Failure

Joe: 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.

Brett: I am Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. 

Joe: Hey, Brett, how's it going? 

Brett: 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. 

Joe: 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 is a structure in the brain called the habenula, that basically it's 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 critical to think about failure differently than most people do. 

Brett: 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? 

Joe: Correct there is no failure. If you take a look at, say, Sam Walton, right?

So this guy starts Walmart, 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, 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, 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 family did the restoration of the Colorado River and all the restoration of the Sonoran and the stuff they're doing with like rhinos 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 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. 

Brett: Yeah. That's really interesting this idea of an end 'cause I think, in our work, we talk a lot about the false end. 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 duh. What do you have to say about when a failure is defined as my company ended? 

Joe: Right? 

Brett: Therefore, it's a failure. It's just a failure. And now I move on. How does that interact with this idea? 

Joe: Yeah, you can do that. The problem is, so the part of the brain called that habenula, its job is to, of course this is neuroscience, so everything's gonna change in five, 10 years. But generally, the thing about the habenula is that 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. 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. 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. And 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 gonna be a way out. I'm never gonna succeed. This is gonna 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. 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. 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 in Silicon Valley as well. Fail fast is another one. So the idea is that everything that you're doing is an iteration. 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 a 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. 

Brett: Yeah. 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 ultimately keeps us very safe if it's well calibrated, but we often fall out of calibration. 

How does this emerge from childhood? 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 reprocessed in the work.

Joe: 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? 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 their 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. Then he got a job as another CEO of a company and at the end of that, 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 is 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 Loom Energy, and I was like, huh, that sounds a lot like the company my dad ran called Lumen Optics.

So I went over and 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, 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, 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 shelfed the company and these folks sued, the parent company, won a hundred million dollars or something, said you shelfed us, it was a breach of contract and so they lost a hundred million dollars and now with this new a hundred million dollars, they're restarting the company.

And so my dad's entire life went downhill because he thought he failed when he actually hadn't failed. And so I started to ask for the numbers, literally, I'm like, what happened? And I started asking for the numbers 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. He had turned that around to only burning 10,000 in less than two years, and their revenue had increased by something like three or 400%. So it was definitely on the right trajectory, definitely going in the right direction and I was like, your whole life defined by a failure that didn't actually exist. And so that's the crazy thing is 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 'cause nothing's perfect. Nothing is perfect that you can look at anything and say, see, I wasn't perfect. I failed. 

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

Joe: Jesus. Yeah, I was about the seventh grade, eighth grade somewhere in there.

Maybe ninth grade is when it started happening heavily. Yeah. The alcoholism that at least to some degree was propelled by it. 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. So that self anger, that shame that you failed, you fuck up, how could you had it all and blah, blah, blah, blah. It had to go somewhere when, so he yelled at me for an hour and a half over the dinner table every night. It was crazy. 

Brett: Yeah. 

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

Brett: Yeah. Now I'm curious about the other side of that extremity. We've got the tension here between like the pessimism and optimism, and then some people who are like I'm just a realist and 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's the way to go too far in redefining what is failure for you? Is that possible? 

Joe: 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. But I don't think that's about failure or non failure, that's about over optimism or not wanting to feel your negative emotions. It's like a completely different thing. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Yeah, you're gonna be disappointed. Yeah, you're gonna 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 no, everything's gonna be okay. It's not a Pollyannish thing.

Brett: Yeah. Something that I'm noticing here is that in, in the instances that you were talking about, 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 ionically 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 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 a inverse Pollyanna. Where it's I don't want to feel all of what I have to feel. Perhaps your dad might've had to actually recognize that he had succeeded and that wasn't actually enough for the company because other forces outside of his control 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, like a way of protecting an identity or avoiding an emotional experience? 

Joe: Yeah, it's a great question. The interesting thing is 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?

Because I'm just, it's just gonna all be shit, right? That's how far this thing goes, right? Everything I've done is failure. Why even get up? It is just, fuck it. I'm just gonna kill myself. Leaving that place I'm sure is gonna 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 yeah, don't try. If you feel like you're failing, don't try. And so to me I would say that 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 gonna allow you to succeed. I've told this story before but I wanna tell it again is 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 a thousand bucks if you get whatever. I can't even 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 a thousand dollars and then now he's like a working artist.

Because galleries 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 is not reframing and he is 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 dance that goes on with it. But to me I see them as two separate things. One of them is oh I need to just no longer believe in failure. I don't believe that it exists. It's just a fricking idea. And the other one is, I'm gonna feel whatever emotions are coming up and I think they end up leading to the same place. 

Brett: So now I'm curious for, for listeners here, I'm hearing like a number of possible entry points for doing this work. One of them is taking an inventory or account of 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 baked into the subconscious. I'm just not that kind of person. I'm not an artist because somebody didn't like my art once. 

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

Brett: So just to start with that, with the excavating of failure stories 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?

Joe: 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. 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 wanna lose weight, sit down and write 50 experiments you can run about losing weight. I'm gonna do an Ayurvedic diet. I'm gonna do a traditional Chinese medicine diet. I'm gonna do the Atkins diet. I'm going to try this exercise. I'm gonna literally I'm gonna count calories.

Oh, I'm gonna control my blood sugar. I'm gonna wear blood sugar monitor. I'm gonna work with my hormones. There's so many ideas of how to lose weight. Write down every experiment that you're gonna do. Then do them in order. Oh, so now, oh, I failed at that. It becomes, oh, I tried that. Now I'm gonna try this and what do I learn? Am I gonna try this? What am I gonna learn? And each one of those is gonna 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. 

Brett: Yeah, and when I say excavation one of the reasons for that is simply so you have something to reframe 'cause a lot of that could be subconscious. 

Joe: 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.

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 gonna try, this app for dating, this app for dating. Go to yoga classes, try your 50 things.

Brett: So now what I'm thinking about is, let's say somebody does this work they do some reframing and then 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? 

Joe: 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 have a north star. You're like, oh, I wanna end up here, but the way I'm gonna get there isn't by getting there. 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.

You're just gonna be like, get frustrated and more frustrated. I don't wanna do this anymore. Fuck this. 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 this thing out there, but your objective in 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. 

Brett: 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. 

Joe: Correct. 

Brett: It's 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. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: And 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 of failure. What if my art ends up in galleries and then I'm judged? 

Joe: Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it. And there's also the part of the emotional experience of oh my God, I'm winning. I feel good. That is scary. It's scary to have really positive emotions and you can see it. 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 gonna be able to fail on a bigger stage. Yeah, absolutely. 

Brett: So 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 might look is somebody's okay, you know what? I'm gonna start experimenting. I'm gonna 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? 

Joe: Yeah. The interesting piece about that is that's where some emotional fluidity is really useful.

But the framing itself, that stepping on a rake, the rake that you step on means that you're 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 framing of self-improvement is failure, there will be a failure in it. Self-awareness, you can't fail at you just keep on learning and iterating. If that rake happens, it means somewhere in the reframe the reframing hasn't been complete or there's an emotion that you don't want to feel, right?

So, 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. 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, 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.

Oh yeah, look at that, you're checking off a task list. Every one of those is a win. So it's like that. It's oh win, win. And feel the emotions that you have to feel on the way through. Not have to, you get to that or you're stoked to that you're allowed to. That's amazing because that's the learning. If you don't feel the emotion, you're not gonna do the learning completely. If you compartmentalize the emotional component of it, then you don't get the actual learning on an emotional level. You might get the intellectual learning, but you don't get the emotional learning.

Brett: I think that's something to watch for too. If people try these iterations and 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.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That's a lot of the time the story of failure is designed to not allow you to feel a certain emotion. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: That's the thing with depression that 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 to, not loving, always being critical because you couldn't feel that as a kid. Because they would just fucking annihilate you. It's if you're fricking two foot tall and there's a six foot tall person yelling at you, it's really, like that's not a place where anger is safe to go and the setup is there to protect you or it was protecting you. 

Brett: Yeah. And it may even be protecting you from losing the idea of an ideal parent, 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 four that my parents are just as confused as I am right now. 

Joe: That 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 twenties. 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, 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 openhearted. 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.

And so they had their family, they had other kids from the area that didn't have good parents and when I went over to his house the first time, his 8-year-old offered me his toy. He's here's the toy. Like you can have it not like you can play with it, but you can have it.

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 son that 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 wanna go to rehab. I want to do therapy. And his dad saw that as a failure. I failed. I did all this work and my son is still, is having problems. He's gonna repeat the life that I had, I screwed up. I remember talking to him, I'm 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 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. It 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 you didn't do this. You screwed up here. You blah, blah, blah, blah. But none of those are accurate. You can just imagine how hard it is, how much energy it takes to just try anything. 

Brett: And the cost of an idea. 

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

Brett: And this is water that a lot of us swim in. There's a culture around it.

A lot of our western capitalist culture and often shows up in companies and it can be in families 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's in charge of the culture, or at least curating, tending, stewarding a culture, what's a way that this can be brought into a company culture or a group or community. 

Joe: Yeah, there's so many ways. So the first, the most important one is to 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 nineties. They had over their, like you'd walk into their main Seattle business headquarters and they had a four by eight, so like the size of a piece of plywood, sign all done by push pin and there was black push pins and white push pins and it just said, fail bigger. They immediately, you walk in and they have framed success as large failures. Boom, like so any way you can do the framing upfront, this is an iterative process. Fail often, fail fast, learning, like just to see everything 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 seven iterations to get here. It's the same thing in 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 oh, if you take these steps, you will get here. So we're going to, we're gonna talk about the iteration of these steps rather than the like long-term goal for the metrics.

So framing it from the beginning is one way to do it. Second is to reward failure. And I've seen this in companies who had the biggest failure, like the most bold failure, who's the one who tried something, 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 I guess it was a couple years ago now, but the, 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. I just said, no problem. It was not even, there was zero emotional backlash for me. There was just like, yeah, wow. That sucks. Okay. How are we gonna handle it? 

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

Joe: No, there wasn't. 

Brett: None? You never had a moment where you're like, fuck, that happened? 

Joe: For them, yeah, definitely not for me. Because of my reframing on it is so strong that I'm, there'll be anger if I don't see progress being made.

I get frustrated, if I don't see the pace. 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 pace isn't being kept. That's what will cause me frustration. Maybe like a mistake being made two or three 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. 

Brett: That seems like another clear example of 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 if the principles are being followed, if we're living by the principles, then we can consider that a success, and if we're not getting the results we want, then we can examine the principles. 

Joe: Exactly and the process, that's right. Yeah. And that, I think that's a big thing, like in families, it's especially families with young kids. Esme and I have 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 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 do that with my kids all the time, even if they mess up in something, sometimes I'm like, I just don't even say anything. Maybe I'll go back and fix it. I won't let them know about it. Or maybe I'll be like, hey, here's this other component. Do you wanna 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. None of that works, at least for normal life. Maybe when it comes to being the best celloist in the world. There's some criticism needed, I don't know.

Brett: Or critique I would say, which might be different. 

Joe: Which might be different. Yeah, but for just normal life, it's not really required, and then the other thing is, like with families is the attempt is important. If you notice like little kids, their hands don't go over their heads the way an adult does, like their wrists go to like their ears when they're small enough, right?

And so you can imagine that when our kids were like, I dunno, two and a half, three 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 to us, that was really important. It was really important for them to know that they were capable.

Yeah, imagine we broke some dishes, we broke some dishes. But like to us, 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. 

Brett: Yeah. One thing that I'm imagining this could all bump up against in somebody is a fear of recklessness. If I were to try this on, then I might become reckless. And if I were to do that as like a base jumper, I'm like, oh, you know what? I'm just gonna 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 but what I do is really high stakes. Yeah. Tens of thousands of people depend on this getting 'cause I'm running a big company or whatever and I can't afford to be reckless. 

Joe: Yeah. So just to say on the base jumping side, just as a great example of 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. 

Brett: So walk away. 

Joe: 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, if I make this decision, then the economy of the free world could collapse, right?

Then do some experiments, like find a very small democracy and try to do the financial engineering there, or do it within a company like the idea is how do I run the simplest experiment that I can learn the most in the shortest amount of time? So that's what I would say to that person is don't do it in that one place.

If you've gotta do it perfect because of X, Y, and Z, then do it when you're practicing. It's 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 again and learning every time.

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. 

Brett: Yeah. There's a lot of interesting research on this how important it is to go back and forth between like performance and play performance and play.

And in something like wing suiting, 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. 

Joe: 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.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And so play in itself, like when you watch kids, no one's I failed at playing. Adults might do that, be I didn't have enough fun because I suck at playing. But generally like kids don't fail at playing. They're constantly learning and they're growing and they learn and grow 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's for kids to have free playtime. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And so it's the exact same thing. 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 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 gonna run my own experiments and learn shit. And I just got really lucky that is just a really, that iterative mindset is just very productive and very enjoyable too. 

Brett: 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 one can, which just deepens the learning and the enjoyment, and ultimately doesn't have to sacrifice performance. It can increase and deepen it. 

Joe: It doesn't. It does the exact opposite, especially over the long term. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: 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 people always overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And if you look at what the iterative mindset does in a decade, like every company that I know that has disrupted a industry inside of a decade has been 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 a thousand 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. 

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

Joe: Yes, it is. 

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

Joe: Pleasure. It's a pleasure as always. Good to be with you.

Brett: 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. Mun Yee Kelly is our production coordinator and Reasonable Volume edited this episode. 

Joe: Hold on a second. I gotta remember the goddamn name of this fucking part of the brain. He, it's not hem mulah.

Brett: Amygdala? 

Joe: No.

It's habenu la like habanero, habenula. 

Brett: I've never heard of that one.

‍