How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (13 page)

You can’t directly
control luck, but you can move from a game with low odds of success to a game with better odds. That seems like an obvious strategy and you probably think you already do it. The hard part is figuring out the odds of any given game, and that’s harder than it looks.

Several years ago I gave a talk to a fifth-grade class. I started by asking them to finish my sentence. The sentence was “If you play a slot machine long enough, eventually you will …” The class yelled out in unison “WIN!” As most adults know, that is exactly the wrong answer. Slot machines are engineered to make everyone but the casino a loser in the long run. But kids don’t know that. I presume they confused the benefits of persistence, which is drilled into them as kids, with the actual odds of succeeding.

If you’re reading this book you’re probably an adult, or close to it, and you understand the odds of slot machines. If you play them, you probably think of it as recreation and not investment. But are you equally clear about the odds that rule over other areas of your life?

I’ll give you another example about odds, using my favorite topic: tennis. For a period of about seven years I played tennis once a week with the same friend. He beat me 100 percent of the time. In the early years his wins made sense because his game was stronger in every way. Eventually, my shot making improved to the point where I felt I should have been winning, but I never did. I could get close, but I lost every match during those years. I didn’t feel that I was choking from
the psychological pressure, because I typically perform better in stressful situations. My natural optimism always tells me I’m going to pull a rabbit out of the hat and win against all odds no matter how far behind I am. That feeling is so strong in me that the only reason it isn’t classified as mental illness is that it works more often than you’d expect.

So I wasn’t getting psyched out by my losing record, and my strokes were good enough. Why did I lose every match against this particular opponent? I would routinely win against players who seemed about the same level as him. My losing streak was a mystery that dogged me for years. Apparently I had some sort of blind spot about … what? How could I learn to see the thing I couldn’t see? And if I saw it, would it help me win?

My tennis partner and I were good friends off the court, and we chatted a lot about our matches. I was always on the lookout for him to inadvertently spill his tennis secrets. I got little hints here and there as we talked about what was working and what wasn’t on any given day. All of our tennis conversations swirled around in my brain for years until one day the pattern revealed itself.

Some of the most powerful patterns in life are subtle. This tennis pattern was extraordinarily so. The quick explanation is that while I was playing tennis, my opponent was doing math. He was a card counter with a tennis racket. Over the course of several decades of tennis he had learned the odds associated with just about everything that can happen on a tennis court.

Learning the odds in tennis is harder than it looks because so much of it is counterintuitive. For example, when your opponent hits a forehand-to-forehand shot that takes you wide, leaving half of his court unguarded, most amateurs would try for a blistering forehand winner up the line into the open court. That shot was almost always my choice, and I missed it about 80 percent of the time. It turns out that hitting down the line when you’re moving at a right angle to your target is exceptionally challenging for a weekend player. The down-the-line shot works best when you have time to set up and step toward it. Hitting down the line while on the run only
feels
like it would be easy. The illusion is surprisingly strong. Every time I missed a down-the-line shot I was surprised, no matter how many times in a row I missed the same way. I assumed I would be able to lock in that shot if I just tried it a few more times. I was wrong about that for years.

I
could give a dozen more tennis examples where the odds are exactly the opposite of how they feel when you are on the court. And I could give you a dozen examples of how my opponent always played the high-percentage shots while cleverly goading me into one low-percentage shot after another. The point is that while we all think we know the odds in life, there’s a good chance you have some blind spots. Finding those blind spots is a big deal.

In time I learned to avoid the low-percentage tennis shots more often and I won our matches about half the time, exactly as our shot-making skills would predict. So how does any of this help you?

The idea I’m promoting here is that it helps to see the world as math and not magic. It would have been easy for me to assume my tennis losing streak was due to my lacking the will to win. Or perhaps I might have thought my losses were lessons from the Creator of the Universe, who realized I needed help maintaining a socially appropriate level of humility. But no, it was just math.

If you find yourself in a state of continual failure in your personal or business life, you might be blaming it on fate or karma or animal spirits or some other form of magic when the answer is simple math. There’s usually a pattern, but it might be subtle. Don’t stop looking just because you don’t see the pattern in the first seven years.

The future is thoroughly unpredictable when it comes to your profession and your personal life ten years out. The best way to increase your odds of success—in a way that might look like luck to others—is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job. This is another example in which viewing the world as math (adding skills together) and not magic allows you to move from a strategy with low odds of success to something better.

I made a list of the skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge. I wouldn’t expect you to become a master of any, but mastery isn’t necessary. Luck has a good chance of finding you if you become merely good in most of these areas. I’ll make a case for each one, but here’s the preview list.

Public speaking

Psychology

Business writing

Accounting

Design
(the basics)

Conversation

Overcoming shyness

Second language

Golf

Proper grammar

Persuasion

Technology (hobby level)

Proper voice technique

I’ll defend the economic value of each of these skills in the remainder of this chapter.

I took one public-speaking class in college. It helped a little. I took two more classes in public speaking during my corporate career. The company paid for both. Those classes helped a little too. Then one day my employer—the local phone company—announced it would pick up the tab for any employee who took the Dale Carnegie class on his or her own time. Anyone who wanted to learn more could attend a presentation in the big lecture room. I was curious and had heard good things about Dale Carnegie courses, so I decided to go and see what it was all about.

The regional director for Dale Carnegie, whose name I inexplicably remember twenty years later—Tony Snow—gave the shortest and most persuasive sales pitch I have ever seen. I’ll condense it further here, but the essence was this: “Instead of describing the Dale Carnegie course myself, I’ve asked two of your fellow employees who took the course to tell you what they think.” He introduced the first guy and walked off. Tony Snow was done selling.

My fellow employee bounded onto the stage as if he had just won the lottery. His energy and enthusiasm were infectious. He had no notes. He prowled the stage and owned it. We, the audience, locked onto him like a tail and we let him wag us. He was funny, expressive, engaging, and spontaneous. It was the best speech by a nonprofessional I had ever seen. I could tell he loved every second onstage, and yet he had the discipline to keep things brief.

When
he was done, Tony Snow thanked him and introduced the second speaker. The second guy was completely different in style from the first speaker but every bit as good. He was enjoying himself. He projected. He was clear and concise. He owned us.

When he was done, Tony Snow thanked the audience and told us how we could get more information about the course. Tony Snow: magnificent bastard.

I signed up that day.

There are several flavors of Dale Carnegie courses. I don’t remember what my particular course was called, and it has probably changed names by now. The focus was on public speaking, but for reasons that took a long time for me to understand, Dale Carnegie didn’t classify it as a speaking course. It had a broader agenda.

On day one our instructor explained the Dale Carnegie method he would be employing. Rule one was that no one would ever be criticized or corrected. Only positive reinforcement would be allowed, from the instructor or from the other students. I was immediately skeptical. How was I supposed to learn if I didn’t know what I was doing wrong?

The next rule was that every person would speak to the rest of the class during each session, but we had to volunteer to go next. This rule was more important than you might think, because most of the people in the class were deathly afraid of public speaking. The instructor acknowledged that sometimes the class would need to sit quietly for long periods waiting for the next volunteer. And wait we did.

On day one we sat like frightened squirrels, hoping someone would go first. For some reason, going first seemed extra bad, even though we all knew we would go eventually. The instructor stood in front of the frozen class and waited patiently, not judging, clearly having gone through this before.

Eventually someone volunteered, and then another. Our speaking assignment was something simple. I think we simply had to say something about ourselves. For most people, including me, this was a relatively easy task. But for many in the class it was nearly impossible. One young lady who had been forced by her employer to take the class was so frightened that she literally couldn’t form words. In the cool, air-conditioned room, beads of sweat ran from her forehead down to her chin and dropped onto the carpet. The audience watched
in shared pain as she battled her own demons and tried to form words. A few words came out, just barely, and she returned to her seat defeated, humiliated, broken.

Then an interesting thing happened. I rank it as one of the most fascinating things I have ever witnessed. The instructor went to the front and looked at the broken student. The room was dead silent. I’ll always remember his words. He said, “Wow. That was brave.”

My brain spun in my head. Twenty-some students had been thinking this woman had just crashed and burned in the most dramatically humiliating way. She had clearly thought the same thing. In four words, the instructor had completely reinterpreted the situation. Every one of us knew the instructor was right. We had just witnessed an extraordinary act of personal bravery, the likes of which one rarely sees. That was the takeaway. Period.

I looked at the student’s face as she reacted to the instructor’s comment. She had been alone in her misery, fighting a losing fight. But somehow the instructor understood what was happening inside her and he respected it. I swear I saw a light come on in her eyes. She looked up from the floor. She had a reprieve. She was still in the fight.

The next week she volunteered to speak again. (See how powerful this volunteering thing is? She owned the choice.) She didn’t do well, but she got through it without perspiring or locking up, and the instructor praised her for her progress.

By the end of the course, some weeks later, every member of the class could have sold Tony Snow’s product. Every time we spoke, we got compliments from the instructor and sometimes other students. We got applause. It felt great. Today when I see a stage and a thousand people waiting to hear me speak, a little recording goes off in my head that says today is a good day. I’m the happiest person in the room. The audience only gets to listen, but I get to speak, to feel, to be fully alive. I will absorb their energy and turn it into something good. And when I’m done, there’s a 100 percent chance that people will say good things about me.

There are several things to learn from that story. The most important is the transformative power of praise versus the corrosive impact of criticism. I’ve had a number of occasions since then to test the powers of praise, and I find it an amazing force, especially for adults. Children are accustomed to a continual stream of criticisms and praise, but adults can go weeks without a compliment while enduring
criticism both at work and at home. Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.

“Wow. That was brave,” is the best and cleanest example I’ve seen in which looking at something in a different way changes everything. When the instructor switched our focus from the student’s poor speaking performance to her bravery, everything changed. Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It’s the nearest thing we have to magic.

Another thing I learned from my Dale Carnegie experience is that we don’t always have an accurate view of our own potential. I think most people who are frightened of public speaking can’t imagine they might feel different as a result of training. Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.

It’s hard to imagine any business or social activity that doesn’t require a basic understanding of how the human brain perceives the world. Almost any decision you make is in the context of managing what other people will think of you. We’re all in the business of selling some version of ourselves. Psychology is embedded in everything we do.