you're hoping to do have undoubtedly spent months, if not years, of time, of effort, of mistakes, of process, of feedback, of conversations, of book reading, all of those things that you don't necessarily see, which make up elapsed time. They've had that. And so, comparing ourselves to others, we see our elapsed time but we don't see anyone else's. And so, it's like we're comparing our elapsed time with other people's flight time, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

Jen: Holy cow, that was a really big aha moment for me. Because we see our own elapsed time, because we live with ourselves every day.

Pete: Yes.

Jen: But when we look at the people we admire, we only have access to a certain part of the story, and we're making...I'm saying "we" as if I'm not talking about me, so let's just modify to say "I". When I see people I admire doing things that are amazing to me, that I would like to be doing, I go, "Well, I must not have what it takes."

Pete: Right.

Jen: But it's possible that I'm in the middle of my elapsed time, doing exactly what it takes.

Pete: Exactly. Yes.

Jen: Oh, empathy. Wow.

Pete: Right. I also wonder if this is one of the reasons why, one of the many reasons why people feel more connected when they hear other people talking about their imperfections or their vulnerabilities or their elapsed time, like they share the struggle they have with their imposter every single time they try and pick up the microphone or pick up the pen or pick up whatever instrument that you use to do the thing that you're doing.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And you hear someone finally say, "Oh, yeah. This is like what my process actually looks like, i.e. here's some insight into my elapsed time." And then, I hear that and go, "Oh my god, thank god. Like, I feel so much more human and connected to this person. Because they, too, have those struggles and those fears and those things that they grapple with." So I'm trying to work out, how do I use this super helpful distinction as a tool of permission, to spend more time thrashing or be comfortable with my own thrashing? Because thrashing is part of the elapsed time.

Jen: Mmm-hmm.

Pete: And I mean, for me in particular, to catch myself if I'm comparing...

Jen: Mmm-hmm.

Pete: ...just as a mental model, to go, "Oh yeah, you're seeing their flight time. I wonder what their elapsed time might be?"

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Like just to ask yourself that question, as a way to remind yourself of the fact that it's very likely the elapsed time is far longer, far more effort, far harder than the output that you're seeing, which is the flight time.

Jen: And I'm seeing a world in which I can adopt this language with my clients. And when it feels like they're ready for next steps, literally say to them, "It's flying time. Let's go."

Pete: I love it. That's so good. "It's flying time. Let's go." And that is The Long and The Short Of It.