#269: Powerful Freelance Success Lessons from Moneyball

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. With over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries. Earlier this week I was watching the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt in Jonah Hill. This is my second time watching that movie. I absolutely love it and I was reminded once again of all the reasons why I love it. There are so many important lessons in the story and today what I wanted to do is to share three of those key lessons with you and why they apply to us as freelance writers, copywriters and marketing consultants. If you haven't watched the movie, I urge you to do so. My wife is not really a sports fan, so she resisted, but I convinced her to sit down with me and watch it and she ended up really liking it. So a little bit of backstory or a little bit about the movie itself. Moneyball is based on the true story of Billy Beane, who's a baseball player turned general manager of the Oakland A's. And he was tasked with putting together a winning team every single year, but was severely constrained by one of the lowest budget and all of Major League Baseball, specifically payroll budget, to be able to put together a winning team. So early in the movie, after losing some of his marquee players, he realized that he has to start thinking differently. He needs to start asking himself different set of questions and trying new approaches because he comes to the realization that the way it's always been done, it's just not going to work. The obstacles in his way, the challenges, the constraints are too great. He's dealing with a different set of cards, but he is continually shut down by his team of scouts. They are a much older group of baseball veterans who have always tackled the problem the same way. And even though they have these huge obstacles in front of them, they're still trying to solve the the problem is if really they just had a slightly reduced payroll budget. The fact of the matter is that they're dealing with a fraction of what most teams in Major League Baseball are dealing with. So in the middle of the struggle, Bean serendipitously meets a young guy by the name of Peter Brandt. And Peter Brandt had studied economics at Yale and had been studying the game of baseball for a while. And he had been Doing it from a statistical viewpoint. So Brian basically, in his own time, just for fun, had figured out a way to assemble a baseball team on a very lean budget by employing computer generated analysis to acquire new players. Now, at the time, this was an insane idea. Really, everyone thought and everyone subscribed to the model that really the way you win championships is you have marquee players. You have these huge big time players who can make things happen. But this was totally different. Basically, Brian was saying, you don't need that. You just need to put together this statistically assembled list of players that probably make no sense from the outside looking in, but mathematically it makes perfect sense. Bean was completely out of ideas. So he decides to try it and not just try it. As you see in the movie, he goes all in and he doubles down on brand strategy. As you can imagine, it doesn't go very well at first. Very few people on the team, including the general manager of the Oakland A's, very few people are on board with this crazy idea. Bean is ridiculed. There's just so much on the line. I mean, I just can't even imagine the pressure from the team's owner, from management, from the fans. I mean, it's insanity. And you just see the pressure building. Now, here's what happens and I'll maybe spoil a little bit of the movie for you. But the result is that the Oakland A's end up breaking baseball's long held record of 19 consecutive wins during a season, coming back from last place in their division. More important, by the end of the movie, it's clear that Bean and brand end up changing the game of baseball forever. And they did. I mean, this is general knowledge. Now, they prove that putting together a winning team is not about having a bunch of all star players or even a few all star players. It's about looking at the data and letting that data drive better actions. It's about, and this is the key, it's about asking yourself different and better questions and looking at the problem from an entirely new angle. So in other words, very often to achieve the level of success you really want, you have to be willing to try new, bold and creative ideas, which are almost always very different from the conventional wisdom. And that's the beauty of this business, that's the beauty of being out on your own is the business owner. You get to make that decision. You get to decide what you try, when you try it, and how much effort you put into new ideas. I find this to be perhaps the most exciting part of being a Business owner, the creative latitude I have, even if much of what I try ends up not working out. That is actually the case every single time. Out of every 10 ideas, one might work really well. One or two others might work okay, that's it. The other seven or eight, they're usually complete failure. Many times a massive failure in the case of a few of them. But here's the thing. When an idea does work, that one out of 10, it more than makes up for all the things that didn't work. Sometimes you get these ideas from a trusted colleague, or from watching or hearing about another writer or copywriter who's doing things a little differently, or from your business coach, or from heck, a podcast like this. The first step is typically imitation, right? You just try to copy exactly what the other person is doing, or at least as closely as you can. But in most cases, when you think about it, what ends up working is a different iteration of that original idea you set out to imitate. And what's interesting is that typically that iteration that ended up working for you came about after making a series of changes, adjustments, and refinements. Now, unfortunately, most people never get that far because the original idea doesn't work when you imitate it. Maybe when you try it the first or second time exactly as you saw it, and it doesn't work exactly as you thought it would, the strong tendency is to just give up. I mean, that's just human nature. It's not you. It's not that you don't have it in you. It's not that you give up too easily. That's just the way it works. Most of us are trying to conserve energy. We also don't want to make fools out of ourselves. We don't want to expend the time, the energy, the cost, and we hear a great idea, we copy it exactly after a couple of at bats to just kind of stick with a baseball theme here. If we don't get a hit, we just move on. That's not how breakthroughs happen. If you want to make massive improvements in your business, you have to be willing to push through those obstacles and try different flavors of the idea. You have to change, adapt, pivot, and refine. You have to just kind of sometimes even flip it. Giving up too early, though, that's the mistake. Just like it would have been for Billy Bean in the movie. It becomes very, very clear that really the idea that he heard sounded amazing, but when you implement it, it didn't go as well. The execution was not smooth. And while it might Be easy to think that the original idea wasn't really that great for you. You have to honor that idea, because had it not been for the original idea, the way you heard it or you saw it, you would have never tried something that eventually worked. By continuing to iterate, you would have never stepped outside your comfort zone. So really, there's a few different ideas and takeaways from what I just talked about. But the main one, I guess there would be two would be the first one would be the fact you have to consistently innovate and try new things. And the second one would be that most cases, the things you try don't work right away. And you typically have to continually change them, refine them, improve them, until they finally do work for you and your situation. Just because they don't work exactly as you saw them the first time around doesn't mean that it's a flawed idea. Idea. The second, I guess, concept or takeaway from the movie that I wanted to highlight is the concept of fundamentals. So again, Bean quickly saw the genius and Brand's strategy. Maybe not so much because Bean was a visionary, but let's face it, he was probably out of ideas. In the movie, it becomes very clear that he was at the end of his rope. I mean, he just didn't know what else to do. He had the smallest payroll budget in the league, and with that kind of massive constraint, he realized that he had to think very differently or he would have to quit. And quitting was not an option option for him. He wouldn't be able to solve the problem basically with the same kind of thinking everyone else is using. That's been obvious, and we've hit on that idea. But just as important, Bean recognized that he had to focus specifically. That meant ignoring shiny objects and focusing on fundamentals, because a consistent focus on core fundamentals will take you where you want to go. And it's very easy when you start implementing something new and it's not working as you thought. It's very easy to start bringing in new ideas and adding new things to it because you start becoming desperate. And it's very clear in the movie that the pressure from above and from the fans was dramatic. And anyone else would have probably buckled and said, well, all right, so this is not working. You know, let's kind of. Let's try some new things as well. Let's add to it. But when you do that, you dilute the core idea, the core strategy, and you end up with really very poor results or really back where you started. So in the movie, you see that it clicked. This idea clicked when Brand reminded Bean. So this is very interesting. Here's a mathematician, a statistician, reminding Bean, who's a very seasoned ball player, about one of the most important fundamentals for winning a ball game. He said, you need to get more of your players on base than your opponent does. Fundamentals. I mean, actually, he wasn't a mathematician. I believe he was an economist. He went to school at Yale for economics, and he was reminding a seasoned ballplayer, a pro. Hey, Billy, let's not forget the way you win is you get more of your players on base than your opponent. It's that simple. It's not about home runs, it's not about stealing bases. It's not about better bunting. And all these ideas just came up in the movie. It's about getting on base, period. Even if that means you get walked every time you're at bat. In fact, it was a situation where Brand wanted to recruit this player because he got walked more than anyone else in the league. And normally that's seen as a negative thing. Wow, this guy is only getting on first base. You know, he's not even connecting bat and ball, but he was getting on base. And if we go back to fundamentals, if that's the objective, then somebody who gets walked all the time, that's a good thing. Brand understood the numbers. He saw the direct causation between how many players got on base regardless of how they got there, where they hit a single, double, triple, home run, or they even just got walked and which team won the game. And by assembling and training a team to focus on that one thing, getting on base by whatever means necessary. Brain and Bean again, forever change how baseball is played. We would all do well, I think, in emulating this approach. I think too many of us, and I'm very guilty of this, fall into the trap of thinking that we're missing some key strategy or some key hack that's going to turn our situation around completely. And, you know, just when we find it, everything's going to be hunky dory. We're just. We got to keep looking. We got to keep. It's out there somewhere. I just haven't found it yet. I haven't really come across it. We want some new LinkedIn prospecting hack or a new service we could offer that would make us super attractive to new prospects, or a foolproof pricing strategy, or some magical way to get clients to stick to the schedule they promised us. We want the Silver Bullets you know, we want the magic pill, but that's wishful thinking. You and I know the answers. We know what the fundamentals are. It's all about marketing yourself well, converting the right prospects into profitable repeat clients, managing your business operations effectively in growing your business strategically, which means making decisions that will enable you to earn more and less time. Like we always talk about in this podcast, that's really the holy grail, earning more and less time, because that's extremely inclusive. It doesn't really matter if this is a part time venture, full time, venture, halftime, side hustle, whatever. It's really all about maximizing what you earn in any given hour and doing it with clients who love and respect you and doing it with projects that you really enjoy working on. The thing is, when you earn more and less time, you have options, don't you? It's not complicated. It's quite simple. Now, of course, simple doesn't mean it's easy. Too often the difficult thing is getting clarity and better understanding on what exactly you need to focus on and how to deal with the obstacles that are preventing you from doing that in a consistent fashion. That's a big reason why clients hire me to coach them, because they want someone to guide them through this exciting journey. And let's face it, sometimes it's not that exciting. Sometimes it could be excruciating, sometimes it could be painful, sometimes it could be very, very difficult. But at the end of the day, it all adds up to excitement. And I find that my coaching clients, they recognize that they're probably too close to their own problem to see their way out of it. We are all guilty of that. We're too close to our own stuff. And as I work more deeply with my clients, I keep coming back to that one theme, focusing on the core fundamentals. I remind them continually, the fundamentals will never stop working. They may not be amazingly exciting, they may not be sexy, but they work. So being able to identify the fundamentals and then strip everything else out. And sometimes there's a time and a place for the fancy stuff, of course, but the fancy things, the shiny objects, don't replace the fundamentals. They never do. So that's another key lesson here. The last insight I wanted to highlight is this awesome movie came at the very end of the story. So Bean was extremely disappointed that he wasn't able to get his team all the way to the World Series and win the pennant. Instead, his Oakland A's lost to, I believe it was Minnesota in the playoffs. Now, keep in mind that when Bean Started using this Moneyball strategy, his team was squarely in last place in their division by a very wide margin. Okay, so they're way down there at the bottom. But Billy Bean, this point at the end has lost some perspective. And he was complaining to Brandt that when you change how baseball is played through something as new and controversial as what they had done together with a team, you're going to get criticized. You're even going to get ostracized. And he made the argument to brand that people quickly forget about all the good things you did because they only remember how your team performed at the end in the last game they played. Forget about all the other games they won, including the 20 games in a row they won that season in which they broke the major league record for most consecutive games won. And he's right, people, and this is just human nature. We tend to remember the final moments of an event or string of events to a much greater degree than previous events. In fact, whether Bean knew this or not, this phenomenon has a name. It's actually called the peak end rule. And it's a cognitive bias in which positive or negative moments, so the peaks and the final moments of an experience, the end, are much more heavily weighted in our memory and decision making. So anyway, the end of the movie, you see that Bran was noticing that Bean had lost perspective about everything that they had accomplished together. He was ignoring the fact that he had accomplished the impossible, taking his team from last place, a very deep last place, to first place in their division with the lowest payroll budget in the major leagues. No one, absolutely no one, considered this to be even remotely possible, because everyone's assumption was that you need at least two or three marquee players to make that happen. And that year, Oakland couldn't afford any of those players. To make his point, Brand asks Billy Beane to come into his office and he shows him a video clip of a recent minor league game in which an overweight 240 pound catcher was at bat. Now, this particular player had a history of never getting on base. He almost always struck out. This time around, however, as you watch the clip, and this is on YouTube by the way, I'll try to put a link to it in the show. Notes his bat actually connected with a ball and this guy is just shocked that it happened because it hadn't happened in so many months. But then thinking, well, I can't run very fast, he's thinking, he probably can't even won't be able to make it to first base because he is such a slow runner. He just gives it all he's got and he starts running as fast as he can to first base. And he trips on the base. Now all the players on the field and all the spectators start laughing at him. And of course the runner thinks that they're laughing at him because he tripped and made a fool out of himself. But he quickly finds out why they're laughing. And they laughing because he had hit the ball 60ft over the fence. He had hit a home run. His first ever home run. But here's the thing. He was so used to always striking out. His expectations had become so low that he had lost the ability to dream bigger. He had lost perspective. It was an important message of Bean needed to hear. In the process of focusing on winning and winning the whole thing, he had lost sight of the fact that he had done something amazing. He had lost perspective. He had lost perspective about what he had accomplished. And it's easy to do. And that's why we need others to help us along the way to help us maintain that perspective, which is so easy to lose when we're busy and hard at work going after big goals. I'm all for taking things to the next level, but just make sure that in the pursuit of this new level of achievement, you don't lose sight of how you've grown and how that growth has made you better and stronger. Because the actual outcome you're gunning after is the only thing you care about. You know what I'm here to tell you. You'll never be happy and you know it. I know you know this. You've been around. You don't have to be a freelancer to know this. If the actual outcome is the only thing you care about, you'll always be chasing outcomes. You'll never be happy. So look, as you can tell, I'm a big fan of this movie. I think it's these are just three or four of the top lessons or takeaways for me. If you haven't seen it. If you haven't seen Moneyball, I encourage you to do so. It's not only an inspirational story, it's also filled with valuable lessons for us all. Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book earn more and less time the proven mindset, strategies and actions to prosper as a freelance writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com or you will also find the detail show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.