Failure

In his mind, he failed. And in his, like, perception, he failed. And literally within a year, he was, like, back on meth, living just a shit life. His family, they didn't have any money. He had abandoned them. He just was like, "Fuck it, I'm out." Because of this idea of failure. Because it was a fucking idea. It was just an idea that he had failed.

I'm Brett Kistler here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson.

Hey Brett, how's it going?

And this is The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease. On today's episode, we're gonna talk about failure.

Yeah. Yeah, we are. We're gonna talk about failure. The thing about failure that is so critical is that it is just an idea, and it is an idea that when you have it can totally stop you in your tracks, can make it so that you don't want to try anymore. It, it is a structure in the brain called the habenula that basically its job is to make sure that you don't fail. And so if you have this idea of failure, your capacity to keep on trying and iterating goes way down. And so to really understand failure can absolutely transform the way that you do personal development work and the way that you achieve stuff in the world. So to me, it's, it's critical to think about failure differently than most people do.

One thing that I noticed right there is this immediate distinction between the story or the idea of failure and any objective reality that's going on.

Correct. Well, there is no failure. I mean, if you take a look at, say, Sam Walton, right? So this guy starts Walmart. You know, some people think he's evil, some people think he's great, but whatever it was, he was on a boat coming back from World War II and he thought to himself, you know, autocracies in the world. The problem with them is that they don't have a middle class. I need to support the middle class of America. So his way to do it was to increase the buying power of the middle class, give stock options to clerks. He did all this stuff to help the middle class. Oddly, you know, it changed over time, but that was his thing. That's what he wanted to do. And he failed the first time. First Five and Dime failed. Second Five and Dime failed. Third Five and Dime, Walmart, and then Sam's Club, and then everything else that him and his, and his family did, the restoration of the Colorado River and, and all the restoration of the Sonoran and the stuff they're doing with like rhinos in, in Africa right now, all of that propelled because he apparently failed, but he didn't fail. And I don't think anyone's gonna look at Sam Walton and go, oh, that dude was a failure. So the idea of failure is time limited. You have to think that there is a time, like, line on life and that there's some end to it. As long as you don't think there's an end, there is no such thing as failure. There's just the next iteration, the next attempt, the next experiment, the next try.

Yeah, that's, that's really interesting, this idea of an end, because I think there— in our work, we talk a lot about the false end. You know, in skydiving or BASE jumping, we would often say that any jump you walk away from is a success, and then the corollary there is a jump that you die on is a failure. And it just seems like Duh. What do you have to say about when a failure is defined as, well, my company ended, right? Therefore it's a failure, right? It's just a failure and I move on. How does that interact with this idea?

Yeah, I mean, you can do that. The problem is, so the part of the brain called the habenula, its job is to— and of course this is neuroscience, so everything's going to change in 5, 10 years. But generally the thing about the habenula is that it It is a regulator for the dopamine and the serotonin production. And so basically what it's designed to do is help you succeed. And so if you're say like a rat running a maze, and so all vertebras have this, including fish, they have this part of the brain. And if you're running a maze and you'd go one way and it doesn't work, this part of the brain is designed to tell you, don't go that way again. If you are a bear and you're fighting for mating rights, or a lion fighting for mating rights, and you fail, that part of the brain says, don't try again because you're gonna get killed. So don't do that. Like, and, and that's what it's designed to do. It's designed to say, hey, here's how you succeed by not expressing the reward of success when you have failure. Right? And so there's even studies that show people who are depressed the habenula is not working in the same way. It's perceiving failure even before it happens, so then you don't even try, right? And then if you think about the way people who are depressed feel, as an example, they think about it as, there's no way out, there's never going to be a way out, I'm never going to succeed, this is going to last forever. That's like the symptom of depression, and the habenula is involved in that. And the studies that have been done— and there's this woman whose name escapes me, Uh, we'll put it in the show notes. The way her study went was she went into populations that didn't have a lot of resources and looked to see who actually lost weight when they tried.

Hmm.

And the people who lost weight, and most of them didn't, their mindset was never, I failed. Their mindset was, what's the next iteration? What's the next thing we do? What's the next attempt? What's the next try? What's the— it's a constant iterative mindset, which you see in Silicon Valley as well. Fail fast is another one. So it's like the idea is that everything that you're doing is an iteration and it's an attempt and it's a reframing of failure to experimentation. And if you look at like the way our courses are designed, they're all designed that way. They're all designed in a way where we're teaching folks that it's not about failure, it's about iteration. We do experiments. We don't say, here's an exercise, here's what you have to learn. There's like an experiment. We talk about want over should, because should, if I should do it and I don't do it, then I failed. Again, creates this situation where, oh, I'm trying to get out of a bad habit. And then that moment where you go back to the bad habit, you don't see it as an iteration. You don't see it as a pendulation. You're like, oh, I failed. And then I'm gonna stop trying.

Yeah. Yeah. What I'm, what I'm hearing there is that learning is gonna happen either way. We're evolved to learn no matter what happens. But what we learn depends on what we make of it. And failure causes us to learn to stop trying that thing, which is ultimately keeps us very safe if it's well calibrated. But we often fall out of calibration. You know, it might actually— how does this emerge from childhood? Like, as we become more complex adults, how does our sense of failure change from when we're children? If we're a child, we might only be able to recognize a certain level of complexity of the definition of a task and whether or not we succeeded or failed. And so I wonder to what extent that kind of carries forward into our adulthood, and that's part of what needs to be deprogrammed and kind of reprocessed in, in the work.

Yeah, absolutely. So the idea is how do you get into an iterative mindset? How do you redefine or reframe failure? That's the important part. And so if you look at kids, one of the main things that they have for their reward system, right? Like, what's the cheese at the end of their maze? It's mom and dad's love and attention, or love and attention generally, right? So if they keep on failing at getting that, if they keep on failing at getting the attunement that they need, if they keep on failing to get the connection that they need, if they keep on failing to get the love that they need, then they grow up with this incredibly critical voice in the head telling them that they're failing all the time, even when they're not. So that's the amazing thing. So I'll give you an example of this. My father was the CEO of a company and that company fired him, and then he got a job as another CEO of a company. And at the end of that, the, like the owners of the company, which was another company, so the parent company basically fired him and said, you failed. And my dad was just like, I'm a failure. And his whole life just went down the tubes. It's when he started drinking heavily and Everything he did went wrong and it was just like, it was horrible. Like just a horrible thing. And later on in life, I'm a venture capitalist and I am walking around this trade show looking for investments and there's this company, it's called Lumen Energy. And I was like, huh, that sounds a lot like the company my dad ran called Lumen Optics. So I went over, I was like, wow, this sounds like a company called Lumen Optics. They're like, oh, that's who we used to be. I was like, really? My dad used to, you know, run the company and they're like, oh, John Hudson. Yeah. And so what I found out was that my dad was so successful at running the company that the parent company that didn't want this company to exist because it was a competitive product to their main manufacturing facilities and everything like that, basically shelf the company. And these folks sued the parent company, won $100 million or something, said, you shelved us, it was a breach of contract. And so they lost $100 million. And now with this new $100 million, they're restarting the company.

Wow. Yeah.

And so my dad's entire life went downhill because he thought he failed when he actually hadn't failed. And it, and so I started to ask for the numbers, literally. I'm like, what happened? Like, and, and I started. Asking for the numbers. I, and I went and talked to my dad about it too. I was like, tell me the numbers. And he basically turned a company that was losing something. It was like burning $300,000. And he had turned that around to only burning $10,000 in less than 2 years. And their revenue had increased by something like 300 or 400%. So it was definitely on the right trajectory. It was definitely going in the right direction. It wasn't. And I was like, Your whole life defined by a failure that didn't actually exist. And so that's the crazy thing is like, especially somebody who's depressed, they can look at anything and turn it into a failure. They can look at anything and say, oh, this is— see, I didn't succeed. I didn't— it wasn't perfect because nothing's perfect. Nothing is perfect that you can look at anything and say, see, I wasn't perfect. I failed.

Yeah. And how did that impact you? How old were you when this occurred in this and your dad started to see himself as a failure.

Oh, Jesus. Yeah, I was about the 7th grade, 8th grade, and some— somewhere in there, maybe 9th grade is when it started happening heavily. Yeah. I mean, the alcoholism that at least to some degree was propelled by— he was a heavy drinker already, but like that whole, like, shame cycle that he went into. Yeah, I like lost my dad even more than I had already lost my dad. And he, of course, his job was or not job, but what actually usually happens is that like he would take his own self-anger out on me, right? So that self-anger, that shame, that you failed, you fucked up, you da da da, how could you, you had it all and blah, blah, blah, blah. It had to go somewhere when, you know, so he yelled at me for an hour and a half over the dinner table every night. It was crazy.

Yeah.

So that, this one idea, one idea that he failed where he could have been like, oh, I succeeded. And those guys, like, you know, tried to hamstring me because of the success that I was having. If he had that thought process, and he's like, I'm a successful CEO, like, my life, his life, my sister's, my mom's, all— everybody's life would be different. One, one idea of failure. It's fucking a phenomenal thing.

Yeah. Now I'm curious about the other side of that extremity. You know, we've got sort of the tension here between sort of like the pessimism and optimism. And then some people who are like, well, I'm just a realist. And, uh, I'm, I'm curious, like, what's the other side of the extreme here? If somebody just doesn't recognize any failure or learning, or like, what, what's the way to go too far in redefining what is failure for you? Is, is that possible?

So I've seen people do something where they do the power of positive thinking, and so they don't look at the reality on the ground, right? But I don't think that's about failure and non-failure. That's about overoptimism or not wanting to feel your negative emotions. It's like a completely different thing.

Yeah.

So yeah, you're going to be disappointed. Yeah, you're going to be sad. Yeah. Like, I have been a venture capitalist. I've had companies that I love that have not succeeded. I had to mourn. It's not about like, no, everything's going to be okay. It's not a Pollyannaish thing.

Yeah. Something that I'm noticing here is that in, in the instances that you were talking about, like what your, what your dad could have learned from that experience, what we could have learned from any experience that we labeled as failure, or what we could have learned from an experience that we were kind of pollyannically kind of grazing over the top of, is that there's a lot more subtlety to reality than we previously had modeled. And to get there, there's a lot of emotions we have to feel. We have to sit with that complexity. And so it seems like kind of the ungrounded optimism is a form of avoidance of that complexity. And it sounds like what we're talking about here with failure, it's like an inverse Pollyanna where it's like, I don't want to feel all of what I have to feel. Perhaps, perhaps your dad might have had to actually recognize that he had succeeded and that wasn't actually enough for the company because other forces outside of his control, right, were happening and there'd be heartbreak in that. And so how much is perhaps the premature idea of failure or the simplistic story of failure that prevents us from really getting the full experience? How much is that a protection or a way of protecting an identity or avoiding an emotional experience?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the interesting thing is like, if you bring that all the way into where it goes really deep, like in depression, where the person's like, why even get up? Why even live? Right? Because I'm just, it's just gonna all be shit. Right? Like, that's, that's how far this thing goes, right? Like, everything I've done is failure. Why even get up? Why now? I'm like, it's just fuck it. I'm just going to kill myself. Leaving that place, I'm sure, is going to be scary. Somehow or another, being where you are, even if it's hell, is somehow more comforting than being in someplace new. And so I think to some degree there's something there, but there's also just like this brain structure that's like, yeah, don't try. If you feel like you're failing, don't try. And so to me, I would say that the, the emotional avoidance is something that is really important and is going to allow you to succeed. And reframing failure is something that's really important and is going to allow you to succeed. I mean, I've told this story before, and, but I want to tell it again is like, you know, I have a, a guy who cuts my hair, who's this great artist. And I've done this many times now, and he wasn't being able to sell in galleries. And I said to him, look, hey man, I'll give you $1,000 if you get whatever. I can't remember anymore, 25, 50 rejections inside of a month or two or whatever it was. And every failure was a success. That reframe, he was like, oh, I'm closer to getting to my goal of $1,000. And then now he's like a working artist. Because gallery said yes, but the reframe was, I am winning if I get failures. And that was like, that's all he needed was that reframe. And so if he's in there and he's not reframing and he's like, this is a failure, this is a failure, then there's a lot different things that he's gonna have to feel than if he's in there saying, this is a success, this is a success. So there's a, there's a dance that goes on with it. But to me, I see them as two separate things. One of them is like, oh, I, I need to just no longer believe in failure. I don't believe that it exists. It's just a frickin idea. And the other one is I'm going to feel whatever emotions are coming up. And I think they end up leading to the same place.

Yeah. So now I'm curious for, you know, for listeners here, I'm hearing like a number of possible entry points for for doing this work. One of them is taking an inventory or account of like, what stories do you have of failure? And then there's the explicit ones that you tell yourself every day. And then there's implicit ones that have just become kind of baked into the subconscious. Like, I'm just not that kind of person. I'm not an artist because somebody didn't like my art once.

Because I failed when I was a kid. Yeah, exactly.

So kind of just to start with that, with the excavating of failure stories, what's, what's something that listeners could do as a practice or as an experiment to start to excavate those stories, to investigate them more deeply?

Yeah, I think there's the investigation, but there's— I'm not sure how necessary that is for reframing. Meaning if you want to lose weight, let's say you've always tried to lose weight and you haven't succeeded, as an example.

Mm-hmm.

What we normally do is we say, oh, we're gonna do this diet. We're gonna try. X amount of time goes by. And then we fail in some way and we give up, right? So like, next time you want to lose weight, sit down and write 50 experiments you can run about losing weight. I'm going to do an Ayurvedic diet. I'm going to do a traditional Chinese medicine diet. I'm going to do the Atkins diet. I'm going to try this exercise, this exercise, this exercise. I'm gonna like, literally, like, I'm gonna count calories. Oh, I'm gonna like control my blood sugar. I'm gonna wear a blood sugar monitor. I'm gonna work with my hormones. Like, there are so many ideas, and I— of how to lose weight. Write down every experiment that you're gonna do and then do them in order. Oh, so now— oh, I failed at that. It becomes, oh, I tried that, now I'm going to try this, and what do I learn? What am I going to try this? What am I going to learn? And each one of those is going to teach you something about your situation, about how you think about food, about how you think about weight, about how you think about exercise. So to me, more important than going back into and excavating the ideas of failure, which I think is important, is to start to getting a taste of what it is to reframe the idea of failure. Because once you have that, then the exploration I think is much easier than if you are going to explore stuff, but you don't have a taste of what it is to have an iterative mindset.

Yeah. And when I, when I say excavation, one of those, one of the reasons for that is simply so you have something to reframe. Because a lot of that could be subconscious.

Yeah. So I would say the first place to reframe is the thing that you want to do next is that thing that you want in life that you've been not able to achieve, whether that is like finding a lover, finding a husband or a wife, starting a business, blah, blah, blah. Like, take whatever that thing is that's been hard for you that you don't want to go out and do because you feel like you fail every time you do it. And come up with 50 or 60 iterations that you can try. I'm going to try, you know, this app for dating, this app for dating, go to yoga classes. Try your 50 things.

So now, now what I'm thinking about is, let's say somebody does this work, they do some reframing. And then, you know, a lot of times people will continue to self-sabotage what they think they want. And it'll be a fear of success that's actually underneath that sabotage. How would you relate the fear of success to the propensity to develop a story of failure?

Yeah, to some degree, the iterative mindset helps with the fear of success because every time you're iterating, you're starting to taste success. Not success in the goal because there's no more goal, right? Like the whole thing about iterative mindset is that you kind of have a north star. You're like, oh, I want to end up here. But the way I'm gonna get there isn't by getting there. My, the way I'm gonna get there is just learning. I'm just gonna learn enough that eventually that problem gets solved. So if you're like trying to solve a puzzle and you come into that puzzle and you're like, I wanna solve this puzzle, I wanna solve this puzzle, I wanna solve this puzzle. The impartiality of view goes away and you're just gonna be like, get frustrated. And more frustrated. I don't wanna do this anymore. Fuck this. Right. But if you're like, oh, I'm just here to learn about the puzzle.

What is this?

What is that? How do I do this? How do I do that? Eventually that puzzle gets solved. It just does. Eventually you're gonna learn enough where just the learning is gonna solve the problem for you. And so the more that you can have your north star as like this thing out there, but your objective in the, the, the partiality you have is just to learn. Not to get to the end, the quicker the whole process goes. Which is, if you just notice, like, the way we design everything.

Yeah, and I love how a lot of what you're saying here in the reframing is that you're reframing the criteria for success from an outcome to a process.

Correct.

Like, I'm succeeding if I'm iterating, I'm succeeding if I'm learning. And I trust that if I'm iterating and I'm learning, I'm gonna get a better result. Yes. And so So when I'm tracing this back to the fear of success, I think a lot of times a fear of success is actually a projected future fear of failure. Like, what if my art ends up in galleries and then I'm judged?

Right. Yeah, that's a huge part of it. And there's also the part of the emotional experience of like, oh my God, I'm winning. I feel good. Like, that is scary. It's scary to have really positive emotions. And, and, you know, you can see it, like, pleasure is available to us at any minute, any day, just by the way that we breathe. And most people are not experiencing it because it's a little bit scary. So I do think that those are the two main things that make the fear of success happen, is that expansive feeling that is overwhelming, and, oh, now I'm going to be able to fail on a bigger stage. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So as, as people start to work with a different way of being, often we'll try that new way of being, and then something will happen and we'll revert back to an old one. And so one way that that might look is somebody's like, okay, you know what, I'm going to start experimenting, I'm going to try to get a bunch of rejections,, and then they step out there and they get a particularly painful, possibly public rejection, and then that did just go straight back into the failure. There's like an implosion. How can somebody be ready for that or be prepared for such a moment where they've changed their way of being and then all of a sudden they step on a rake?

Yeah. The interesting piece about that is that that's where some emotional fluidity is really, really useful. But if you. The framing itself, that stepping on a rake, the rake that you step on means that your reframing really wasn't complete. I'll give you an example of this. One of the things you'll notice about all of our work is that we never talk about self-improvement. We only talk about self-awareness or self-realization or understanding yourself. The reason we do that is because you will fail at self-improvement. Like the, the, the framing of self-improvement is failure is there will be a failure in it. Self-awareness, you can't fail at. You just keep on learning and iterating. So if that break happens, it means somewhere in the reframe, the reframing hasn't been complete, or there's an emotion that you don't wanna feel, right? So there, there's still gonna be disappointment. There's still gonna be sadness. There's still gonna be all the feelings of fear and all that stuff. There's, there, they're not going away with the reframing. And so it's still really important to feel them. And to process them and to let them all move through. As we talk about in other podcasts, if you step on the rake, feel the emotion that you need to feel, and then go back to the list. And that's why I say put that list up front. If you put that list up front before you attempt to do your first thing, write that whole list down, frame it so that every time you make a check on an experiment, it's a win. Like, oh yeah, look at that. I want— like you're checking off a task list. You know, every one of those is a win. So it's like that. It's like, oh, win, win, win, and feel the emotions that you have to feel on the way through.

Yeah.

Not have to, you get to, that you're stoked to, that you're allowed to, that, yeah, that's amazing. Because that's the learning. If you don't feel the emotion, you're not gonna do the learning completely, right? If you compartmentalize the emotional component of it, then you don't get the actual learning. On an, an emotional level. You might get the intellectual learning, but you don't get the emotional learning.

Yeah. I think that's something to watch for too. If people try these iterations in the, these experiments and they continue to have the same stories of failure come back out of it, then it's probably a sign that there's some emotional experience that you have been creating a little wall around with that story of failure. And that's something to explore.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a lot of the time, the story of failure. Is designed to not allow you to feel a certain emotion. Yeah, that's the thing with depression. What we talk about, like, one of the main things that I've seen work to have people move through depression is allow their anger to move. And so a lot of the time what that feeling of failure is doing is making it so you don't have to get angry at Mom and Dad for not being attuned, not loving, always being critical, because you couldn't feel that as a kid because they, they would just fucking annihilate you. It's like if you're freaking 2-foot tall and there's a 6-foot tall person yelling at you, it's really, you know, like that's not a place where anger is safe to go. And, and the setup is there to protect you, or it was protecting you.

Yeah, yeah. And it may even be protecting you from losing the idea of an ideal parent.

Correct.

Like losing that ideal, like Oh, if I decide that I failed in earning their love, then that's perhaps easier. The world is less unsafe to me than me taking on the belief at age 4 that my parents are incompetent, are just as confused as—

Exactly. As I am, right? The world is not safe even in the way that it's supposed to be for me.

Correct.

The most horrific story that I have around this and that I feel is it still makes me sad to talk about it, is this guy who I met him in the desert when I was in my 20s. I was recording an album and met this guy who was restoring habitat named Fred, and who's now like the godfather of my child. And he had a guy working for him who was an amazing human being. He had at some point was like, living in his car on meth, you know, in the drug game, living a horrible life, and turned his life around. And if you went into his house, he was a loving human being. He had kids who were generous, who were open-hearted. He took in kids from other homes. Like, if there was like a kid that he found, and even though they didn't have money, they were always like, yeah, you just come in, live in the garage. Like, and so they had their family, they had other kids from the area that didn't have good parents. And just— and I like when I went over to his house the first time, his 8-year-old offered me his toy. He's like, here's the toy, like, you can have it. Not, not like you can play with it, but you can have it. Like, it was just, it was just this very loving thing. And he was just providing this amazing nest of love. And he just really cared about his kids. And his eldest son, which was, I think, the, the son that kind of brought him out of his meth haze and drug haze when he was like 17, noticed he was drinking too much, noticed that there was a problem. He said, hey, Dad, I want to go to rehab. I want to do therapy. And his dad saw that as a failure. I failed. I was— I did all this work and my son is still having problems. He's going to repeat the life that I that I had. I screwed up. And I remember talking to him like, dude, I don't think you screwed up. I think like you did an amazing thing. Like for a kid to be able to see that they needed that and ask for it for themselves, like that's a huge win. And he was like, no, that's total failure. Inside of a year, he was back on meth and he was living in a car again and his whole family imploded, which I can't even think about the ramifications for the 17-year-old who was taking care of himself and then like has this recognition that like, oh, my dad imploded because I wasn't perfect. And so the whole family fell apart because he had an idea that he failed. Wasn't even a true thing. It wasn't even a true thing. And if you put that together with the critical voice in the head who's constantly telling you that you're fucking up and that it is not right, every time it says it, every time the voice in your head is like, you didn't do this, you screwed up here, you blah, blah, blah, but that none of those are accurate. It's like you can just imagine how hard it is, how much energy it takes to just try anything.

And the cost of an idea.

Yeah. All because it's an idea that you believe.

And this is, this is water that a lot of us swim in. There's, there's a culture around it. A lot of our Western capitalist culture.

Yeah.

And often shows up in companies and it can be in families like, like you were just describing. And so when this happens in a group, I'm curious, what can somebody who's, let's say, who's a leader in a team, or a parent, running an organization, anything, when somebody is kind of in charge of the culture, or at least curating, tending, stewarding a culture, what's a way that this can be brought into, into a company culture or a group or community?

Yeah, I mean, there's so many ways. So the first, the most important one is to like frame the thing from the beginning is that there can't be failure. So like the, my best example of this is I think it was like Nike in the '90s. They had over there, like you'd walk into their main Seattle business headquarters and they had a 4x8, so like the size of a piece of plywood sign all done by pushpin. And there was black pushpins and white pushpins and it just said, fail bigger. They immediately, you walk in and they have framed success as large failures. Boom. Like, so, so any way you can do the framing up front, this is an iterative process. Fail often, fail fast. Learning, like just to see everything in, in that way to set up a goal. Even I've seen people set up goals of iterations. Instead of we're gonna get here, we're gonna run 7 iterations to get here. It's the same thing in like, um, tracking sales data. Are you tracking how much money they brought in? Eventually you're gonna have to, but the best thing to track is how many phone calls they made. The best thing to track is how many moves down a pipeline did they make? Because then you're creating failure, you're creating success in something that they can actually do. Instead of something that is somewhat beyond their control. So it's like, oh, if you take these steps, you will get here. So we're gonna, we're gonna talk about the iteration of these steps rather than the like long-term goal for, for the metrics. So framing it from the beginning is one way to do it. Second is to reward failure. I, and I've seen this in companies who had the biggest failure, like the most bold failure, who's the one who tried something that You know, and actually reward that. If you truly understand this, that is not a scary thing to do. That is a no-brainer. Like, you want innovation from your company and you know that innovation is gonna cost you money. This is the way it costs you money, is people trying stuff. And everybody has their own set of experiments. So to reward that, I think is an amazing thing to do. The other thing is don't get angry when people fuck up. In our company recently, we had— well, I guess it was a couple years ago now— but somebody made a $50,000 mistake. And I walked into the office and they're like, oh, shit, I'm so sorry, Joe. I think I made $50,000. I just said, no problem. It was not even like— there was zero emotional backlash from me. There was just like, yeah, wow, that sucks. Okay, how are we going to handle it?

And I imagine there was some anger to process at some point.

No, there wasn't.

None? You never had a moment where you're like, Fuck, that happened for them.

Yeah, definitely not for me. Because, because of my reframing on it is so strong that I'm— there'll be anger if I don't see progress being made, right? If I get frustrated, if I don't see the pace. But if I see someone trying something and it doesn't work, or somebody making a mistake, I'm totally good with it. I'm not good with the fact that that pace isn't being kept. That's what will cause me frustration. Maybe like a mistake being made 2 or 3 times in a row for no, like, not, that's a whole different thing. Nobody wants to make mistakes. So if they're making a mistake, it means they're most likely trying something. And that's an important part of how we grow as a business.

Yeah. That seems like another clear example of reframing, reframing success from outcomes to process. To learnings, even down to principles. It sounds like a lot of what you're just describing here is like, if, if the principles are being followed, if we're, if we're living by the principles, then we can consider that a success. And if, if we're not getting the results we want, then we can examine the principles.

Right, exactly. And the process. That's right. Yeah. And I think that's a big thing, like in families, it's especially families with young kids. Esme and I talked about this on our podcast recently about seeing like a family, like correcting their kids from doing the dishes. And so for that kid, they're learning that they're a failure. They're learning that they can't even wash dishes without being corrected. To me, like, that's a, like a deeply disempowering move that people make. So it's really important that when you're working in a family situation, that the attempt is far more important than the success, that the learning, that the iteration is far more important than the success. I mean, I do that with my kids all the time. Even if, if they mess up on something, sometimes I'm like, I just don't even say anything. Maybe I'll go back and fix it, but I won't let them know about it. Or maybe I'll be like, hey, you know, here's this other component. Do you want to think about doing that? How do you want to do that? But I'm not gonna criticize. I'm not gonna step in and do it. It just doesn't help them have the self-esteem, doesn't help them be empowered, doesn't help them learn. You know, none of that works, at least for normal life. And maybe when it comes to like being the best cellist in the world, there's some criticism needed. I don't know.

But— Well, critique, I would say, which might be different.

Which might be different. Yeah. But for just normal life, it's not really required, you know? And then the other thing is like with families is The attempt is important. Like if you notice, like little kids, their hands don't go over their heads the way like an adult does. Like their wrists kind of go to like their ears when they're small enough. Right. And so you can imagine that when our kids were like, I don't know, 2.5, 3 years old, they were setting the table. The table was higher than them. They were holding the dish above their head and then sliding it onto the table. And like, and to us, that was really important. It was really important for them to know that they were capable.. And yeah, we broke— imagine we broke some dishes. We broke some dishes, you know, like, but like to, to us, it, that was the framing. The framing was the attempt was more important than the success. And you see a lot of folks being right is really important and doing it well is really important and being perfect about it is really important. For us, it was just always Did you try? Great.

Yeah. Yeah. One thing that I'm imagining this could all bump up against in somebody is a fear of recklessness. Well, if I, if I were to try this on, then I might become reckless. And if I were to do that as a base jumper, I'm like, oh, you know what? I'm just going to try and fail a bunch of things. Then that might actually lead to my death. What would you have to say to somebody who's like, but what I do is really high stakes. Tens of thousands of people depend on this getting right because I'm running a big company or whatever.

Yeah.

And I can't afford to be reckless.

Yeah. So just, just to say on the BASE jumping side, just as a great example that you've already framed it so that you can't fail or that when you fail, you're dead anyway. So like it doesn't really matter, right? Like you just said, if I live, then it was a success.

So walk away.

You've already done the reframing. You've already done it. So I just. Point that out. The other thing that I would say is, yeah, so do small iterations, run little experiments, find other ways that you can learn about what you're doing. So if you really think that there's this thing, like, you know, if I make this decision, then the economy of the free world could collapse, right? Then do some experiments, like find, you know, find a very small democracy and try to do the financial engineering there. You know, or do it within a company. Like the, the idea is how do I run the simplest experiment that I can learn the most in the shortest amount of time? And so that's what I would say to that person is like, don't do it in that one place. You, if you've gotta do it perfect because of X, Y, and Z, then do it when you're practicing. You know, it's like, yeah, you have to be perfect when you're trying to be the world champion of ice skating, for instance. But when you are practicing, You better be iterating. You better be trying over and over and over again and learning every time. And, and so it's the same thing. Like, where's your arena? Where's your dojo where you get to practice?

Yeah.

And then that's the place where you get to iterate.

Yeah. There's a lot of interesting research on this, how, how important it is to go back and forth between like performance and play, performance and play, performance and play. And in something like wingsuiting, people often think, wow, there's no margin for error. And really there's lots of margin for error. There's just specific margins that you need to maintain. And then within those margins, there's actually a lot that you can do. And what you do in that space is what increases your capacity, your skill, your awareness, your body awareness, and everything else.

I love that because that's even the idea of performance and play basically means a place where you can fail and a place where you can't fail.

Yeah.

And so play in itself, like when you watch kids, no one's like, I failed at playing. Like, kids— adults might do that. I didn't have enough fun. Yes, I suck at playing. But generally, like, kids don't fail at playing, and they're constantly learning and they're growing, and they learn and grow really, really quickly because they're in this state of play all the time. And there's a huge amount of data now that shows that, like, how important it is for kids to have free playtime.

Yeah.

And so it's, it's the exact same thing I mean, when we say connection over perfection, it's the exact same thing, we're reframing it. When we say wants over should, it's the exact same thing. We're saying like, you can't fail in your wants, you can fail in the shoulds, you can fail in perfection, you can't fail in connection. And that's why we get the results that we get. I know that if that got taken away, we would not get the results that we get because it's like, we're just sitting there experimenting and learning. And it's like, it is the entire system that I did and that I was lucky enough to do because I just hated authority. That I was like, I'm not listening to anybody. I'm just going to run my own experiments and learn shit. And I just got really lucky that that is just a really— that iterative mindset is just very, very productive and very, very enjoyable too.

Yeah. And I think one, one last observation on this topic of reframing is that what this does essentially is it brings the enjoyment of play into the performance of high stakes as deeply as, as one can. Which just deepens the learning and the, and the enjoyment and ultimately doesn't have to sacrifice performance. It can increase and deepen it.

It doesn't. It does the exact opposite, especially over the long term. Yeah. Like, especially over the timeframe of years or decades. There's this great quote. I think I heard it from Tony Robbins. And it was, um, people always overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade.

Yeah.

And if you look at what the iterative mindset does in a decade, like every company that I know that has disrupted an industry inside of a decade has been very, very iterative in their approach. And you look at Mark Alexander, just by a great example of this is Mark, who works with us. Like when you talk to him about his health, it's just like 1,000 iterations he has done over decades. And you look at him, you're like, holy crap, that dude is so healthy. And he enjoys the process. So just another example of it.

Yeah. And this episode is another example of our iterative process.

Yes, it is.

And thank you everybody for listening. Thank you, Joe.

Pleasure. It's a pleasure. As always, good to be with you.

Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. To hear more about how to use failure to your advantage, you can join our newsletter or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com. We often have free one-on-one workshops coming up, so just check out the website and see what the next one is. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please share it with a friend, and of course, please follow us and rate us in your podcast app. The Art of Accomplishment was produced and hosted by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. Munyi Kelly is our production coordinator, and Reasonable Volume edited this episode.

Hold on a second. I got to remember the goddamn name of this fucking part of the brain. It's not hemula.

It's amygdala.

No, no. Habenula. Habenula.

Habenula.

Habenula. Like habanero. Habenula. I've never heard of that one.