EverydaySpy Podcast - The Hidden Power of Average

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Get ready to unlearn everything you were told by your parents, teachers, college professors and peers. Elite operators do not strive to be the best -- instead, they strive to be average. And you'll be shocked when you find out why. In this episode, Andrew breaks down how average goals can unlock elite performance in you today, through the new year, and for the rest of your life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is Everyday Espionage. I am just so excited to be starting season seven of the Everyday Espionage podcast with you today. It has been a long break since we finished season six. I have been hard at work building the business, building the content that we're about to go through this season, and then, of course, traveling to spread as much espionage knowledge and insight and skill as I legally. can everywhere and with everybody that I get a chance to talk to. And I've been really blessed lately. I've been on some great podcasts. If you've seen me on Chris Williamson, if you've seen me on Lex Friedman, if you had a chance to see me on Fresh and Fit or the PDB podcast for

valu attainment, it's been an awesome ride with some really cool folks. And, you know, as I think through what my last six months have looked like, you know, building the business and building the podcast, an important lesson that I think perfectly speaks to the the goal of season seven comes to mind, right? Our mission with season seven is to talk about tactics, tactics that get you an unfair advantage over everyone else. And what I have seen as 2022 has come to an end and I do a final review of my own business, I have watched at least three of my peers, three other fellow business owners who started

businesses in different spaces who were friends or contacts of mine from my. day at the agency. I've watched how 2022 brought their businesses to their knees. And there's been a couple of really good people who work really hard who have had to make major changes because of the way that their business has turned out in 2022. And as I look at my own success in this year and as I am grateful and appreciative of all of you who have been part of that success, that is one of the big reasons why I want to start season seven with a surprisingly backwards example of how elite people operate. And I want to teach you the lesson that we call being powerfully average. You did not hear that wrong. I am talking about being average,

but not just being average the way the society likes to mock average or belittle average or make fun of average. You know, we've, we all remember growing up where our parents looked at this and said, what, do you want to be average? Do you just want to be normal? Do you want to be? be forgettable. You know, our parents, they tell us that because they were never taught elite skills. They were brought up in a world where they struggled and they don't really have the insights that I've been able to grow through my network of ultra high net worth and my network of elite operators for the military and for the intelligence sector.

Because average is really, really good. Average is a super powerful advantage when you understand what average actually is. And let me give you a couple of examples. right off the top of my head, right? So first, if you think about the stock market, right? The stock market changes, and there are so many people out there who are either personally investing their money

or who make a career out of investing other people's money or are they analysts for large funds that invest corporate money. If you talk to anybody who is a professional financial analyst, they will tell you that if you can have average performance, you are going to be better than 80% of any other analysts out there. Because just being average is enough to sustain a long-term career. It's enough to grow a portfolio in a healthy average way.

It's the people who strive, who work, who toil to be more than average. Those are the people who end up running out of energy, taking risks that are unnecessary, making mistakes that actually give them exactly what they want. And they become not average. They become a loss. They become much less than average. They perform far below average. So having your goal be average, having your starting objective be average, giving yourself

permission and accepting the fact that there's nothing wrong with starting at average is a powerful advantage. It's true in the financial sector. It's true in the business sector. Where people who follow just good, healthy, average business processes, business decisions, these are people who can grow their business steadily, over time, make their business resilient against recession, they can grow a business that absorbs new employees and can merge and acquire with other companies and grow to massive scale, where those people who try to push

their business or rush their business end up inevitably running into these giant stumbling blocks that can actually cost the life of the business. These are just simple examples of how being average can be a very, very powerful advantage. Now, in my own personal life, I've had a few different examples with this and I want to walk you through in detail how I use this powerfully average principle to get ahead not just with my business, but also in my personal life and in my health and fitness life. So in 2011, I was, I decided to enroll myself in my first ever ultramarathon. Now, I'm not sure if I've had a chance to tell you all about this ultra marathon. It was the second time that I had run anything close to a marathon length. And the first time that I ran a marathon was

actually in 2007 when I ran the Marine Corps marathon in Washington, D.C. And I remember that Marine Corps marathon very clearly because it absolutely destroyed me. My legs, my joints, my muscles, my back for weeks, I was sore afterwards. And I promised myself that I would never run a marathon again, that it was just too damaging. And it wasn't worth the pain just to have a metal around my neck. Now, that's just me. There's plenty of people out there who are very talented, very dedicated marathon runners and ultra marathon runners.

And I have so much respect for them now that I know how much it hurts to just do it once yourself. But during this 2011 marathon, I registered to race, and it wasn't just a race in the United States. It was actually a race in Thailand. It was a race in Phuket. And it was a professional caliber race hosted by the outdoors and outerwear group known as the North Face. I'm sure you know the brand. So the North Face was hosting a professional and semi-professional race in Phuket.

It was a 100-kilometer race. and it had a semi-pro 50-kilometer option. So I chose to enroll myself in the 50-kilometer race, which is just over, I think that's just around 30 miles, 32 miles. I didn't do the math right before I jumped on the microphone, obviously. But smarter people than me will tell you exactly how many miles, 50 kilometers, comes out to. And I told my wife that I was going to run in this race, and she reminded me that I promised myself I would never do it.

And I promptly reminded her that I often forget. get my promises to myself and that I was looking for a challenge. So as I started training for this race in Pouquet, right away, I knew that I wanted to do something different than what I did when I raced the Marine Corps Marathon. Now, when I raised the Marine Corps Marathon, I really wanted to place well in my age group. So I made it an objective right away to try to place, to try to do well, to have my name on some plaque or have some different color lanyard at the end of the race. And I pushed myself and I trained with a really rigid, really regimented structure.

I ran segments of the actual race course because I was living in the Washington, D.C. area at the time. And I really tried hard to perform above average for the race. And then when race day came, what I found is that I knew the race course. I knew what I was going to run. I knew that I had put in the miles. I had put in the time. But what I had also done is I had also built. up this pressure, this expectation of myself that the criteria to have a good race was to place.

The criteria to satisfy my personal needs for this marathon in 2007 was that I had to do well. It wasn't good enough just to finish. It wasn't good enough to have fun. It wasn't good enough to go for a long run in, you know, the nation's capital. Instead, I had this very narrow definition of. of what I was trying to achieve. So I went out there and I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 2007 and it was horrible. My body hurt.

I was slow. All of my miles, all of my check-in times, my lap times were all worse than any that I had put into training. And I was very discouraged. And then like I said, I went on for weeks to feel soreness and personal depression afterwards. I did not want to do that when I decided to run the ultramarathon in Pouquet in 2011. So instead, I set up right away that I was going to just try to perform average.

That's all I wanted. I didn't want to place. I didn't want to fail. I just found a nice average running pace that was comfortable for me. It was somewhere between eight and nine minutes per mile. And then I trained to just maintain that pace. That was my goal. Let's run a race in Phuket.

Let's go to Phuket. Let's run in the jungle. Let's run under the North Face banner. with international racers of professional and semi-professional caliber, let's just go have fun. That was the goal that I had set for myself was just to be average. And I empowered myself by giving myself permission to be average in this race. And I trained and I prepared,

but my training was fun and my training was relaxed and my training didn't have this rigid structure like I had in 2007. Instead, I just had the goal to hit a certain number of miles, a certain number of times per week. And everything else was flexible. I didn't obsess about diet. I didn't obsess about, you know, ancillary exercise. I just wanted to have a good average race.

So the race day comes and my family comes with me, my wife, and I'm there with a really good buddy of mine who is a certified professional triathlete who has run ultramarathons multiple times in the past, who has regularly placed and who is one of the people favored to be in the top three for the semi-professional 50-kilometer race. A really good, humble buddy of mine. He was also former CIA. He was also undercover.

For the purposes of today's conversation, let's just say we call him Mac. So Mac and I had trained on and off together, but we were both really excited to take this race together and we were good friends. And we were excited to spend this experience being covert intelligence officers running in a semi-professional race

with a brand that we both really, know and love and pride to represent that brand in the beaches of Thailand. And the race gun goes off and we take off. Now, Mack was not the average racer, right? He was not shooting for my eight to nine minute mile. He was shooting for his five to seven minute mile consistently for the entire 50 kilometer race. So he took off like a shot and I just started my pace. And I ran and I ran and But, you know, I found myself in coconut groves and banana fields and I found myself on the beach. And sometimes I was running next to a guy from Sweden and sometimes I was running next to a Russian guy. Other times I was next to, you know, a semi-professional athlete or a fully professional athlete from Africa or from one of the African countries.

But I just plugged away, right, foot in front of foot, just trying to stay average, just trying to complete the race. And about halfway through the race, I came across a medical event. And I was really surprised because the person inside the medical van was my friend Mac. Now, as I was running up to it, I saw that Mac was wrapped up in a warmth blanket. He looked green. He had vomit on his chest and on his legs. And I was a little worried about him, but it didn't look like he was physically hurt. And of course, Mac being the really good friend to me, he saw me coming and he, you know, did his best to give me a smile.

And right away, the first thing he said to me was he was like, Andy, don't stop. I'm fine. I'll get back to the race. You just keep going. And as much as it hurt me to see my friend like that, I knew that he was right. I knew that I couldn't stop. That part of my training regiment was that you run the same pace

and you keep that average pace for the entire time. And that's part of what powerfully average means. It means you don't slow down or speed up. You just stay on your average target. So I just kept on chugging. And then time passed and, Before I knew it, I was crossing the finish line. And as I crossed the finish line, I was shocked when I was granted a medal that said third place.

And there I was kind of scurried away from the finish line into a tent where I was signing a bunch of paperwork because I had essentially, by placing third in this race, I had become a semi-professional athlete. And North Face wanted to make sure that they gave me the certificate and marked the date. time and I got all the right pictures and I was still covered in sweat and I was still tired and I was still sore. But what ended up happening is my goal of being powerfully average ended up making me one of the top performers in that race. Now a few hours later, Mac crossed the finish line. It just turns out that, you know, all of his elite training and all of his strict dietary needs and the plan that he had to keep himself nourished during the actual race, they backfire a bit on him just because the heat and the sunlight and some other factors in the environment

worked in a way that he didn't expect to kind of cramp him up and make him sick. But he finished with a smile, happy to finish it all, happy to cross the finish line. And he was ecstatic because now I had my semi-pro card and of course he had his pro card. So we were now kind of brothers that never expected to have the kind of results that we had. But my point with all of this is that my objective when I ran in 2007 with the Marine Corps Marathon was to be better than average. And instead, I failed to meet that goal and I failed to enjoy the entire experience. Meanwhile, when I raced in 2011, I had no objective other than the training objective that CIA had given me about just being powerfully average. And now that powerfully average goal ended up bumping me to the top

of my group, to the top of my heats, and giving me an opportunity and a chance to tell a story that I never would have said. I would have never even attempted to be a semi-professional athlete. I would have never attempted to win a race ever again. It was never my objective. My objective was just to perform average, just be average. And the reason that powerfully average works, the reason it worked for me in 2011, the reason it works for people every day in elite services is because here's the truth of the matter. The truth is that whether you finish or race two seconds ahead of the person behind you or two hours ahead of the person behind you. The fact is you just finished before them.

You don't get a bigger medal, you don't get a bigger reward, you don't get anything extra by beating them by a large margin as much as you do by just beating them with a small margin. And the same thing is true in espionage. When we go out there and we try to take on one of our peers, When the CIA is going head to head with the Chinese MSS or with the Russian SVR, the goal is not to crush our opponents. That's something for the movies. Our goal is just to be marginally better. Just be a little bit better.

Just beat them by one second, one fraction of a second across the finish line. That method, that concept is what we call being powerfully average. not trying to be the top performer who drops the ball, but trying to be the consistent, steady performer who carries the ball across the finish line at the expected time every time. That's what it means to be powerfully average. When I finished my accounting for 2022

for everyday spy this year, I was shocked to see that we had become a half-million dollar business. Now, for those of you who have been with me from season one, you know that we started not even knowing how to make money back in 2019. And here we are just three years later at a half million dollars in revenue. And at the same time, our peers, my friends, my fellow CIA officers and my fellow business contacts who I've been watching grow for the last two and three years, you know, they were running much bigger businesses. They were having much higher levels of success. And then they found themselves at the end of the year with much, much higher sales.

many more clients and much more money, but unable to maintain their business in its current form and even considering closing their businesses. The concept that I had pursued of being powerfully average meant that I was just going to do a good average amount of business. I wasn't looking for high conversion rates. I wasn't looking for the best sales. I wasn't looking for only the most specialized clients, I was just trying to do a good job for every person, every time. Because if I could just be average, if I could just have that average star rating, if I could just have the average sized audience, if I could just have the average priced product, if I could just be average, then that would give me a long life, a long, resilient,

steady business instead of trying to make something massive or something that grew too fast or too big and then became too difficult to maintain. All of this boils down to what CIA taught me when I first went through the farm when they wanted us to learn the value of just being powerfully average because powerfully average is maintainable. Powerfully average is predictable. Powerfully average is predictable. Powerfully average is someone who can consistently and continually execute no matter what the circumstances look like because they have the resources to keep executing. They have the energy, they have the money, they have the time, they have the attention, they have the focus. When you try to push yourself too far too fast, especially when you do it because of the expectations that were

set on you by others, you increase the risk of failure. But when you set out with a very clear objective right out of the gates to be powerfully average, what ends up happening is you are consistently targeting average and you're fully resourced, you're fully focused, you're fully dedicated on that average performance and you can surprise yourself by getting ahead of your target, by actually getting ahead of average, just like I got ahead of my goal in 2011 with the race to Phuket, just like I got ahead of my financial goals in 2003 running everyday spy just like I've watched friends and family and peers all get ahead when they have followed and learned from this CIA lesson of being powerfully average. I understand that in your life,

you have people that you're trying to impress. Sometimes it's your girlfriend, sometimes it's your boyfriend, sometimes it's your parents, sometimes it's your kids, sometimes it's your boss or it's your peers. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be. best. There's nothing wrong with trying to be a high performer. There's nothing wrong with working hard and giving it all you've got. But I want to encourage you to add one tool to your elite toolkit. And that tool is the idea of being powerfully average. You don't have to win by a large margin in order to still be the winner. But the more you stretch your resources, the more you push yourself, the more you limit your goals, the more you define and tighten your specific objective,

the higher you run the risk of failing, of missing the very narrow goal that you've set. So I want to encourage you, consider, where can you set a wider objective? Where can you be more forgiving about being average? Where can you pull back and conserve resources so that you have the grit and the tenacity and the energy to push through those really hard parts, whether it's, whether it's a business that has to work through one of the worst financial environments that we've ever seen, like what happened in 2022, or whether you have to survive a massive collapse of industry, like we saw with COVID in 2021, you want to always have the reserves, have the resources on call for the unexpected,

being powerfully average, setting goals to be average, and. and letting yourself have the space to perform beyond your goal. That is the key to making sure that you don't fail, that you never fall behind, and that you beat all of your competitors, if only because they can't keep pace with you and your steady, powerful average tempo. That is everyday espionage. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn.

If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at EverydaySpy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations and join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.