Make More Mistakes

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This is kind of a riff on my recent post failures faced by Michael Jordan and others, but it has more to do with making mistakes.

Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, is quoted as having said:

“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him.”

I had a similar experience with an employee back in the 90’s when I worked at a video game store — he made a big mistake (clearly on accident), but we kept him around because he was now the least likely to make that mistake again.

Physicist (and Nobel Prize winner) Niels Bohr says that mistakes lead to excellence:

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

Mistakes are how you learn. As with failure though, mistakes aren’t the goal. It’s pretty easy to go around screwing things up on purpose, and you’ll never learn anything from that. Rather, the point is to not be afraid of trying new things and learning when things don’t go your way.

That’s kind of the point of this blog. I’ll hit on some winners, but I’ll undoubtedly come to some poor conclusions as well. When I do, I hope you’ll call me out on it so I can learn from that mistake.

Being overly cautious can help keep you in a job, but that might not always be a good thing. As Henry Ford has said, “Those who never make mistakes work for those of us who do.“

Be fearless, make mistakes, learn from them, repeat.

More about clarity breaks

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I mentioned the idea of a “clarity break” yesterday and thought I’d unpack it a bit more. It’s a concept that I’ve struggled with over the years, but find great value from when I do it regularly.

The EOS Worldwide blog defines it as:

A clarity break is a regularly scheduled appointment on your calendar with yourself. You define what regular is – a half hour daily, two hours weekly, a half day monthly. It’s up to you. The doing of it is what matters.

Next find a place to meet with yourself… I like Panera Bread personally.

Just take a blank pad with you. Using technology tends to become a distraction. We are tempted to just do one email or just surf the web for that one project back at work. Don’t do it.

Back to you and that blank pad. Stare at it and your mind will help you. The important things will surface. Ideas will pop up. Try it. You’ll be amazed.

It really can be quite amazing, though it’s also rather intimidating. You’re sitting there with a blank piece of paper and nothing worth writing. If you can break past those first few minutes, though, things will start to roll. For me, the content varies a lot: sometimes it’s mostly work-related, sometimes more personal tasks, and sometimes just random. Not every session is perfect, but collectively they add up nicely.

The idea is not unlike your time in the shower, when you let your mind wander and you often come up with new ideas or remember something you were supposed to do. This is just an intentional version of that.

Getting Ready

I’ve done a few things to help make my sessions more useful, and one is better prep. First, I take another look at my calendar for the coming days so I can have that fresh in my mind.

Next, I do a short meditation session with Headspace. I’ve never been much on meditation, but taking three minutes to clear my head before I start is key.

I kind of relate it to this ridiculous scene from “The Waterboy“. Coach Klein leaves his head for a few minutes, but when he’s done he’s ready to dig right in. That’s how I am with Headspace; I try to relax for a few minutes, and when it’s over I snap back and dig in.

Ideas to use

From there, I have a few prompts that I give myself each time.

  • Highlights: What are some things that have gone well recently?
  • Gut Feelings: What am I feeling? What am I nervous about?
  • People: I think about the other three people in my house, and the other six people at our company, one at a time, to see if anything pops up. I’ll often have random thoughts like “Oh yeah, I need to check in with Brooke about project X”.
  • Goals and Priorities: Looking ahead, does anything show up there?
  • Random: I leave a section on the side for any other random things that come to mind.

I don’t do them in order, and I rarely have something in every category. They’re just good prompts to get things rolling and then I follow wherever my thoughts take me.

In my case, I use my reMarkable tablet for these breaks. It has no apps or features, and is essentially just digital paper. No distractions, but can save and sync my notes. Perfect for something like this.

Do you ever intentionally take these kinds of breaks?

Busy isn’t the goal

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When asked “what’s going on?”, I think we’ve all said it: “Super busy.”

That response is usually seen as being a good thing, so we keep going back to it. Is that really the goal, though?

In Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism, he has a variety of things to say about busyness. His main point:

What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?

And it’s not that being busy is necessarily a bad thing. He extends the thought by saying:

Being proud of being “busy” is stupid. Granted having a busy agency is much better than a slow one, but working all hours.

That’s where it gets tricky. If we’re just bored all of the time, that’s no good, but some time to let the mind wander can be beneficial. Did you ever come up with a great thought in the shower? A lack of other “stuff” can bring out great things. Another great line from Greg relates to employees, saying that “if his people are too busy to think, then they’re too busy, period“.

I’ve been working to intentionally develop thinking time into my day. Some days I can, some days I can’t, but it’s a goal each day. I roughly follow the idea of the EOS Clarity Break, but anything will work. Just disappear for a little while, remove notifications and distractions, and see what comes up.

Be Like Leo

Leonardo da Vinci followed this idea as well, saying:

Every now and then go away and have a little relaxation. To remain constantly at work will diminish your judgment. Go some distance away, because work will be in perspective and a lack of harmony is more readily seen.

He wasn’t a slacker. In fact, while da Vinci is known for his vast collection of artwork, he also made an incredible number of scientific discoveries. He attributed his ability to do that to keeping a clear mind.

86,400

We all have the same time allotted to us: 86,400 seconds a day, 168 hours a week, and 365 days a year. Because of that, Rory Vaden says we really shouldn’t complain about our busyness:

It’s not even right to complain or whine to others about how busy you are. You and I have the same amount of time in a day as Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Mother Teresa, Michael Jordan or anyone else who has achieved greatness.

Stay active and moving, for sure, but just make sure that being busy isn’t your goal.

Good decisions can have bad outcomes

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As humans, we too often judge the quality of a decision based on the outcome, when many other factors (often luck) play into it.

The “Resulting Fallacy” is a case where we create too tight a relationship between the quality of the outcome and the quality of the decision.

Or as poker player Annie Duke says:

Don’t be so hard on yourself when things go badly and don’t be so proud of yourself when they go well.

We see this a lot in sports. Should the runner try to steal second? If they’re fast and going against a catcher that rarely throws people out, it’s likely a good decision — even if they get thrown out. In hindsight they shouldn’t have done it, but at the time it was the the right decision to make.

The Seahawks made a good decision to pass

At the end of Super Bowl XLIX, the Seattle Seahawks threw a late interception that cost them the game. If you’ve not seen the play before, here it is:

It’s widely considered to be a “horrible decision”, but was it really? To recap the situation:

  • There were 26 seconds remaining
  • The Seahawks had one timeout
  • They were at New England’s one yard line
  • They were losing by four, so they couldn’t just kick a field goal

Given the time remaining, they couldn’t run the ball three straight times. To maximize their chances (assuming they don’t score on the first two tries), they’d need at least one pass. Passing first leaves the Patriots guessing about subsequent attempts, whereas a run on first down that failed would have essentially guaranteed a pass on second down.

To further the point, teams that season on the 1 yard line scored on 57.1% of their running plays and 57.4% of their passing plays, so a very tiny nod toward passing.

The counter is that they had Marshawn Lynch at running back, who had an incredible season, and seemingly could have picked up the yard. Everyone was likely expecting that, though, making it a bit tougher.

Here’s the big one, though — in the history of the NFL, passing plays from the 1-yard line are intercepted just 3.1% of the time.

Do-over

Obviously, if they could go back in time and choose a different play, the Seahawks would absolutely do that. At the time, though, they made a solid decision that just happened to not work out for them.

Such is life. Prepare the best you can and do the best you can, and see where the pieces lie. You’ll win some and lose some, but don’t beat yourself up if things go poorly. Learn from it, and come back with a bit more wisdom next time.

Plus, it probably won’t cost your team the Super Bowl.

Leadership isn’t about who goes first

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I consider Andy Stanley to be a leader in every sense of the word. If you’re not familiar with Andy, he’s the senior pastor of North Point Community Church, speaker, author, podcaster and much more. If you ask someone that knows Andy if they consider him a leader, they’ll almost certainly say yes.

Andy’s churches see weekly attendance of more than 40,000 people during non-COVID times, so you think he’d want to be a “leader” and reopen as soon as possible. You’d be wrong. They announced months ago that they’d be staying closed until at least the end of 2020, perhaps longer. In their eyes, the safety of their congregation comes first, and unnecessarily putting them at risk isn’t leadership of any kind.

They’re certainly doing a ton to support their congregation through virtual events, and much could be learned from that, but they don’t think that leadership means going first.

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of businesses and organizations in your area that are doing the opposite. They’re “leading the way” to reopen or to host their event, even if it might not be a smart move. It’s a tricky thing to navigate, particularly for businesses, so I’m not sure what the right answer is. However, I don’t think that opening quickly necessarily equates to leadership.

Verizon is leading the way with 5G

5G is going to be great — someday. We’re still a long way from that. However, if you listen to some companies you’ll be led to believe that being first is all that matters.

Take Verizon in Atlanta, for example. On July 31, 2019, Verizon launched their first 5G towers in Atlanta. They’re first — they’re leaders!

That was more than 15 months ago. As of now, their true 5G covers about six square miles. Six. And that’s only on some streets, and only works if you’re outside. For comparison, the metro Atlanta area is considered to be 8,376 square miles, and the state of Georgia is 59,425 square miles. They cover 6.

6 vs 8,376 vs 59,425. It’s a joke. Are they leaders in 5G because they were first?

Side note: To help confuse you, Verizon has now renamed much of their old 4G network as kind of a fake 5G, like AT&T has done. When looking at this data, be sure to look at their coverage for “5G Ultra Wideband” to see what they really have.

Leaders can be first

This isn’t to say that being first means you’re not a leader. There are plenty of examples of leaders being trailblazers into a new industry or idea, and that should always be celebrated.

It just seems to be that being first to something is now being treated like a crown, while being first is only part of being a true leader.