How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S8, Ep3 How to Fail: Matthew Syed

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

Matthew Syed is an acclaimed author, newspaper columnist and broadcaster. He is also, in many ways, is the father of failure. I mean that as a compliment, obviously. Through his seminal, bestselling books - Bounce, Black Box Thinking and his latest, Rebel Ideas - he has shown again and again that failure can actually be the richest seam of data acquisition. His interest in making mistakes in order to evolve started, incongruously, with table tennis. He was the British number one in 1995 but later choked in spectacular fashion at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. The experience triggered a fascination with what it means to fall apart under pressure and why it happens.Syed joins me to talk about all this, as well as leaving school at 15, his childhood experiences of racism, the horror of cold-calling when he ran a marketing agency, the 'terrible' early newspaper columns he wrote, the necessity for diversity of thinking, fatherhood and why we don't need to be scared of airplane turbulence (thank goodness, quite frankly, because I'm terrified of it). It was a joy meeting Matthew, and I also liked his exceptionally polite way of saying 'thank you' when I ask a question.*I've written a new book! Failosophy: A Handbook For When Things Go Wrong is out in October. It's a practical, inspirational and reassuring guide to the seven principles of failure I've developed since doing this podcast. Packed full of contributions from loads of former guests, as well as listener stories, it is also beautifully illustrated by Paul Blow and I would love it if you wanted to pre-order a signed copy here.*Matthew Syed's lates book, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking is available to order here.*How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp. We love hearing from you! To contact us, email [e-mail]* Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayMatthew Syed @matthewsyedHow To Fail @howtofailpod         Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned

from failure. Matthew Said is a man of diverse talents, which is just as well given that his latest acclaimed book, Rebel Ideas, concerns itself with the power of diverse thinking. The author of three non-fiction books for adults, two books for children, as well as a regular broadcaster and economist for the Times, Saeed has made a name for himself as one of the most influential analytical thinkers and commentators in Britain. Much of his work examines the necessity of making mistakes in order to evolve, something which Saeed has first-hand experience of from his years as a top-level sportsman. He left his state school in Reading at the age of 16 to focus on table tennis. By 1995, he was the British number one. He is a three times Commonwealth champion and competed in the Sydney Olympics in 2000,

where, by his own admission, he fell apart under pressure. Saeed was born to a Pakistani father and a Welsh mother, and after teaching himself his A-level subjects, managed to gain a place at Balliol College, Oxford, to study PPE. He graduated with a first. His website states that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Said believes that developing both the physical body and the intellectual mind simultaneously can provide a powerful synergy, a point well understood by the ancient Greeks. And yet, for all his impressive success, Said is, happily for me, a great believer in the value of failure.

Success happens through a willingness to engage with and change as a result of our failings, he says. Get that right, and everything else falls into place. Matthew Saeed, you are my ideal guest. Welcome onto How to Veil. Thank you for having me. You know, it's so funny listening to that introduction, and it's very kind of you to chronicle my dubious achievements. But I've had such an odd life when you say it like that. Leaving school at 16, playing ping pong. You know, I look back on that, and it was a great part of my life. Don't get me wrong. I loved it, made great friends, travelled the world.

But to spend 15 years seeking to beat Christophe Legault of France hitting a small plastic ball over the net, it kind of seems slightly surreal now. But look, I love the podcast. I love what you're doing with this concept of failure. So it's great to be on. You're so kind. And for me, you are in many ways the father of failure

and the paternal presence that oversees so much of what I do, because you were talking about this, you know, way back in 2015 with Black Box Thinking and Bounce and all your fantastic books. So it's an honour for me. But I'm super interested by your life. And that thing that I said about you leaving school at 16 and teaching yourself your A-levels, did you genuinely teach yourself? I did. So I went to a good but bog-standard comprehensive in suburban Reading. But at sort of 14, 15 years of age, I started to think to myself, table tennis, that is what I want to do with my life. I loved it. It was such an exciting sport to play, you know, spin, speed, strategy. And I thought, I'm only going to get one shot. So, I started my A-levels at my comp. And then after a couple of months, I thought, you know what, I'm just going to go full-time. And so, I trained in Reading with a couple of good players who came down to live quite nearby. And there was a wooden table tennis club in a place called Woodley and we'd get down there in the early morning and leave late afternoon and I started

to move up the England rankings but my father as you mentioned in the intro Pakistani background very keen on education and he kept saying to me you know table tennis is great but you're going to have to retire at some point what are you going to do with the rest of your life? And he persuaded me to start teaching myself A-levels. And I did them one at a time. I did economics, then maths, then industrial studies, because it was similar to economics, but counted as a separate A-level. And I bought the textbooks. I remember them well. I mean, I remember it vividly, very vividly. Bostock and Chandler were the maths. There was an economics textbook called Economics Explained. And I read through them in the evenings after finishing practice. And weirdly, because I was doing it because I wanted to do it, not because I was being told to by a teacher, the motivation

was sort of coming from within. My father had convinced me that education was a good exit route from table tennis when I had to retire. It sort of changed my attitude to studying. And from being an average student, I became somebody who became gripped by economics and maths and later psychology and politics, and it made a big difference. That's extraordinary. I mean, I thought you were going to say that you did A-levels in my kind of subjects, history, English, and things that you can get away with not knowing the facts. I mean, you can just make an impressive argument, but that's extraordinary. And you mentioned your father there. One of my favourite pieces of your journalism is a tribute to your father, who, again, sounds like such an interesting man. He converted from Islam to Christianity.

He married a much younger Welsh woman. And I just wonder how much of an influence he was on your life. How much of him do you see in yourself now? Oh, he's a massive, massive influence. He's chatted to him last night on WhatsApp with my two kids. And it's so interesting to see the way his mind works. Obviously, he comes from a completely different culture. As you say, converted to Christianity, met my mum, who's a kind of easygoing, laid-back Welsh girl who was living in London,

having moved from North Wales. And he's been a massive influence, very strong personality, very focused on self-improvement and self-reliance. I mean, I think one of the ways that I got through those A-levels, by the way, is because I had seen my dad, who had struggled to get promoted in the civil service, despite a fierce work ethic. You know, there's a few people back then who, to be honest, they were racist towards him. He's told me the stories that it's difficult to hear, to be honest. But then he thought, you know what, I'm going to teach myself a postgraduate diploma in economics. He did a master's degree, all in his spare time. And that gave him the option to take on a new career in academia. And his tenacity really made an impact on me. You write in that piece that I mentioned

about how when you were at that state school that you mentioned, you went through a phase where you would fantasize about waking up with white skin. Yes, that's true. I mean, one of the reasons for that, by the way, remember in sort of early 1980s UK, I was one of probably three or four kids in the whole school who was not white from an ethnic minority background. The P word was very commonly used, not just by students, but also by teachers and table tennis coaches. There was a bit of graffiti on the back door of the bakery that I had to walk past every day out of school and everyone else walked past that said something of quite graphic racist intent and I remember asking out a girl in my first year at senior school called Yvonne who I fancied big time and she said pick on someone of

your own color and it was just it was difficult to describe how devastating that is because you can't change your color you know it's just something that I was stuck with and I thought, you know what, what would it be like if I woke up with white skin? And I did fantasise about it, I did dream about it and it took a while for me to become comfortable with my own skin and part of the reason for that is I think Britain became more comfortable with people from ethnic minority backgrounds and I'm much less conscious of my ethnicity today. In fact, almost not conscious of it, which is a real blessing. I ask you about that as a way into talking about your brilliant book Rebel Ideas because it is all about the power of diversity, but there are different kinds of

diversity. Can you explain the two different kinds that you analyse in that book. Yeah, thank you. So, we often focus on demographic diversity, which is differences in race and gender, social class, religious background, and so on. And I think that is important. But the focus in Rebel Ideas is cognitive diversity, differences in insights and perspectives and information. There is a link between these two, because our identities influence our experiences, the way we make sense of the world around us. But I think there is a distinction between them. And one of my fears is that in the modern political and corporate world, we tend to reduce diversity to a box ticking exercise. I think it can be a lot more powerful

than that, and can shape our, as it were, collective intelligence in more systematic ways. And what I try and do in the book is try and flesh that out and offer pointers to how we as individuals and how institutions can leverage true cognitive diversity to innovate more effectively and to solve problems. There's a very interesting bit where you look at the misinterpretation of the iconography around Osama bin Laden by American intelligence agencies, the fact that he would film these videos in a cave with a sort of cloth around his shoulders. Explain more about that, because I found it so interesting. Yeah, so this is about perspective blindness. The interesting thing about the CIA, and this is true of many intelligence agencies around the world, is they tended to recruit people who were exceptionally able as individuals, but they shared the same basic blind spots. In the case of the CIA, most of the recruits were West Coast, Protestant, white, male,

liberal arts graduates. And you need people like that in any organisation. But if everybody comes from that background, they're likely to miss things that might otherwise be intelligible to a more diverse group. And as you say, the iconography of Bin Laden, in a cave, the long beard, they thought he was a mad Muller

who could never out-communicate the world's most sophisticated communications nation. thought he was a mad muller who could never out-communicate the world's most sophisticated communications nation. And there was a system, if you look at what the CIA was thinking in real time with what was actually happening, my view is you can trace it back to this gaping blind spot at the heart of the agency. And how much, because obviously you're talking about organisations there, but how much do you think're talking about organizations there but how much do you think that we suffer from the same perspective blindness as individuals and subconsciously we seek out people who think the same as we do i mean twitter being a prime example

of echo chamber ideas exactly and i think it's an unconscious tendency because we tend to be attracted to people who think just like us because it makes us feel smarter when people are telling us things we already know. It kind of validates our worldview, our assumptions. For what it's worth, the pleasure centers of our brains light up when people are mirroring our perspective. So there's this profound unconscious tendency for human groups to be populated by people who are like-minded. And that's okay in certain situations, but it can be incredibly dangerous when you're trying to solve complex problems. And funnily enough, one of the things that got me thinking about this was, can I mention football, something I'm interested in as a journalist?

Of course you can. something I'm interested in as a journalist. Of course you can. I sit on a technical board which advises Gareth Southgate and Philip Neville, the two England coaches for the men's and women's teams. And it was really interesting when I joined the group because one of the people on the group is Dave Brailsford, who's a cycling coach, and Lucy Giles, who runs the Military Training Academy at Sandhurst. And then there's Stuart Lancaster, a rugby coach, and Manoj Badali, who's a big data startup guy. So it's a very eclectic group. And a lot of the football journalists thought it was ridiculous because we didn't know that much about football.

Harry Redknapp, the former Spurs manager, knows more about football than I do. And Tony Pulis, former Stoke manager, knows more about, probably forgotten more about football than Manoj Badali will ever know. But the problem is, if Southgate and Neville were surrounded by football experts who were socialised into the basic assumptions of English football, a way of playing, a way of setting up tactically, diet, he wouldn't be learning anything new. They would be kind of agreeing all the time and probably corroborating each other's perspective and becoming more and more confident about potentially gravely flawed assumptions.

The interesting thing is when somebody says something that no one else in the room knew, like Brailsford talking about diet and big data sets and cycling suddenly you get the cross-pollination of ideas divergent thinking much more creativity and much better outcomes before I go on to my next question I want to ask whether you can get Gareth Southgate for me on the podcast I tell you what he would be brilliant on this Elizabeth because I've got to tell you at these board meetings we sort of talk around this table the formal part of the meeting then we go and get a cup of tea and a biscuit or a sandwich and every time him and i are talking we're talking about failure and what

we've learned from it because southgate do you remember back to 1996 where england got knocked out of the euros against germany it was south well, yes. Do you remember the trauma? And Southgate missed the penalty. Yeah. And so it was a massively traumatic thing for him, but also a hugely valuable learning experience about how to deal with setbacks of this kind. And also, for what it's worth, it informed England's approach to dealing with the pressure of penalty shootouts more effectively at the last World Cup. So I had a massive silver lining. And have you always been willing to engage in your own failures? Have you always understood the value of it? Or is that something that you've learned through the years? That's an interesting one. I think I've learned it.

I think my father always encouraged me to take sensible risks. Like if I ever said to him, oh, I don't want to be in the school play, I might mess up. He would say, that's why you should be in the school play. You know, messing up, you'll be better the next time you do it. If you live your whole life in the comfort zone, if you never take any risks, you're never going to achieve anything. So that was a big influence. But I think also every now and again when you have a high profile failure and as a sports person they can be quite painfully high profile you notice how much you learn from

them if you properly engage with what went wrong and how you can get better the next time around so your first failure is a failure as a sportsman and it is possibly the most high profile you can get and it is falling apart under pressure at the Sydney Olympics so Matthew tell us what happened well you know it's funny when you're doing the intro you call me the father of failure do you remember in the build-up to 2012 when a lot of the conversation about the Olympics was whether British sports people would cope with the pressure once in a lifetime at the home Olympics. I got a phone call, the one show, I said, we're doing a feature on people who fall apart under pressure. Could you front it for us? Because I'd fallen apart in Sydney 12 years

earlier. And it was interesting because the Olympics is a four-year build-up. You know, it's a four-year cycle. The whole of your mindset, your focus, your life is bound up in peaking on that day when you arrive in the competition venue and you're there to win. And my first match was against a guy called Peter Franz of Germany. I was near the peak of my game, an outside prospect of a medal. The preparation had been very good because we had a holding camp on the Gold Coast. Then I had two sparring partners whose styles were very similar to Peter Franz. But just before I went in, the venue manager, Neil, an Aussie, great guy, said, Matthew, we've just heard from the broadcast centre that the

match is going out live on BBC One. And I thought of my coach back home watching and my parents. And I looked out from behind the curtain at the auditorium and I could see Union Jacks. And out I go. And as I'm walking from the curtain to the court side, my coach, Swedish guy, Søren Ahlen, he said, Matthew, what happens over the course of the next 40 minutes will determine whether the last four years were a waste of time or not. He was trying to motivate me, but it had completely the opposite effect. And I watched it back on video, actually to do this piece for the one show, and I kind of missed the table with my second shot by two feet and my hand

was shaking and I had the classic choke meltdown and it was horrible so I was out of the tournament in about 20 minutes and then on the coach back to the Olympic Village I called British Airways and said I'd like to change my flight to get back to the UK within 48 hours and I was out of there very down but know, and I'm sure we'll talk about this, there was a silver lining for me too. And how old were you then? So I would have been 29. Gosh, that's a very particular age as well. I mean, you were still sort of so young and yet you feel like you should have your life sorted by then. And by that stage, you've devoted so much of your 20s to becoming this top level sportsman did you feel shame i think i did a little bit yeah because it was so one-sided first game by the way table tennis back then was up to 21 so a typical result

would be 21 19 21 17 i lost the first game 21 2 that never happens no one loses 21 i was ranked above him in the world. I mean, he was looking at me wondering who, I mean, he must have thought it was an imposter. I mean, I was a genuinely good player, you know, with a lot of finesse, very good timing, typically reasonably good composure. But if your hand shakes, think about how difficult it is to connect with a ball traveling at 60 miles an hour with the right amount of slice to impart it onto a tiny table a few yards away you just can't do it and so the meltdown was dramatic I was a bit ashamed I mean my parents are incredibly loving people and they were like you know win or lose

we love you but you know I did feel extraordinarily down I remember those first few days after. And the point you made, all of the effort I'd sunk into table tennis, the sacrifices I'd made, it just seemed so incredibly worthless. And how long were you in that state of mind? I would say I was very downcast for about two weeks, incapable of thinking about anything else, very high levels of self-recrimination, not wanting to spend time with other people because I knew that that would be the first thing they asked about. And then I started to turn a corner where I wondered whether if learning more about why I had broken down and trying to understand what kind of

techniques I could use to prevent it in the future would help me not just with sport but my life beyond sport. It's the 18 year old teaching himself from textbooks again. I think that was really a lot of it that I did believe somewhere quite deep down. I mean, there is something in education, and I'm sure you have a lot of teachers who listen to this because failure is becoming a really important concept in educational psychology. There's a concept called the growth mindset. And it's all about how you interpret failure. If you interpret as meaning that you don't have what it takes, and therefore you're going to withdraw from putting yourself in that place again you can see how that have consequences where you're never going to learn

whereas if you have a growth mindset and you interpret failure as an opportunity to find out what you could do differently next time it creates a whole set of different types of behavior and I do think that after that two week very low period the growth mindset kicked in and helped me a lot. What did your coach say after having sort of hyped you up to believe that these 40 minutes were going to change the rest of your life? What did he say afterwards? To his credit, you know, he and I were really close friends.

He just made, I think, a big strategic error. He thought that by talking about the significance of the match, it would lift me. He thought I had the psychology to deal with it. And I think he was surprised at how I reacted to what he said. Afterwards, he was absolutely marvellous. He came back with me and the coach. Funnily enough, at the Olympics, the Olympic Village is so small, given the number of people I have to live in. We shared a bedroom. So he, you know, we had two single beds. This is often the way at Olympic Games. You have to share with a coach or with other athletes. And he was an absolute joy.

We had a drink that night. I'm not as connected with him as today as I used to be, but we remained friends. God, that drink must have tasted quite good. Yeah, no, that's right. I needed it. So after those two weeks of feeling very downcast, how do you go about rebuilding yourself and learning from

that failure? So I started reading a huge amount about performance psychology and things like how the human brain responds to stress, the predictable patterns about how meltdowns occur in sports contexts, in aviation cockpits during crises in the air, in military contexts. And it was a really interesting journey of making a real attempt to understand this because at university, I'd done PPE, philosophy, politics and economics. This was all about psychology. And in a funny kind of a way, it led inexorably to my first book, Bounce, that you kindly mentioned, where there is a long chapter on the human brain, the mind, how we cope with difficult situations, how we build out of them. And that was hugely valuable. So having figured out what I needed to do to cope with pressure two years after the Olympics in the Commonwealth Games in 2002, I managed to win a gold medal unexpectedly.

So that was in sporting terms a silver lining. But the techniques for all it's worth that I learned then helped me when I became a journalist and occasionally got asked to do television interviews, which would have terrified me before. I learned how to manage my own adrenaline spikes, my own neuroses, my own fear of failure, my own imposter syndrome, all the things that I think everyone feels. So it had a really good consequence. I know that this is the work of a lifetime, but how do you manage those things? Well, so for me, I think it can be quite individualistic. But for me, one of the things that made a big difference is this research by some of the psychologists who worked with the british olympians in 2012 and they asked the sports people men and women to talk about how

they felt when they were going on to a very big match and it would almost always be something like this what if I lose you know and if I lose I'm going to lose my funding from the national lottery and if I lose my funding from the national lottery I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage and if I can't pay my mortgage I'm gonna have to move out of my flat and then my girlfriend might leave me or my boyfriend might leave me and if they leave me my parents who want grandchildren they're going to disown me and if oh my goodness if they disown me i'm going to turn to alcohol and and basically they're about to go on to play the biggest match in their life and in their mind they're kind of living on a cardboard box drinking alcohol i mean to cut a long story short when our emotions are engaged we can often focus on the worst case scenario. It's called this psychological

escalation. And one of the techniques that sports people do to arrest that escalation is instead of saying, what if I lose? What if, what if? They try and find something of value that is true win or lose. So this will sound incredibly superficial, but honestly, I've got to tell you, it helps a lot. So when I find myself in a difficult, highly pressured situation, I say to myself, win or lose, my parents will still love me. Now, my parents regard this as a slightly optimistic claim. But can you see how when you know that the most important thing of all, the love of your parents isn't contingent on winning or losing, isn't contingent on whether you give the best TV interview of all time, it suddenly gives you a kind of a bedrock of psychological assurance. That, to me, gives me a huge amount of social confidence when I'm facing difficult situations.

I do some other things too, but that is a big part of it. That's so lovely, Matthew. That really, really is. And I totally get it because I think that you've identified there the difference between being loved for what you do and being loved for who you are without having to do anything. And that's something that I really rely on, that notion that I could just be and the people who really count would still love me for that and yeah I think we're saying the same thing from different angles but that's so interesting and your lovely parents they must they must really like that that's where you go to what a lovely thing to say as a son oh that's kind of look and it's so interesting to

hear what you're saying it's exactly the point that you were making just there when I gave the book launch for Black Box Thinking, it was at the Royal Institution in London, lovely venue. And I did say that just before coming onto stage to give the talk, and my parents were in the audience, I'd been saying to myself outside, whether I do well or badly in this speech, my parents will still love me.

And I said, if I'm giving a good speech, part of the reason is because of that love. And I looked up and my dad, not emotional, he was kind of silently applauding from the kind of, so it was lovely. It was great. Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online.

It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo. All the time. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions, if you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second, then join me, Hunter Harris,

and me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess, we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like, it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when.

You are so messy for that, but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise. Mother. A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad-free

by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, historian and host of a new chapter of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Join me and world leading experts every week as we explore the incredible real life history that inspires the locations, the characters and the storylines of Assassin's Creed. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned imposter syndrome there, which is very interesting to me because it's something that is often referred to on this podcast, but mostly by women.

And I wonder whether the root of imposter syndrome comes from taking things very personally, and how you separate failure from feeling like it's a definition on who you are. Yes, and you may be right that there is a gender difference, although I've got to say, I think almost everyone suffers with this. You know, why am I here? You go and talk in front of an audience, or even if it's just a job interview where you know there's a lot of people also seeking to get the job, why would they want me? And I think it does take a bit of time to get over. One of the ways to get over it, by the way, is to know that almost everyone else is thinking the same as you even that person who looks supremely confident assured resolute somewhere deep down there is a bit of self-doubt and I think when you realize that most people are in that boat

it just helps you to deal with those anxieties a little bit better because you talk a lot in black box thinking about the aviation industry and the fact that there is this black box on planes where after a plane crash that data is examined and the failures are examined in an objective way and it's not examined in a way which is apportioning blame to individuals and for that reason the aviation industry has a much greater safety record than other industries how easy do you Matthew find that to do as a person as an individual yeah you I mean you nail the key thing in aviation it's that combination of recording when things go wrong so that the black box recorder has two components one is the electronic data the other

is the sound in the cockpit so they can figure out what the pilot was saying to the co-pilot in real time so what was going on in their minds so they can deconstruct effectively what went wrong but that of course gives them the chance to put new protocols, new ergonomics, new procedures and behaviours in place to ensure the same mistake never happens again. And that learning mechanism, that institutionalised willingness to objectively learn from adverse events is what has effectively cut the accident rate to very low levels today. It's about one crash for every 7.5 million takeoffs. I mean, that culture has been slightly jeopardized by Boeing in recent months. But nevertheless, I'm pretty confident it's still largely intact. And you're absolutely right. It is difficult to

get that in play. I mean, if you take, for example, the health service, and the health service is obviously performing marvelously at the moment. Frontline workers are heroes, putting themselves in danger. But my analysis is it doesn't have quite the same learning mechanism. One of the reasons for this is frontline professionals are often afraid of being unfairly blamed or penalized or struck off for completely honest mistakes created by problems in the system. And that can sometimes create a bit of a cover-up culture. So I think getting that right. And in bit of a cover-up culture so I think getting that right and in terms of your question about me personally no I think it's really

difficult to be honest with yourself when things go wrong because failure is a difficult thing to engage with and I think it takes real discipline to maybe discipline is the wrong word but you know you definitely need to have an open-mindedness about how failure can help you to grow. definitely need to have an open-mindedness about how failure can help you to grow. And so how do you do that? Do you rely on someone else, say your wife, telling you? Or do you almost write down a psychological shopping list of where things have gone wrong when you retrospectively analyse something like choking at the Sydney Olympics? Are there practical techniques that you have? I think it depends a huge amount on context. So if we take, for example, the thing we're doing at the moment, podcasting, you do it brilliantly. And I know you've got a huge following.

I did a bit of it with Robbie Savage, a footballer, and Fred Flintoff, former England cricket captain. And we did one on BBC Five Live, and it was great fun to do while we did it. Okay, so this was interesting. The question is, how do you get the feedback that you need about where you're going wrong in order to improve your offering? I mean, that's basically the BlackBlocks approach. And I learned a lot from Robbie. He created a WhatsApp group, and he invited a few different people onto it so that after any episode, people would tell us what worked, what didn't work. We looked at Twitter to see what the public was saying. I know it's a self-selecting group on Twitter and not always representative of the wider audience, but nevertheless,

we checked it out. You get reviews. I don't know if you check your reviews on iTunes. Yeah. And Rob would collate all of that information, put it on the WhatsApp group, and then we'd have just really honest conversations, me, Fred, and Rob, about what was working, what wouldn't. So it was quite a systematic attempt. And I've got to tell you, the first one wasn't that great. And they got better and better over the course of the series. And I think the reason was we were really honest with each other about what was going wrong and what could be the other thing we did is we listened to loads of other podcasts to see what was working out in the podcast community so we had all of that built i

mean it might sound a bit sort of systematic but actually it was a fun thing to do and it definitely helped us just going back to the aviation industry and this is purely a personal question. But should we worry about turbulence? Because turbulence freaks me out more the older I get. I hate turbulence. I hate turbulence. No, I hate it. Me and my wife, just before the coronavirus started hitting home, we took a holiday, very short holiday. And the turbulence, I grabbed her hand and she was like, hang on a second. We know from the industry, from a few friends who are pilots, I've obviously got

friends who are aviation aircraft investigators, civil aviation authorities, I'm really connected with that community. And they say that turbulence doesn't really mean there's anything to worry about. And they hardly feel it in the cockpit, you know, even because they're so used to it, they don't even know. That's why the pilots often don't say there's nothing to worry about and they hardly feel it in the cockpit you know even because they're so used to it they don't even know that's why the pilots often don't say there's nothing to worry about it's because they hardly even notice it but despite all of that I still get so look I understand why you get nervous but you don't need to be okay thank you I've had hypnotherapy for it and everything it's just yeah oh wow but that's helpful that the pilots barely feel it because I sometimes worry that if they're not saying anything, then it's really serious.

Did it help the hypnotherapy? It did. It did actually. It really helps, but I had to get it quite quickly because I was about to go on a long-haul flight and I should have gone back for several sessions, but I just didn't have time. So I only had one session. It really did help actually.

It lasted for a few months and I think I basically now need to go back for a top up. Your second failure before I get totally diverted is starting a marketing business and getting rejected a few hundred times on cold calls. So I'd never realised that you, Matthew Syed, had started a marketing business. How did that come about? Well, so what it was is just as I was getting to the end of the table tennis career, and as my dad had told me, you're going to need to exit out of this. I'm thinking, what am I going to do with my life? Okay, I've got a degree, but how do I actually use that? And one of the things I thought might be fun is to organize a couple of really big table tennis tournaments. big table tennis tournaments. So, you know, just to give you a bit of background, most table tennis tournaments happen in sort of local authority sports centres. So, where you'd normally play badminton, they clear everyone away and they'll put some tables down and then you'll get the top

players coming and playing against each other. And I thought, you know, wouldn't it be great to have table tennis at the Wembley Conference Centre when it existed, you know, the Crucible Theatre, the Royal Albert Hall, beautiful events with televised coverage onto the BBC with proper sponsorship. Of course, all of that is contingent on raising money, right? Because you've got to pay for the television production. You've got to pay for the venue. You've got to pay for the marketing and all the rest of it. So even though it was really an events company, as you say, it was a marketing company,

it was a sales company. And I knew almost nobody who worked in business. So I asked somebody what I should do. And he gave me this book called The Hollis Directory. And in this book, it gave you the names and email addresses, sometimes the telephone numbers of the marketing directors of pretty much every big British business. It was about a hundred page book. And so I'd wake up in the mornings and start phoning people and getting through to PA saying, sorry, he won't take your call or she won't take your call. They'll call you back. They wouldn't call back emails that were never returned.

And so it was a day to day of, I would say, 99% rejections and 1% openings. And I've got to tell you, that was a tough period. So I have a brief experience of cold calling as well. And there is something about that level of rejection that really is bad for the soul. Did you find that? Yeah, it was so interesting. It was, Bev, though. I mean, I think you have to recalibrate your soul, don't you? Because you just get so, you kind of get used to people not being interested in what you've got to say. And you're trying so hard to open their minds to what table tennis could be and your passion for the sport and all the rest of it. And, of course, they're listening with a much more sceptical ear. So, yeah, I'd get to the end of a working week having made, if I was lucky, I'd get through to get through to say three four people a day for a

meaningful conversation and getting rejected all week and that was tough I mean really tough. Are you someone who relies on the fuel of human connection to exist like the meaningful interactions with people is that something that you you need it's an interesting contrast actually you mentioned earlier about being brought up with a Pakistani dad and a Welsh mum I mean in Pakistan there's a very strong kinship structure much of life is based on the extended family so you spend a lot of time with cousins and second cousins and nephews and nieces I mean in the UK for interesting historical reasons and much of Western Europe we moved away from extended kinship with cousins and second cousins and nephews and nieces. I mean, in the UK, for interesting historical reasons, in much of Western Europe, we moved away from extended kinship quite early in

our history. And a lot of our connections are with strangers. You know, we have pubs and other civic institutions of that kind. And so I found that I've grown up with a bit of both. But living in southwest London, and not being that well connected to my extended family in pakistan and some of them in the united states i have had a lot of luck in having some great friends so i could hang out with and during that period where i was getting rejected all the time being able to go to the local pub so there were a lot of regulars at the pub i became friends with them that was a huge huge release and did you ever nail the cold calling? Was there anything that you knew would work? I definitely improved. I mean, that for me

was a learning curve because you begin to understand how to navigate somebody on a journey from hearing about something to potentially being interested in it. I think people who do sell well are hugely skilled at what they do. I really admire people who can do that well. And I did get okay by the end. I mean, I wouldn't say I was brilliant at it. Got a couple of sponsors into the tournament. So we did run events at Wembley Conference Centre, Crucible, Royal Albert Hall. I even did a badminton event i felt sort of empathy with badminton it's another great sport that has no money so we did an event at preston guild hall which again was broadcast around the world i mean the problem with it of course is that even though these competitions made a bit of money

when i say a bit i mean a tiny bit of money it was difficult to scale it in any meaningful way so it didn't really work as a business concept long term. Did you get better at it? What were you cold calling, by the way? God, I can't even remember what I was cold calling. It's when I was a temp, basically, I was making money in my university holidays. And the temping agency would send me to various places. But what I do remember, I was cold calling America and so we worked very funny hours because we had to work around the time difference I think I did get better and I think it was very instructive for my early days as a journalist because when you start out in journalism I started out as a news reporter and I quite often had to make uncomfortable phone calls or

turn up on someone's doorstep and ask them uncomfortable questions and try and encourage them to talk. And I found that very awkward until I realized that I should just be myself and I should be as authentic and sincere as I possibly could be. And that sometimes meant not relaying everything back to the news desk. And it sometimes meant just taking a judgment and thinking, no, this isn't right. And I don't want to harass these people. Or let me just put it very clearly, like, this is what I could do. And this is what I believe would be good. And if you're up for it, then let's do it. And I think I just realized very early on, that being honest to the

person I was trying to talk to was the best policy. I think that is such a brilliant insight. And the other thing that I took from it, in addition to that, I think honesty is critically important, is you learn empathy. So as a journalist now, I occasionally get calls from people who want to get their story in the newspaper. And instead of thinking, why are you wasting my time? I always try and put myself in their shoes

and how difficult it must be phoning lots of different people who are uninterested in the story they're trying to sell, at least give them the time of day. I think I learned empathy during that period. Totally agree. I have exactly the same thing. And people, again, who are manning the phone lines with online banking, and you might be

very frustrated one day because your bank account isn't uploading in the way that you want it to but it is never that person's fault and so often they're just really nice people that you want to end up having a chat with it's so true and often victims of really difficult systems where they're put in a position where you know they've been told they have to finish the call within one minute to get their times down. And they've got somebody on the other end who wants to hear more. You know, it's so difficult. And I think in addition to learning really well from Fado, I think if we could empathize with people a bit more, a little bit more kindness. I mean, I think that concept, by the way, needs a massive redefinition. I mean, economists think of it as a sort of anomaly. I think kindness

can be a really critical part of how we create stronger institutions, but better communities. And actually, I think we do better ourselves when we're kind, because we can create more diverse networks. We're able to call on people who might be able to help us because we've put in the time to help them. And there's great research that people who are kind in a more interconnected world tend to do better and I think that all hinges on some meaningful level of empathy god that's fascinating because we've been sold the lie I think that kindness is counterintuitive within capitalism like the two things are mutually exclusive yeah and funnily enough so i mean one of the really important pieces of research there's a very wide growing

body of research in this terrain but one of them was with a group of medical students they tracked 600 of them through six years of study and the study started off quite depressing it was the people who were selfish and were takers who did the best in the first year because it was almost all about independent study and they were able to get insights from other people and because they didn't share anything that they had learned they got all of the benefits of selfishness it was only by the third year that the people who were kinder more empathetic and more generous had caught up. And by the sixth year, they were miles ahead. Because by the sixth year, it's about collaborative learning, patient care, interconnections.

And that attitude paid off in massive dividends in the long term. So, in the early days of capitalism, where there was less teamwork, there was much more individualism, I think it was possible for kind people to fall behind. I think in a more interdependent world, I mean, so there's a big body of research, people who are kind tend to do a lot better, providing, and this is just one caveat, their kindness is linked to social intelligence, so that they can see when they're coming up with people who are trying to exploit them all the time and eventually you know move them out of their collaborative network so it's kindness linked to social intelligence that is winning out that's what i think your next book should be by the way i mean

i'm sure you've already written it and you've already got an idea but that that's so interesting thank you well funnily enough gone elizabeth like i'm talking way too it's funny when you do a podcast yeah but the weird thing is as a journalist I'm used to asking questions and when I was doing podcasts I'll be asking Fred and Rob it's me answering them and every time I think I would love to hear what Elizabeth says about this but of course that's not that's not the rules of this one oh you're so sweet no but I just think that kindness is as you say really overddo an image overhaul because there's a sense that kindness is a nice thing that you can think and feel rather than being something that is also proactive and impactful and can actually serve communities and organizations very well i think that's a very

very interesting sweet spot for you to explore. Well, look, thank you. We could co-author a book on this. Social science, psychology, the thing I'm interested in is really going through some interesting changes at the moment in kindness. I mean, often it comes back to this idea that what we achieve alone is massively less than what we can achieve together. So, it's not just about the quality of my individual brain that matters, but how meaningful and how authentic my links are with other people, other brains, other skill sets that enable us as a group to achieve great things. So it's the strength of these connections and the suppleness of these connections that are becoming more important. And they, more than almost anything else, are held together by

the human qualities we've been discussing. I need to get onto your third failure, otherwise we'll carry on talking for weeks on end. But your third failure are your terrible early columns as a journalist. And when you wrote these down, you appended six exclamation marks. So you really mean this, that they were absolutely terrible. So honestly, I don't know if you look back on early articles. So I mean, honestly, they're so bad. And I tell you what, talking of empathy, so my first editor, everyone loves their first editor, but I adore my first editor. His name was David Chappell so by the way that cold calling helped because the way I got into the times was this will show how old I am but I called 192 do you know what 192 is yes that is a blast directory inquiries and I thought you know what

these events aren't necessarily going to work out I I need to perhaps find another career. So I phoned 192 and I said, can I have the telephone number of the Guardian? And I phoned the Guardian and the sports editor at the time, isn't it interesting how you remember stuff like this, was a guy called Mike Averys. his PA, left a message, didn't phone back, I phoned again, he didn't phone back, I phoned again, didn't phone back. And I thought, you know what, why don't I try another newspaper? Guardian was what I read at the time. And I thought, what about the Times? And I phoned the Times, got through to the switchboard. And I said, could you put me through to the sports editor? And I happened to get through directly to the sports editor, and it was David Chappell and I said look I hope you don't mind me calling I'm a table tennis player coming towards the end of my career but I would love to write for your wonderful newspaper and by sheer luck really he had once commissioned a piece about me while I was an Oxford undergraduate thinking how weird to have this sort of ping-pong intellectual

and he said are you that guy and I said I'm I'm that guy. He said, well, look, fax me again, shows how long ago this was. Fax me some ideas. And I faxed him. I mean, he didn't get back to me. He's a busy guy. I phoned again, but I kept trying on the phone. You know, I think maybe I've got a bit of resilience from all the cold calling failures. And eventually he said, okay, why don't you write a piece on this? It didn't make the paper, paper but my second column did and it was a terrible column but it was David Chappell's empathy that really got me through he said look the you know I think it was honest enough to say this isn't a classic but I'm going to publish it those early columns were not great but I think because I had an editor who had tremendous empathy and was prepared to

mentor me through those early ones, we got to a stage, I'd say after perhaps a year or so, where it wasn't just an editor thinking I had potential, but the readers were beginning to think it's not completely unmerited to have this guy on our pages. So I do think having supportive people around you really helps when you're struggling. Because it's inevitable. I mean, unless you're particularly good at writing, particularly talented, it does take a while to get up to speed. And what was the main problem with your early columns? Was it that you weren't opinionated enough, or you just didn't write well enough? Or what do you think? Oh, interesting. So I'll be fascinated to know what you felt. I think I was trying too hard.

Yeah. I was so desperately trying to get every sentence right that when you actually look back on it it was incredibly clunky too contrived not smooth and fluent enough when you read a column it you should be able to get from beginning to end in a lovely smooth arc at least to a point and these were just I was just so desperately trying to do well that I think I overthought things. How did you find it, by the way? Did you sort of take to it quite easily? No, I had exactly the same thing. I mean, I didn't start out as a columnist, which, by the way, is the most extraordinary entry into Fleet Street you could make, Matthew.

It's taken me years to be a columnist. But when I did occasionally cover for people who were on holiday and they were columnists I realized that I wasn't opinionated enough and I was constantly trying to couch what I was saying in kind of essay speak like on the one hand this on the other hand that and you might think this but maybe it's that and obviously that's just not interesting to read at all so you need to get a lot I wouldn't say punch punchier, actually, but just a lot for me, it was about becoming less apologetic about what I thought. But when I was writing features, my early features, similarly, I was trying way too hard. And I was trying to be like other journalists that I admired. And I was trying to be taken seriously. And again, I think that I lost a lot of natural lightness in my writing because of that. That's really

interesting because I found a bit that if you were a bit too opinionated and polemical, readers would often immediately spot the bit that you hadn't properly dealt with. So I think I've gone on maybe a different journey over the past few years where I put in a few caveats just to kind of close off the obvious. And it's interesting, you know, having written sports columns. I mean, I've written sports columns for years and years now. And I've just started what they call op-eds, so like a comment column in the Sunday Times, which is a really interesting, great newspaper.

But I'm only about five weeks or six weeks in. And again, without wanting to talk shop too much, I think if you have a decent length for your column, you know, 11, 1200 words, you can put in a few caveats. I think if you try and put them in at six or 700 words, then you're just not making the point you want to make. And I think that is another interesting dimension to it. The other thing that I learned, which I'm sure you have as well, is because we both have been journalists during the age of the online commenter I realized that whatever I wrote any given week I could be writing about something completely different when I was on the staff at the observer for instance and whatever I wrote whatever position

I took there would always be a whole bevy of people ready to criticize and say that it was the most rubbish piece of journalism they'd ever read and in a way that was very helpful to me it was very instructive because I realized that I could not rely on those other people's opinions in order to determine the value of what I was doing yeah agreed and and it's always important to remember and it's a difficult thing to remember when people are going after you under the, what do they call it, under the line, the comment beneath the line, that they are not always representative of the wider readership. I don't know if you ever get letters in addition to, you know, you get these lovely written letters from readers, don't you? And some of those are just wonderful because it's often older readers who might not necessarily be reading the online edition. I think that gives you a better sense of what people are thinking. You're so right. Now, one of the things that I kept reading when I was doing research for this

interview was that when you played table tennis, you played defensively, that that was one of your hallmarks as a player. What does playing defensively in table tennis mean? as a player what does playing defensively in table tennis mean okay so brace yourself for a tutorial so table tennis okay so up until about night well actually i was going to give you a very long story going back to 1952 let me give a slightly shorter version but table tennis today is played with incredibly fast precision engineered bats with very grippy surfaces so you can put huge amounts of spin on the ball and almost every player in the world is a top spinner so they hit it with overspin the ball dips it goes at very fast velocity but there is a tiny group of which i was one who go a long way away from the table and rely on backspin so drag slice so you'd be five way away from the table and rely on backspin. So drag, slice.

So you'd be five yards away from the table, trying to slice it back low over the net as these guys right by the table were whacking it at you. I got into that because there happened to be a guy living in Reading when I started playing table tennis in about 1978 who was in the top 12 of England and was a defender called Dave Barr and I idolized Dave Barr even though he was only ranked 12 in England he was the best in Reading anyway and so I played that style and there was only about two of us in the

top 100 of the world it was a very unusual way to play but it was a fun way to play if you ever watch it on the internet it's kind of a lot more spectacular and do you think you play defensively in other parts of your life funnily enough I would say I probably haven't been hugely defensive in other parts of my life you sort of the way it happens in table tennis is you're a bit more cautious, a bit more strategic, a bit more measured. Is that part of my personality? No, I wouldn't say it necessarily was. I think it was more of a kind of a coincidence that we happened to have a player like that in our little town. And I kind of just followed in his footsteps.

Damn it. That was my cod psychology question. That's damaged me now, isn't it? Tried my best there, but no. But my final question is actually because you're a best-selling children's author and children love your books. You are awesome and dare to be you.

And I think that you're doing something very important there, which is teaching children the value of resilience. What advice would you give to any parents listening if their child is scared of failure? Yeah, that's right. Well, look, first of all, if it's the last question, I've loved doing this. Love the podcast. Anyway, I hope we meet face to face at some point.

But I wrote You Are Awesome for exactly the reason that you're doing this podcast, is that I wanted young people in particular. I was seeing this classic curse of perfection where kids are inhabiting an online world where there are airbrushed photographs and people are curating their lives to look perfect. And if they think that life is about looking and acting perfect, they're never going to want to take the risks where they might seem something less than perfect. And that's a problem because it's occasionally messing up that helps us to grow. And so in You Are Awesome, I try and talk about how people develop and grow in life and that that sometimes means doing things that

aren't perfect the first time around. And I love the idea that being a young person, it's not about having fragile self-confidence that is called into question the first time you mess up. It's about having, as you say, resilience to face up to the occasional setbacks that are a part of life and learning, embracing them. And the feedback, I mean, talking about letters, some of the letters I've had from kids has been wonderful. It was a real risk to write the kids' book because I wasn't really entirely sure that it would work. But it's one of the best things I've done. And what about your own children? How old are they?

Oh, I'm just looking at them out the window at the moment. We've got a garden about the size of a postage stamp. Half of it is taken up with this tiny trampoline. And they're on the trampoline at the moment. I'm loving being a dad. Evie's seven, Teddy is six. They're obviously slightly stir-crazy, given that we're recording this during the lockdown period of coronavirus. I think parenting is difficult, definitely getting loads of stuff wrong, and I wouldn't want to hold myself up as a model parent. But we have been, in this homeschooling period, giving them, we've asked them to write a little essay about their biggest failure and what they learned about it which was so fun and also i've been getting them to do other sort of softer skills like improvisation and thinking on their feet and they're quite enjoying it and i hope it will

help them in the long term am i allowed to ask what their biggest failures were easy it's interesting she was she was asked to write a different essay at school about her father and she said the thing that i most love about my father is that he is extremely silly and i said evie that isn't a failure that was a great essay and teddy's was at his last birthday party they had this game of lasers and he didn't win the laser game and he had that down as his biggest failure and I said come on Teddy you had so much fun doing it what did you learn from it and how did you connect with your school friends so it was quite a nice activity what a beautiful note to end on I'll have to get them on the podcast next they've been fully primed by your

parenting as you say we are recording remotely And I think that the fact that this has been such a joy for me means that we've both learned from our cold calling exercise. It was all worth it. I just cannot thank you enough, Matthew, for the work that you do and for coming on How to Fail. Thank you, Elizabeth. It's been a pleasure. if you enjoyed this episode of how to fail with elizabeth day i would so appreciate it if you could rate review and subscribe apparently it helps other people know that we exist