Take the Time to Calculate Your Margin for Error with Kalpesh Patel

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode.

Of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm talking with Kalpesh Patel. He's in Gainesville, Florida, getting ready to absorb a storm, I guess.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It almost knocked his lights out, but hopefully, hopefully he'll make it through.

Yeah, well, you know, it either knocks our lights out or makes our flowers grow. One way or the other. Yes, one way or the other, it's a win.

The things we were talking about, we're talking about learning how to operate off your own feet. It really has to do with emotional intelligence because it's easy to keep your wits about you in tough situations, whatever. Personal, business, life, health life, financial life. If you have figured out that just because you don't know something right now doesn't mean that you never can know. Just because you don't have that resource available right now. And if you've got tools, you got some experience at figuring things out, finding people that can give you that support or that information and start to unravel it. And you don't have to do it like within five minutes, you know, you just have to start moving in that direction. You have a confidence and a stability. You know, this in terms of emotional, dependent, the people that are flying off the hand, you know, and you know, the people are like Will Smith jumping up in front and going up and slapping that big, dangerous Chris Rock who weighs like 100 pounds, big man, you know, six two guy who played Muhammad Ali, you know, muscle bound Will Smith goes up there and this little skinny Chris Rock, you know, he slaps him. Oh, he really made a point. And then, you know, if you had a little bit, you know, you do things like that when you're on edge and you're out of. You feel like you lost control. But the more systems you have, the more experience you've been with, the more tools for coping and finding things less like you are to fly off the, you know, the hook. And I'm not, I'm not down on Will Smith, unfortunately, he chose a really bad place.

He picked a bad place, Yes, a real bad place.

However, you know, he's a big star, you know, so that's where, that's the world he lives in. And so I'm not saying that we're not, you know, any of us capable of that kind of thing if we get rattled or whatever. But the more, the more you systems you have, the more experience you have in thinking on your feet and solving problems and unraveling it and get one and one point you make. We're going to get into how you go about solving problems, but letting people. I think we need to elaborate on the concept of margin for error because I found the same thing in my career. You and I, we've never talked about margin for error, but I found the same thing that people will not. In other words, they build their schedule like they're never going to run late. Like, I've got an appointment across town. That's a 15 minute drive.

Yes. Yeah.

Now they've made that drive a thousand times.

Yes.

And maybe, you know, a small percentage actually made it in 15 minutes. Lights are wrong. If there's an accident or you know anyone, or you're a little late, you lose your keys, leaving, you know, you have to run back and pick up your cell phone, you know, that's an extra three minutes, five minutes. And then the people that are consistently late, they never build a margin for error. I mean, just, that's one area.

But they do it. That's a, that's a great, that's a great area. I think that's a really great example because it's so routine. I mean, it's so commonplace. And you know, I, as you were describing the situation, I was thinking about myself and I was like, yeah, I'm one of those people, I build a really tight schedule. And I know I build a really tight schedule. It's a habit from a previous era.

Yeah.

When I couldn't afford.

Right.

To waste time, like literally could not afford it. Right. So I did not have that margin then. And then because I got acclimated to functioning that way, I've just retained that pattern. But I tweaked it. Right. So what I do now is if I've got a tight schedule and then I'm trying to figure out whether I can squeeze in one more thing or not, I look at who the next person is and if their friend or their issue is not dire or whatever it is, if there's an emotional margin with that person, then I'll allow myself a little room for error.

Now explain that.

Yeah. So, you know, let's say I've got a couple of things. You know, I wake up in the morning, I'm getting ready to go to the office and I see that I'VE got some emails. I'll scan them to see what they are, Right. And there's someone that's written something and it, you know, it could do with an immediate response, but it's not a simple response. And I was, I better sit down and I better respond to that, you know, and there are going to be days when I go, well, let me see, who's my next person? Who's my first person in the clinic this morning? Oh, it's some new person I've never seen before. This person is going to have to wait. I'm not going to reply to this email right now because I need to go get to the office a little early, set up everything a little early, get the vibe, right. For some person who doesn't know me from Adam, they're coming in for the very first time. I want to receive them well.

Right.

I cannot be flustered. They're coming into my space. My space needs to be welcoming and calm and organized. They're going to, it's their first glance. They're going to be disoriented. I need to be orienting them. I need to be available, emotionally available to orient them or same situation. But I look at who my first person is and it's so and so. I've seen them 100 times. They know the drill. My guy. Yeah. If I, if, if I literally walk into the building at the same moment that you do when we ride up the elevator, we'll be gossiping and laughing and chit chatting. It won't be a big deal. I don't need to be there 10 minutes before for this person. Okay, I'll sit down. I'll write this person a robot.

Yeah. And you see the same thing in business, but in production. I mean, the lesson you need to learn in production, they allow a certain amount of damage. Like if they make 100 sofas or 100 La Z boy chairs, they know there's gonna be 5 to 10% that have here and there. And rather than slit their throats and the boss come down and scream at the managers, like, sell them off. We built that in. In fact, I had a, I was riding up a chairlift with or a gondola I guess, over at Vail many years ago with this, this father and son team that had a lot of fast food restaurants and Waffle Houses and McDonald's and 7. 7 11. A lot of 7 elevens. And I said, well, the thing about a 7 11, I said, how about, you know, because I'd heard this before, you know, I'VE never, I've never made that a priority. That never appealed to me to like own ten seven elevens or something. They said, and they were talking about, well, every 711 is worth about 10 grand a month. You know, this is 20 years ago. It's like, I don't know the numbers now, but they said, like, you know, if you want 100,000, you need 10 of them. And then in your portfolio, your package of things, your investment thing. And so I said, well, yeah, but what about the theft? You know, the matter? How can you keep up? How do you do that? He said, oh, we just built 10% theft in.

Yes, yes, exactly.

We know he's going to, we know.

It'S going to happen, Right.

Usually he's not going to be bold enough to steal more than 10%.

So that brings me to the piece that I, you know, because you're the one that actually brought the term emotional intelligence into this and I really appreciate that because it is a factor of emotional intelligence is that, you know, when you're solving a problem, right. It makes sense to go into crisis management mode. Right. Emotionally, it makes sense. It's a problem. The problem with crisis management mode for us emotionally is that physiologically it affects us in a way that narrows everything. Yeah, it narrows your field of vision, it narrows your options in terms of response. It narrows the level of complexity of the responses that you feel are available to you. And so it's good to recognize that and go, oh, right. Crisis management response is probably something I should think carefully about using in a problem solving situation. Now the reality is you're going to automatically go into crisis mode, right?

Yeah.

So the discipline has to be noticing when you're in crisis mode, stopping for half a second and going, is this necessary?

Yeah. Backing you, developing, you know, that's, that's another skill or a model or whatever to teach. You actually can give yourself permission to.

Yes.

To recognize I'm about to explode. And it could be after your first explosion, it could be like, or not.

Even explode, but accelerate.

Yeah, accelerate. And then you say you can to know in your mind, have this worked out beforehand. I can throw this whole thing into reverse and back out of it.

Right.

I can take three, four, five deep breaths.

But see, I think what happens for people is that if they don't, if they, if they're, if they're used to accelerating, they sometimes, again, it's a matter of equating things incorrectly. They will equate that feeling of accelerating and that reflex of accelerating with commitment.

Yeah.

Oh, look, at look at how fired up I am. This is me being commitment committed. Right. This is me being passionate. Like, like they don't understand that sitting back and looking at things really long with the squinty eye look is also a passion. Right, right. That there's an emotion there. You know, like you and I grew up with westerns. So, you know, when the guy sits back kind of, you know, tips his hat down a little bit so you can't see that he's watching everything and he's just watching everything, you're like, oh, here comes trouble.

Right, right.

So that idea that like when the guy sits back kind of goes all squinty eyed, that that's not, that's not dispassionate in the sense that he's getting detached from the problem. He's going into a different kind of problem solving mode where he's like, yeah, I'm gonna open up all my windows and take a good hard look at what's out here before I decide what to do. Because I'm gonna do something and once I do it, it's going to be very decisive and it's going to end the fight. So I want it all, I want all my data before I make my plan, you know, and then I'm going to make a really good plan and then I'm going to execute it flawlessly. So this idea that, that you know, what is what, what kinds of behaviors actually are representative of commitment to the problem solving. Having a broader picture in your mind of what your commitment actually looks like so that you then again have freedom to vary the kind of emotions that you apply or, you know, and still consider yourself engaged.

Right. And another aspect of this where you can learn, I mean if you have to learn this thing. But you see, wisdom is not rushing into the burning building right off the bat. If there is, you know, you show up and there may be a family member inside the burning building or whatever, at least look around and see if there's a fireman somewhere.

Right.

They're equipped to actually run into the building. You know, at least get some facts about the light year odds. Take a pot even in a situation like that. And so you learn, you can be very young and learn this. In fact, kids with out of control parents learn this. When things start to get nasty, back away, you know what I'm saying? It's just don't engage. And it could be because you just got burned so many times, but you don't have to get burned. You can just realize to recognize situations, we should Go around, keep your mind open. And you can learn a lot just by seeing other people interact in situations and say, okay, I feel that, yeah, I saw what's happening there.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're training yourself. You know, it's like when someone, you know, they're looking for a fight. You know, the person who's looking for a fight is like, you can pretty much be confident if you don't engage them, don't say anything to them that they could jump on, you know, situation where there is nothing you can say that won't inflame them, you know?

Yes, right, right, right.

If you just be quiet and back away, somebody else will come in and walk in and they'll do the, they'll explode the firebomb on them. You know what I'm saying? Right, you, right.

Or, or somebody else will come in that's better suited.

Right.

Just to de. Escalate the thing or the person left with the vacuum of not getting to do tit for tat with you because part of where they planned on getting energy to continue the conflict was pushing you and then you pushing back. Right. So the pushback was part of what their body was expecting to get. That was going to keep them going. And so you really just pulling away just takes the energy out of it. They actually don't have enough fuel on board to keep the whole thing on fire by themselves. And, and so they gradually start deflating and you can just stand back and just watch them deflate. When they get deflated enough, you can offer them a cup of tea or something, you know.

Yeah.

And bring them down the rest of the way. So, yeah, I think that's, that's, it's, it's really interesting. And I like what you said about, you know, like, look around and see how other people handle it, because that kind of brings us back to the models, like collect models. Collect. Like, look at how people who are successful are doing things and like eyeball that and go like, I like how they do that. I like, like how they do that. Collect those people's approach, understanding that those are models so that you are actually free later to synthesize. Right. Take a piece of this and take a piece of that. I mean, that's, you know, none of this is new. I mean, certainly we, we both have seen very successful people do exactly all the things that we're describing. But I think it's, it's nice to kind of get academic about it and break it down, but component by component so that, you know, if one of your listeners is trying to put it together for themselves. They can be like, oh, yeah, that piece. Right. Okay. That's a good piece. You know, I hadn't, I hadn't associated that piece with this situation.

Yeah. Well said, Kalpesh.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.