Probability Hacking with Kyle Austin Young: The Science of Beating the Odds

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Step into the world of success with your brand ampl, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. Kyle Austin Young, you are an author, a journalist, and a strategy consultant, and you have a book that was just released that I'm really excited to dive into because this is the it's always the perfect time, but right now is really the time when people are thinking about what does my life look like? How can I reimagine it? So I very much appreciate you coming on your brand amplified at this time.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about your origin story in your book Genesis. Walk us through the moment that you realized that success could be systematically approached as a probability equation. Because this is such interesting framing. What happened in your life or work that really crystallized this concept for you?

Sure. Well, what ultimately happened is I was Laid off twice in a span of about 13 months from fairly prestigious leadership positions, jobs where I was making quite a bit of money. And I found myself in a position after the second layoff. I was very fortunate. I had four different people offer to hire me the day after that layoff. And I needed to make a decision. But I was tired of losing my income because it was takes time to get these big jobs. Even though I still had more offers, I now knew that I might lose them no matter how things were going. Because in both cases, things were going pretty well. It was just some external circumstances. So I needed to make a decision about what I was going to ultimately do. And I decided to diversify my income. My wife and I were in the process of adopting, famously expensive process, and needed to be in a position where we could rely on my income. I couldn't keep losing it. So I decided that I was going to consult, diversify, and ultimately, ultimately that put me in a position where I was working on a long list of different projects, different goals at a time, and I needed to find a way to keep myself sane. I needed to find a way to grow my consulting business. This was over a decade ago. And ultimately what I discovered was that what all these projects had in common is there was a desired outcome, there was a goal, there was something that we wanted to accomplish, and there were bad things that could potentially happen instead of what we wanted. And so I tried to make that the backbone of my consulting work, getting really clear on what was the goal that my client was trying to achieve. And then what could I do to make them more likely to ultimately find success? Because what the layoffs taught me was it wasn't just about showing up, doing a good job, having integrity. At the end of the day, if there were financial troubles in the organization, even if they stemmed from another department or mismanagement here, there, you know, wherever, it was still going to have the potential to negatively impact my life. And so I started kind of zooming out in these projects, and I always, you know, pay attention to what am I hired to do. But ultimately what I'm asking myself is, what can I do to make this project a success? And so finding ways to tilt the odds, finding ways to encapsulate all of the different information in a way that was easy to understand and digest and allows me to shift from project to project became pretty essential. And that's ultimately how we got here.

Yeah, that really helps. I want to first say congratulations on going through the adoption journey. We haven't gotten to That I hope it was successful for you.

Done it a couple times now.

Amazing. That is really important work.

Thank you.

Pouring into those kids. And then you also mentioned, of course, this idea of having this consistency in building out plans now when we. I consult with people for their podcasts. I've done pr, branding, other stuff before, and a lot of times I feel like sometimes the clients don't always know what their end goal is. Right, they don't. I mean, depends, of course, on what kind of company you're looking at. And they may think they want to go one direction, but what they really want is something else that hasn't been identified. So are these some of the things that you work through to make sure that everybody's really clear on what the outcomes should be?

Oh, yeah. I think that's. Anytime I'm working with a coach or consultant, anytime I'm asking for advice, if the first question they ask me isn't, what's your goal? What do you really want to get out of this? Then I immediately discount, you know, the quality of the advice that I'm going to get, because ultimately they're offering directions, but they don't know what destination I want to get to. So who knows where they're sending me? Right? So that is a big part of it. And you're right that finding that clarity is an important part. One of the things that I encourage people to do is just own the goal that they actually have. I think a lot of us are maybe a little bit embarrassed about our goals because maybe they're not as virtuous as we would like them to be. Maybe it's just, I want to make a lot of money this year. Well, I don't care if you want to make a lot of money this year. Like, we're not going to rob banks. But if your goal is just to make a lot of money this year, great, let's make a lot of money this year. Or, you know, I want to win this award because I think it'll maybe give my. My family of origin a greater appreciation for what I do for a living. They don't really understand what I do for a living. Maybe this is something that would ultimately help them see how hard I work and, you know, how successful I've been in this. This new world. Fine. That's totally fine with me. So a big part of it is that I just encourage people. Let's just own the goal that you actually want to pursue. Let's try to get it, and if it ultimately doesn't satisfy you, the way that you hope it would, or along the way you discover it's not what you really wanted, then we'll pivot. But I think it's often a challenge for consultants when the stated goal is not the real goal. And I've seen. Well, I've been involved in projects early on where I was delivering wins according to what the stated goal was. But people weren't happy. And ultimately it turned out that sometimes there was a different goal beneath the surface. So I think you're absolutely right.

Oh, and that takes me to thinking about goals. Right. And you mentioned sometimes there are things that happen along the way that are pitfalls or failures. So if every goal has a probability of failure and success attached to it, how do people get numbers wrong? What's a simple misunderstanding in this concept that might lead to people being overly confident about success outcomes?

I don't think anyone's ever set me up better with a question. Thank you for that. My goodness, I'm ready to rock and roll with that question. I'll tell you the exact trap that people fall into. So when we're thinking about pursuing a goal, we instinctively try to get a sense of what is it going to take for me to accomplish this? What am I going to have to do? And so I'll just make up the example of, let's say that we're training to run a marathon. We want to run a marathon. We aren't sure how to get ready, so we hire a running coach. And she says, I can get you there in time, but you're going to have to do three things. I need you to eat, sleep, and train exactly how I tell you to until race day. If you eat, sleep, and train the way I tell you to, you'll be ready. If you cheat or you only do two of the three things, you're not going to be ready in time. You're not going to be able to accomplish this really difficult athletic feat. So there's three things that have to go right for us to accomplish this goal. We have to eat, sleep, and train a certain way. After we get a sense of that, I think instinctively, again, we ask ourselves the question, do I think I can do each of those things? What are the odds of me doing each of those things? So I'm just going to make up some really easy round numbers. Let's just say we think it's 70% across the board. 70% chance that we can stick with a nutrition plan, 70% chance we can stick with the sleep schedule, 70% chance we can stick With a training regimen. You asked, what are the mistakes that people make? And that's a really generous question, because there is a mistake that a lot of people make, and it's called averaging. After we have done some work trying to brainstorm, what does the future look like, what's going to be expected of me, and do I think I can do each of these things. A lot of people fall into this trap called averaging, where if we feel good about the individual steps, we feel good about the goal as a whole. That intuitively makes a lot of sense, but mathematically it doesn't. And unfortunately, in the real world, the math wins. If we need all three of these things to go right, we can't average those three numbers. We actually have to multiply them together. And if we do that, if we multiply 0.7 times 0.7 times 0.7, we find that we only have a 34% chance of being ready on race day. We expect this goal to fail. We feel good about each of these things individually, but ultimately, we expect the goal to fail. The odds are that one of these three things isn't going to come into fruition. We're going to. We're going to miss it on either the training, the sleeping, or the eating. We don't know which one. But the odds are that we are ultimately not going to be ready in time. And this is a goal where, you know, we feel great about everything individually. We only need three things to go right. So now think about, you know, maybe think about starting a business. How many things have to go right for that to be successful? Think about the New Year's resolutions that we said. Maybe we want to change a habit that we've had for a long time. Maybe, you know, even in the context of running a marathon, there's so many things that are going to have to happen in order to make these three things possible. We see how that impacts our odds. Now, I don't see that to discourage people. It's just the opposite. First, I want you to have a more realistic understanding of your odds of success. This is, I think, why a lot of people fail, why so many New Year's resolutions go poorly, why, you know, we're told 9 out of 10 businesses fail, and such a big percentage of mergers and acquisitions fail to create value. Different public policies don't ultimately make the world a better place. There's a lot of things that need to go right. But I don't say that to discourage you. What I ultimately wrote the book to do was, and what I do as a consultant, is teach people how to probability hack. When we know what has to go right, we have an opportunity to then brainstorm what are the things that could go wrong that are currently weighing down my odds? Our odds are it will. All of the different outcomes are going to add up to 100%. So there's an outcome we want, but then there are some bad outcomes. What are those bad outcomes? A lot of people encourage us to think positive, don't worry about what could go wrong. And I say the exact opposite. I think you should think negative. I think you should try to become really aware of what are the risks that could potentially derail my success. So in the context of training to run a marathon, well, maybe bad weather could derail our training regimen. What can we do about that? Maybe we need a gym membership so we can train indoors on days when the weather's not cooperating. An injury could potentially derail a training regimen. Maybe we need a stretching routine or we need to do things that would reduce the likelihood of us ultimately getting injured while running and keeping us from being able to stick with that training. Maybe a lack of motivation. Maybe we need to find a running partner, somebody who can hold us accountable. There are lots of different potential bad outcomes, and we can use our creativity to make each of them less likely to happen. And when we do that consistently over the course of our lives, we can see dramatically different results.

And it sounds in some ways so simple, right? Making these changes, finding accountability partners, taking accountability for ourselves. But I know that sometimes I've gone on a workout plan or done something in business, but then I internally resist, right? It's like a little rebel saying, oh, I'm not going to do it exactly how I'm told to do it, even though it's not in my own best interest. Do you find that that sometimes happens with your clients? And how do you overcome the challenges of getting them to shift their mindset right, so that they can see that using this strategy that you're laying out for them and working through with them is actually going to get them exactly where they want to be as long as they stay the course?

Sure. And now, again, even if I can optimize your odds of success, it doesn't guarantee that things are going to go the way you want. But over the course of a lifetime, you're going to win a lot more often. That's what we expect for you. But yes, you're absolutely right that we're always torn between our desire to kind of wish things into Existence and reality. And what I have to try to explain to people is that desire is not an antidote to risk at all. How much you want to accomplish a goal has no impact on things like whether it's going to rain on a day when you need to train, whether you get injured, whether maybe the issue of a lack of motivation, potentially, you know, resolve, could be a part of that. But typically, the bad outcomes that could ultimately affect our goals aren't things that we can in any way limit by wanting it. We have to actually use our creativity to identify what are the bad outcomes and how can I make them less likely. So, yes, I think that's a constant struggle. We want to ignore the math. We want to, you know, just say, if it's meant to happen, it'll happen. Or, you know, if I want it badly enough that maybe I'll somehow will it into existence. I think that failure is the thing that teaches us over time that we need to be really, really serious about focusing on our odds. And what can we do to optimize everybody? We're all tempted to do things with as little effort as possible. That's human. So we want to wing it. We want to say, you know, running a marathon, 70% across the board. I feel pretty good about this. Let's. Why optimize? I already feel pretty good. But when we understand that ultimately, if things are a true prerequisite to our success, we have to multiply them, our overall odds probably are not that good, then we have an opportunity to give ourselves an advantage and do the things that other people are not doing to be more successful in these goals.

You work with a lot of high performers and high achievers across multiple industries. So I appreciate all of the advice you're giving. And I'm internalizing and thinking about my own situations or people around me as well. At what point did you decide this works so well for people already in the zone, if you will, that I really need to create a book. I need to write a book that was published by Hay House, came out recently. And kudos to you for that. So success is a numbers game, right? Achieve bigger goals by changing the odds.

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That's right. I was really fortunate as my consulting career became more successful because I'm so devoted to trying to help my clients find a good outcome, you know, above and beyond what I'm necessarily hired to do. That these early projects that I took on became some of my best success stories, became these great marketing devices for my services. And so that went well and it ultimately led to a number of writing opportunities. I got to write for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, Psychology Today, places like that. And that was an exciting opportunity to write things that are short form. But I didn't really have anything longer that sort of explained the whole methodology. And so finally, after about a decade of this, I reached a place where I'm very busy. I still take on new clients, but I have to say no more than I say yes. And a lot of times people ask me questions. The best thing I can do is send them an article I've written about that topic and say, great question. Here's what I would recommend for that situation. You can read it, you know, at your leisure. I didn't have anything more comprehensive and it put me in a position where I was sometimes turning people away and I felt like I wasn't giving them everything that I could. And so this was a chance for me to take what I know and ultimately put it in a format where other people who want to reverse engineer some of what I've, what I've accomplished for these clients can do it for themselves. And so my goal was just to empower people that maybe it didn't make sense for me to work with one on one, but that I still wanted to be a part of their success.

Yeah, thank you. And how long did it take you to hone your techniques and realize this is what really works. Was it that first client? Did you already have this in place?

You know, I tell a story in the book when I was getting my first job after college and the long, I'll kind of jump to the end and just say that this is an ongoing process. But I'll tell you how long this has been in place. I was, this is, I don't know, 15 years ago. I'm fresh out of college and I wasn't excited at all about the entry level positions I was seeing. So I decided that I was going to apply to be the product development director for a health organization. Which is crazy because I'm in my early 20s. If I get the job, I'm going to be managing people in my 50s, 60s, 70s, or excuse me, in their 50s, 60s, 70 s. Some of them had PhDs or master's degrees. I had a bachelor's. Again, I'm a kid and I got an interview and so I thought, well, I need to make the most of this. This is a pretty cool opportunity. So I did exactly what I encourage people to do in this book. I tried to identify what are the potential bad outcomes that could keep this company from hiring me. And I was able to identify three that I thought were, were really big concerns. The first one was that they would reject me because of how young I was. And so I couldn't change my age. But again, we have an opportunity to use our creativity. And so I thought, well, if I can't be older, maybe I can look older. And so, as silly as it sounds, I just grew a beard and that beard made me look quite a bit older than I was and it took a little bit of the edge off. When I walked in the room, it wasn't just like, oh my gosh, who's this child? It was, he's young, but you know, he looks like maybe he could potentially be in a leadership position. So that helped. The second potential bad outcome that I identified was I didn't really have a resume. I was just a student, you know, a couple of months earlier. How was I going to get around that? Once again, I couldn't conjure up a resume. I wasn't going to lie, but what I could do is redirect the conversation. So I actually wrote a proposal for how I was going to turn this department around. And it was so big that I ended up having it spiral bound. It was a book and I went in there and I gave it to everybody I interviewed with. And when they would ask me questions about my past, I would redirect it to, well, here's what I think we need to do for the future of the department. And so I ultimately just tried to shift the focus away from the questions I Didn't have great answers to. And then the third risk that I identified was maybe people would just feel like they couldn't get along with me because of the huge generational gap. Maybe it would be weird to try to connect with somebody who was 30, 40 years younger than you, especially if he was your boss. So one of the things I did is I asked an existing team member if they, as a department, had read any books lately. And she told me three different titles. And I went out and I read all three of them. And it put me in a position where I could speak the company's language. I knew their jargon, I knew their goals. I could make analogies that they understood. And I found myself at one point in a group interview, me and these other candidates, and they were all much older than I was, much more experienced. And one of the books they'd read was called the Wuffy Factor. This is an older book, doesn't get a lot of press these days, but it was about how to build social capital as a brand. And I remember sitting in a meeting where I said, you know, I think if we were to pursue this idea that somebody had mentioned, I think it could bring a lot of WUFI to the organization. And I remember looking around at the other candidates who just thought, what on earth did he just say? But the existing team members, they were all laughing. They knew exactly what I was talking about. So as crazy as it sounds, at the end of the day, I got that job. At 21 years old, I was the product development director for a health organization, managing people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. And that was a job that ultimately I would lose via layoff. A nonprofit. And some of the funding changed, but it was an exciting opportunity that really accelerated my career. So in some ways, this has been a mentality that's been with me all along. But along the journey, I've had an opportunity to refine it. One of the biggest, I guess, optimizations was the creation of the success diagram, which is just a visual way to capture all the information I'm talking about. We're on a podcast, so, you know, it's not as obvious. I try to kind of paint a word picture for you, but I give people a way to write it out where they have a bird's eye view that allows them to see, here's the goal, here's everything that has to go right. Here's what could go wrong. It makes it a lot easier to collaborate, to ask for advice, to jog your own memory, and ultimately to store information as you get it. The addition of numbers was one of the final changes. I was just trying to explain to people how this worked and I added the numbers on a few years ago and ultimately that led to the book. And I'm thankful to have the opportunity.

You're really great at painting a picture for us, so I'd love for you to walk us through a real world example of the success diagram, if you will.

Well, again, I can't draw it for you, but I'll give an example of a recent client engagement that I had. I work with a non profit that operates in a part of the country in the United States that deals with a lot of homelessness, addiction, hunger, poverty, human trafficking, a really challenging area. And so they exist to help fight against that. And it takes quite a bit of money to do that. Their budget's around $30 million a year. And about half of that comes in from revenue from thrift stores that they own. The other half comes in from donations. People will read their newsletter and ultimately donate to help supplement the thrift store income. And for years they saw really steady growth in that which was needed because the needs weren't going away. But ultimately they finally started to see a season of decline and it was threatening their ability to keep doing this work, at least at the level that they had been. And so they started bringing in different consultancies to try to figure out what was going on. And the theory was maybe the content had gotten stale, maybe people were losing interest in this newsletter. Maybe it was same old, same old and they needed a fresh take. So they're bringing in these different agencies and strategists try to reinvent this content approach. And it wasn't working. And so finally they bring me in and say, can you help us reinvent the way that we talk to our customers? So that's what I was hired to do. But ultimately what I did was I created a success diagram. What's the goal? The goal is to get these people to be regular donors to this ministry. What's everything that has to go right to take somebody from a newsletter donor to. Well, you know, we need them to subscribe to the email list, then we need them to actually receive the emails. Then the emails need to accomplish the following things. Well, because I took the time to map out all of the critical points, everything that had to go right to move person from point A to point B or to move a person from point A to point B, what I uncovered was that there was actually a technical glitch that was causing people to not receive the emails. The majority of the email list, because of a mistake that had been made, was no longer receiving anything that was being sent out, but it was disguised by some other technical glitches. And so I found that because I wasn't just doing what I was hired to do, I was asking the question, what's everything that would have to go right in order for this company to be successful, in order for them to accomplish the goal of taking subscribers and turning them into donors. And so when I was able to fix the technical issues that had been hiding there for a couple of years, it put them in a position for their existing content to start reaching people again. And it turned out that they didn't necessarily need a full content reinvention, which is what I was hired to do. But you're probably not surprised to learn that they weren't frustrated with me about that. They were just happy to have their problem fixed. Right. There have been lots of people who'd come in and done what they were paid to do. Ultimately, what I saw was an opportunity to again take responsibility for the outcome. And when you know what the goal is, you know what has to go right, you know what could go wrong. In this case, the potential bad outcome was they don't receive the emails in the first place. When you put yourself in that position, you have the opportunity to just systematically de risk goals that you plan to pursue in the future or troubleshoot goals that are maybe gone off the rails and you can't quite figure out why.

It's amazing that something that we think is so small. Right. A glitch. Maybe they didn't have the right email settings based on all of the things that Google and Apple and everybody else who put the restrictions on for email servability. But that one thing could make such a big change. And by not looking at each step really clearly and diving in like you did, nobody else could identify it.

Yeah, we jump to conclusions and I think they're. In this case, I think the assumption was a really good one that maybe content is something that we need to take a fresh look at. Sure. Like that's not unreasonable at all. It's just important to recognize that if you lack, you know, the bigger picture, then you can miss, miss things. And so a lot of times I'm being brought in, in that type of circumstance, I'm there to fix things that have maybe been going wrong for a while and nobody knows why. And that's because I'm taking a bigger picture look. But again, we can also apply this to our own goals, looking into the future. And when we enter into these projects with a bigger understanding of what's going to have to go right, we can avoid some of these things in the first place.

One of the other concepts in your book is the game is rigged and you have some hacks. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what does it mean to you when you say the game is rigged and what are those hacks that can help us.

Help us ultimately be more successful? Sure. So I've shared some of them. Some of them are ultimately us using our creativity to take the risk out of our goals. But I'll talk about another one. And that's just the power of repeated attempts to. This is one of the most reliable ways to accomplish goals where there's a lot of uncertainty. If you think about, you know, the saying that nine out of ten businesses fail, I'm not here to say how accurate that is or isn't, but people say that a lot. What I found is some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world are the people who heard that and recognized that what was ultimately being said wasn't, if you start a business, you'll probably fail. What they saw was, if you start 10 businesses, we expect one of them to succeed. That's the expectation. Now, obviously, there's a lot that goes into making a business successful. Some people might succeed at a higher rate than that. Some people might succeed at a lower rate than that. Than that. There's certainly things you can do to improve your odds. But a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs are very prolific. They try more than one time because they're trying to play the odds. If they need 10 attempts to be successful, fine. They'll try 10 times for the opportunity to change their life and potentially change the future for their families. So one of the biggest hacks we have is to consider if this is a goal where multiple attempts might be really powerful. In the context of the book, I talk about the story of Thomas Addison. Thomas Addison was in a race to invent the first practical incandescent lamp. He didn't come up with the idea. Other people were trying to do the same thing. The challenge was nobody could find a filament that could get hot enough to glow without catching on fire or burning out really quickly. And so they were in a race to find a patent. Whoever ultimately found the solution first was going to have protection for that solution. They were going to have the ability to make lots and lots of money that could really change the trajectory of their Career. Well, what he did that was different than everybody else is he experimented with 6,000 different plant materials to find that what it turned out to be was carbonized bamboo, which would not have been my first guess. Right. Carbonized bamboo was the one that could glow. I think it was 1200 hours without burning out, catching on fire. It helps him get these patents that then protect the idea and really change the trajectory of his career. So in many goals, we have the opportunity to lean on the power of multiple attempts. And when we do that, when we ultimately find success, that typically puts us in a position where our odds at subsequent goals are much better because we now have some connections, we have some know how, we have some resources, and. And that puts us again in a position where in the future we can probably get to where we want a lot faster.

You also talk about negativity as a strategy, negative thinking, when that's opposite and kind of diametrically opposed in some ways to what we're usually taught, which is the power of positive thinking, manifestation, vision boards, mapping out your goals, all of that. So you can talk about why negativity is an important strategy.

Sure. So I want to be clear that I love mapping out your goals. That's what a success diagram is. I also think where I find tremendous power and opportunity in the idea of sort of manifestation is getting really clear on what you want. And I think that that's so foundational. We talked about that earlier in this episode, that if you don't have a really good sense of what the goal is, then you're just kind of drifting. But when you do know what the goal is, what's great about that is it now puts you in a position where you can process all the information that we take in every day. If you know what you want in life, then when you're at a networking event, all of a sudden you know who to talk to. You know, you're listening to somebody talk about the background, you go, oh, that relates to what I'm trying to accomplish. Maybe I can collaborate with this person. It gives you a filter that allows you to ultimately process information more effectively and not miss the opportunities that are right in front of us every day. So I think that's really important to again, have that vision, what do I want? And then try to map out what that goal is going to look like 100%. The missing piece of that for me is the opportunity to improve our odds of success. When we think negative, when we consider the potential bad outcomes that might happen, we aren't giving into Negativity, just the opposite. We're trying to keep bad outcomes from happening in the first place. We're not using this as an excuse to not pursue our goals. We're acknowledging that every goal does come with risks and that some risks can be completely avoided with a little bit of creativity, a little bit of intentionality. So when we don't take advantage of the opportunity to look ahead, brainstorm the potential bad outcomes, and ultimately do what we can to prevent them, we're kind of inviting failure into our lives. And again, I think that commitment is important. I'm not in any way here to suggest that it's not. But explain to me how commitment is going to prevent a market from not wanting the product you just released. How does your commitment fix that? I just. I don't see a good example for how it would. I think that market research could be really helpful in mitigating that risk. I tell a story in the book book of bic, this French manufacturing company that released a line of writing pins for women. These were pins for her. And it wasn't the way that they were presented. It wasn't the aesthetic. They literally said that it had a thinner barrel to fit a woman's hand. Now, that's a bizarre advertising campaign. And ultimately, this product totally flopped. And I do some keyword research in the book, and I show you no one on the Internet was looking for pins for women that just. I mean, it's like 150 people, and they're probably looking more for a stylish design. They're not looking for a thinner barrel. So a little bit of keyword research could have helped prevent this significant amount of wasted time, wasted resources, trying to launch a product that nobody really wanted. Actually, a lack of consumer demand is the leading reason, according to some research that I cite in the book for why new products fail is just nobody wants it. They don't care. So we have an opportunity to be committed. Great. Be committed. But ultimately, if we can perceive the risk of nobody wanting this product has the ability to kill my goal, how can I take the risk out of it? Well, let's do some market research and find ideas that we're confident people are actually going to want to respond to, and we put ourselves in a position ultimately to be more successful. So I think it's great to. I think it's great to be focused, think it's great to have a vision. I think it's still important to optimize your odds of success.

Yeah, not every sale happens at the register Before, AT&T business wireless checking out customers on our mobile POS systems took too long. Basically a staring contest where everyone loses. It's crazy what people say during an awkward silence. Now transactions are done before the silence takes hold. That means I can focus on the task at hand and make an extra sail or two. Sometimes I do miss the bonding time. Sometimes.

AT&T business wireless connecting changes everything.

And that leads perfectly to my next question. You just gave such a great example with the pension. And of course you saw me chuckling. I'm like this, that scene.

If you ever want to have a lot of fun, go on Amazon and read the reviews. Because people just had a field day. It's a lot of fun.

So I'm interested in hearing about. I mean, they could have used productivity hacking and a lot more. Have you ever gone down a path with a client using your techniques and realized that they need to maybe let go of and walk away from a goal instead of double down? Maybe there's something else that they'd be more that would be more attainable.

Sure, Absolutely. I think that getting a sense of our odds of success is an important part of how we prioritize. A lot of people, when they're considering what goals to pursue, they ask questions like, you know, which goal most closely aligns with my values? Which one sounds like the most fun? Which one will maybe make future pursuits the most possible? All those are great. But if we aren't pausing to at least consider our odds of success, then there's a good chance that we're going to waste our time no matter how much hypothetical alignment there is with these other areas. Areas. And yes, that's an important part of this is looking at certain goals and saying, I think that the odds here are so bad. At least right now. I don't tell people to quit, but I do sometimes tell people to press pause. I think about an example in my life. This is how I remember it. I'm not sure this is 100, right? I may be combining a few memories, but this is how I remember it. I'm 11 years old. We are leaving my great grandfather's funeral, driving from the church to the graveside. I have no idea why, but as I recall, that was the day my mother asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, I want to be a writer. That was a goal that I had as an 11 year old. Now, at that time in my life and for quite a bit after, it wasn't realistic for me to try to sign a big book deal that wasn't really on the table for me. So I pursued smaller goals. Goals like writing for the Harvard Business Review. Goals like making connections with people who had successfully published books in the past. Goals like meeting and working with literary agents, something I did before I got my own book dealing. Goals like learning about the process through which books are written and sold. And so by accomplishing all these smaller goals, by the time I did actively pursue the goal of writing a book deal, I was in great shape. For many people, it's something that's almost unattainable. Not. It feels unattainable, let's say it that way. And I really didn't have that hard of a time with it, because by the time I started doing it, I had connections with literary agents, I had an audience. I had all these credentials writing for these different places. I had a consulting career that demonstrated my expertise and had given me a framework that I wanted to share. I was in a really, really leveraged position. So I think that when we think about our odds of success, again, there is some wisdom in trying to prioritize goals that we're confident we can be successful in. And in many cases, those goals can serve us in a variety of areas. Writing for Harvard Business Review makes it easier for me to get consulting gigs. It helps me book speaking opportunities. It does so many things for me. It makes me more fun at parties. What do you do for a living? Instead of saying, I'm a business strategy consultant, and everybody says, what on earth is that? I say, well, I'm a consultant and I write for sites like Harvard Business Review. Oh. And then all of a sudden, they have something to talk to me about a little bit. So it's always great to be looking for these versatile goals where we feel like success has the opportunity to open a lot of doors for us, and we're confident we can actually get the job done. Otherwise, I'm not sure how much value there is in just choosing goals that we know we're going to fail at. Obviously, there are some things in our world that are important enough that we have to try. You think about things like curing cancer. That's a tough goal. Tough, tough goal. But we should try to cure cancer, right? There are certainly areas where we, you know, despite the odds, do everything we can to find success. But in the context of just our own pursuits, the way we spend our time, I say invest it where you think you'll see a return.

Nice thinking about our goals. We have our primary goals, right? But then you also talk in the Book about spinoff goals and how they can help increase your probability of success for your overall goal. Can you talk a little bit about that concept?

Yeah. It goes back to this idea of pausing certain goals when we do press pause. That doesn't mean that we abandon all the work that we did. A lot of times we will have accumulated advantages and assets that we can use in other places. I tell the story of a dating site in the early 2000s that was using this really cutting edge technology to allow people to upload a video of themselves and introduce themselves and then try to find somebody who might want to go on a date with them. They ultimately had a challenging time getting people to use it. It felt really vulnerable at that time, early 2000s, to be uploading a video, introducing yourself, putting it on the Internet, and then you're maybe going to go on a date with this person. That seemed like a crazy thing to do. Obviously, times have changed, but they were struggling to get any kind of adoption. And so they decided that they were going to press pause and that they weren't going to try to do that anymore. But they still took stock of what do we have, what have we gathered along the way? And one of the things was this really neat piece of technology that let people upload videos to the Internet, something that was really hard to do at that time. And so the idea that this, this group of friends had was, what if we let people upload videos about anything? And so they did, and they ultimately rebrand the site. They call it YouTube. They later sell it for, I think, one and a half billion dollars. Don't quote me, but I think that's right. And had this enormous success. And so while they did press pause on the goal of launching a successful dating site, they took stock of what they had accomplished in pursuit of that goal and put themselves in a position to reuse it and enjoy a shorter path to a different outcome.

Yeah. Well, you share so many great case studies and examples from your own experiences, your clients experiences, and the research you've done. I don't want to give away your whole book.

I won't be offended if you do.

Oh. Because I can continue asking you questions about so many different aspects of it, But I want to just finish on two or three more questions.

Go right ahead.

People often think success, right, is like we've talked about, you work hard, you toe the line, you keep on trying to pursue your goals. Or they think, oh, I, I'm never going to reach that level of success. It's only for people who are Smarter than me, more gifted than me, probability hacking is a gap. I don't know if it's a closer completely, but it could be framed that way. So what is the biggest gap you see between people who are maybe naturally talented, who fail. Right. And average talented people who succeed? And of course, that can be a little subjective.

I think that one really great way to close the gap is again, the power of multiple attempts. Being willing to try multiple times until the odds in your favor, I think about Ben and Jerry's. Ben and Jerry's wanted to disrupt the really crowded niche or market, if you will, of ice cream sales. There were a lot of very established competitors, and at that time, and still today, the best selling ice cream flavor in the world is vanilla. It's really hard to make a vanilla that's so much better than all the other vanilla that people say, okay, now I'm going to just buy this new one. Right. If you like the vanilla ice cream you're buying, you're probably not going to want to switch. So they had to find some way to carve out market share in a world where the best selling ice cream brand is vanilla. So what did they do? Well, they ultimately had the decision that they were going to release lots of really creative flavors that were very different that other companies didn't have as a way to differentiate themselves and see if they could convince people to give them a try. And if they did try them because they were interesting, and if they did like them, they were now going to be hooked on something they couldn't get other places. It wasn't vanilla. It was a proprietary flavor to this upstart new brand. So that's what they decided to do. Well, there is no magic formula that allows you to perfectly predict what ice cream flavors people are going to get excited about. And so what they did is they released so many that they actually have over 300 discontinued flavors, 300 failed Ben and Jerry's flavors. If you ever go to their factory in Waterbury, Vermont, outside, they have something called the flavor graveyard. And they have actual headstones where they honor the legacies of these ice creams. They say that they're dearly depainted, it's pretty cute. And they all have funny little epitaphs. And this is again, a place where they recognize that failure was something they had to celebrate because they knew they were going to fail a lot. But they also knew that if they were willing to try enough times, they were confident that they could produce some flavors that other people weren't going to have. And what I find really interesting is if you walk down the ice cream aisle today in the grocery store, you'll find some of those brands that have been around for a long time are now doing the same thing. They're the ones trying to release kooky new flavors with the goal of ultimately taking some of that market share back from Ben and Jerry's. So I think that's a big equalizer. I also think that people who are really talented, people who have a lot of advantages, tend to feel good about their odds. And there can be some overconfidence that comes from that. You know, we talked earlier about goals where the risk we're hidden. The idea that maybe a non profit trying to grow donations doesn't realize that emails aren't being delivered, or the idea that somebody preparing to go for a run maybe isn't really thinking about how a week of bad weather could be the thing that keeps them from running a marathon. When we stop to consider those things, we recognize that we have an opportunity to take risks off the table that more talented people, often more confident people, aren't even considering. And at the end of it, you know, that they'll be the ones talking about, well, it wasn't my fault. It rained for a week straight. There was nothing I could do. And we'll be the ones who ran a marathon. And that's cool.

Oh yeah, it sounds so easy in concept. Even though we know that you have to put in the work, it's not.

Easy to do it perfectly. I don't do it perfectly. But it is easy to ask ourselves the question, what's one thing that's going to have to happen in order for me to accomplish this goal? And what's even one potential bad outcome? If we can identify even one potential bad outcome, we have the opportunity to start using our creativity to try to take some of the risk out of that goal. We can do that in the shower, we can do that in the car. We can be brainstorming anywhere. Once we've gotten the clarity of here's something that might happen instead of what I want to happen. What can I do to take the risk away from that?

Well, you talk about how this can help us. I mean, we all think about what we want to leave behind, right? Our legacies and productivity hacking can help us leave legacy we want to. So I'd love to turn to you and ask, what is the legacy that you want to leave?

What gets me excited when I see people really authentically and vulnerably pursuing goals that mean a lot to them. I think that's a scary thing to do. I think that we live in a world that's everybody's curating their own image. Nobody really wants to fail, certainly not in public. And when I see people who are risking it and saying, I'm going to give this a try and see what happens, it's hard for me not to want to be a part of that. It's hard for me not to want to do what I can to help them be as successful as possible. And so the goal with this book, what I hope the legacy of this book will be, is just something that empowers people to first of all overcome some self doubt. I think when a lot of people try to deal with self doubt, they focus on the idea of doubt and so they try to overcome it with maybe affirmations or something like that. I think that a different opportunity and maybe a better opportunity is to focus on this idea of self. And don't worry so much about the you and the goal. Worry more about the odds of your success. Everybody, you know, oh well, I'm so this or I'm not enough that take that out of it. Let's just look at what are your odds of success at accomplishing this? What are the things that actually have to go right? How can you use your creativity to change your odds? That's something closer to kind of a growth mindset. It's not fixed on the idea of who you are and what your limitations might be. So I hope this is something that'll help people overcome self doubt. I hope it's something that will give them the tools to think through goals, ultimately choose goals that are more likely to be successful and then do what they can to optimize their odds. And I'm hopeful that this will be the kind of thing that elevates those people who are really risking it, those people who are pursuing these goals with vulnerability and authenticity. I'd love to be in a world where more of those people are the ones winning the game. Yeah.

Fantastic. And what are your personal goals for the upcoming year? Two years.

It's a great question. It's a great question. Right now I'm just going to be honest. This probably isn't the ideal answer for you, but after this book launch, after so many things that there's a tremendous amount of work that goes into it, one of my goals is to reset. So that's probably going to be what I'll focus on in Q1 of 2026 is how do I get back Into a rhythm where some of the self care habits, some of just the important things that have kind of been put on the back burner while I launch this book, make their way back into my life. This has been a lot of fun. I'm so thankful for it. I also don't want it to be my new normal, though. I need to be really intentional about drawing a line and saying to some extent we're transitioning back into a more sustainable way of living.

That makes a lot of sense. I think many people are in the same situation. Maybe they don't have an amazing book that just came out, but we're all busy.

I think that's totally true.

Last question, of course we're going to have your website links to your book, all of that.

Thank you.

Show notes. Do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto?

Oh, goodness gracious. I'll tell you one that I think is really exciting and it comes out of a story in the book. One of the coolest privileges I got when I was writing this was I got the chance to interview Jack O', Callaghan, who played for the US Men's Olympic Hockey Team in 1980 when the United States beat the Soviet Union. This very improbable game called the Miracle on Ice. Yeah. And he tells the story of the pep talk that was given to him by coach Herb Brooks in the locker room before they took the ice that night. And he says he doesn't remember it perfectly. He says there's other people who are in the room, that there's some disagreement on exactly what was said. But he says he came away feeling like the message was if we played this really good team 10 times, they'd probably beat us nine times, but they aren't going to beat us tonight. And I think that there's something really powerful about that, understanding that we can accomplish really difficult goals, even goals that feel really unlikely if we're willing to try more than one time, if we're willing to do everything we can to optimize our odds of success. So many people enter into goals with this idea of pass fail, you know, win or lose, not recognizing that if it doesn't go well, you can try again tomorrow. And ultimately, when you do accomplish that, your life will more than likely be defined by the success more than by the failed attempts that it took to ultimately get to that place. We don't talk about all of the filaments Thomas Edison experimented with. That didn't work. We just talk about the fact that he invented this really powerful incandescent lamp. Most people don't even know about the failed attempts. So I think there's tremendous opportunity in that. And I think it. It starts a little bit with that mindset of, you know, if we played them 10 times, they might beat us nine, but they're not going to beat us tonight. I think if we show up with that kind of optimism every day, we put ourselves in a position. We're acknowledging that failure is part of the process, but we're also very hopeful. I joke in the book that I like to wake up with the thought in my head that it's me against the world, and I like my odds, and I think that that's possible when we ultimately implement this framework.

Amazing. Well, I know that you've given me a lot of hope and excitement around the New Year.

I'm glad.

The goals that I have been working towards, what I'm doing right and what I should add to the mix. So thank you. And I'm sure that the listening audience or the viewing audience is thinking the same thing.

Well, I certainly hope so. Most people fail at their New Year's resolutions, and it's for the reasons that we have said. They don't stop to actually consider what is it going to take to accomplish this? And they don't think negative. They don't stop to consider what are the things that could happen instead of what I want. So use this intentionally and imagine that your New Year's resolutions could finally become what they're kind of marketed as, which is every year, this opportunity to reinvent yourself and put yourself in a better position. I think that we can have something a lot more like that when we're optimizing our odds of success. Yeah.

And for anybody who's listening and it's not the beginning of the year, listening to this episode, maybe a little later, it's always a good time to look at your goals. You can have a new year start at any time. It doesn't have to just be January 1st.

That's exactly right. Researchers talk about something called the fresh start effect. And it's this idea that one of the ways or one of the reasons we're so drawn to dates like New Year's is it feels like the beginning of something new, where we can kind of leave the past behind and we can sort of trick ourselves and say, you know, this didn't work last year, but I'm. I'm a new New Year, new me. I can figure it out this time. And one of the things they say is, don't wait to the New Year's. They said if you need to just start on the first day of a month, or if you don't even have that coming up soon, just start on a Monday. Just New week, just draw a line in the sand and say, that's the old me. Today we're going to do something different.

Amazing. This has been such a great conversation. I would love to have you back on again in the future.

I'd be thrilled to do it.

And I'm just. I'm taking so many gems away. So thank you for giving me that gift of coming on the podcast.

It's been a fun conversation. I've really enjoyed it.

Yeah. And thank you to everybody who is watching this episode, listening to it. Check out Kyle's book, Continue to be inspired, continue to chug along on your goals, but also make sure you're using these hacks that he's recommending so that you're being really strategic and really clear about what it is you want to accomplish and how you're going to do so. Until next time, have a great week and I'll be back again with another amazing guest to share their story and their journey very shortly. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of youf Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at your brand Amplified.com.

Not every sale happens at the register. Before AT&T business Wireless, checking out customers on our mobile POS systems took too long. Basically a staring contest where everyone loses. It's crazy what people will say during an awkward silence. Now transactions are done before the silence takes hold. That means I can focus on the task at hand and make an extra sale or two. Sometimes I do miss the bonding time.

Sometimes at Business Wireless, connecting changes everything.