Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Fixing Flaws in Your Thinking & the Good News About Failure

Episode Date: April 11, 2020

Many grocery stores now boast that they sell “locally grown” produce. Perhaps you’ve wondered just how local it is – where does that locally grown produce actually come from? We begin this episode with an explanation of just how far away produce can originate and still be called – locally grown. http://time.com/2970505/organic-misconception-local/ Also, let’s take a look at how you think. In particular, a look at the flaws in how you think. Matthew May is an innovation strategist, speaker and author of, Winning the Brain Game: Fixing the 7 Fatal Flaws of Thinking (http://amzn.to/2tRYBiL). He joins me to explain how we so often go wrong when we solve problems, make decisions or come up with ideas. He has tested thousands of people and found that almost all of us make some pretty common mistakes that prevent us from coming up with the right solution. Listen as he offers simple strategies to get your thinking back on track. Perhaps you’ve heard that many people now cover up their webcam with a piece of tape to prevent hackers from spying on them. Is that really necessary? I’ll explain what the experts say you should do. http://www.rd.com/advice/work-career/laptop-camera/ Plus, we explore the importance of failure. Sure, failing at something really sucks but sometimes it is necessary – and it isn’t the end of the world. Megan McArdle, author of The Upside of Down: Why Failing Well is the Key to Success (http://amzn.to/2vJGPQp) explains why it is important to embrace failure as a process toward success. It isn’t just the old clichés of “learn from your mistakes”, failure serves a real purpose if you don’t let knock you down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, just how local is that locally grown produce you see at the store? Then, understanding the flaws in your thinking and how to tell what's really a good idea. To be sure that what you think is a good idea actually is a good idea. It's making sure that it's not a bad idea is to ask a question that goes like this.

What must be true? What must be true in order for this to be a good idea? Also, should you cover up your webcam lens so people can't hack in and see what you're doing? And celebrating failure. Sometimes it's the best thing that can happen. You look at someone like Steven Spielberg, who's one of the best filmmakers in the world, made a really terrible movie called 1941 that just bombed at the box office. And he felt just as bad about that as we feel about the things that happen in our life,

and he was Steven Spielberg. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to

called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I got a really nice compliment in an email the other day. It said that, you know, I really like listening to your podcast now because it's interesting and it's not about the coronavirus. It's a break from it.

And we don't specifically talk about the coronavirus, but we have and will continue to do things that are related to it and can help you get through this crisis that we're all in together. First up today, when a store says it sells local produce, just how local is it? According to the 2008 Farm Act, a label can say locally grown if the food was grown in the state it's sold in or it was shipped less than 400 miles. So local may not be local like you think it's local. If you really want local, a farmer's market is probably a better bet, and there's good reason to get locally grown produce. Produce that is picked when ripe and sold quickly can contain more nutrients and may taste better than produce that is shipped from far, far away.

And that is something you should know. Of course, as a human being, you think. You're thinking right now. I'm hoping you're thinking, what a great podcast this is, I must tell all my friends. How you think, the quality of your thinking, the process you go through when you think determines how good a solution you come up with when you're solving a problem or making a decision. And it appears there are some common mistakes we make in our thinking, according to Matthew May. Matthew is an innovation strategist, consultant, speaker, and author of the book, Winning the Brain Game, Fixing the Seven Fatal Flaws of Thinking. Welcome, Matthew. And first of all, I'm troubled to discover that my thinking is flawed in seven

different ways. And I trust you'll fix that by the end of this discussion, but where did you come up with this? How did you discover these seven fatal thinking flaws? The seven fatal flaws are something that I have observed over a decade in giving now probably over 150,000 people all over the world a little thought challenge based on a real-world business situation and watch how they solve it in teams. And it's kind of funny. Not only are they not able to solve the little thought challenge, but they consistently do these things over and over again, these seven things that are easily

manifest and observable. And it is sort of fascinating. So the topic is about these brain glitches, flaws, if you will, in our thinking, driven by the brain and how we can overcome them with a few mindful thinking techniques that I've field tested over a decade. All right. Well, I'm dying to know how my thinking is flawed. So what are the seven things? The seven things, I'll pick them up very quickly. The first thing that happens when I give anyone a problem to solve is that they go to the de facto problem-solving technique that we all know and love, which is brainstorming right away. They almost can't help themselves. So they begin leaping to solutions and throwing out ideas without truly considering the problem, without framing the problem in a way that might provoke creative thinking or innovative thinking

or what I like to call elegant solutions to problems. So that sort of fatal flaw number one is leaping to solutions. The second one is what I call fixation, which is just my term for what psychologists call functional fixedness, which is we have these thinking patterns, these ruts, if you will, and it's very difficult to break free of these biases, assumptions, mindsets, if you will. And that happens every time I give someone a problem. They get fixated on a given solution, even though it's not right, and they just can't break free to think differently. The third one is sort of the opposite of leaping, which is overthinking.

We think too much. We overanalyze. We get paralyzed by our analysis. We actually create problems that weren't there in the first place. And I think we're all guilty of this. And the reason, I think, is because the brain just detests uncertainty. So we want to, you know, dot every I and cross every T, and we end up not solving the problem, but actually creating new problems. The next two flaws are sort of closely related. One is called satisficing, and the other is called downgrading. And satisficing is a word that a gentleman by the name of Herbert Simon, a Nobel laureate, came up with half a century ago. And it's a combination, as you can probably tell, of satisfy and suffice. It's the notion of glomming on to a mediocre solution and then just selling the heck out of it, if you will. It's not the best solution. It's not the ideal solution. It's not a very

elegant solution. It's one that gets us in the ballpark, just good enough, we'll do, and then we just try and push it. And unfortunately, it ends up not working because it's not a great solution. Downgrading is sort of a close cousin. This is where you basically say that the problem can't be solved, and you come up with an alternative solution to a different problem. You basically back off the goal. It's sort of trying to declare victory through a preemptive surrender, if you will. And the final two have to do with sort of the notion of killing ideas. The first one is called Not Invented Here.

It's a well-documented, well-researched phenomenon that happens whenever you pitch an idea to someone else. There's almost an immediate reaction of negativity to it. They look for all the ways that that idea could not possibly work. Not invented here means if we didn't come up with the idea, it just won't work. So we just sort of naturally reject and stifle and dismiss ideas simply because we don't come up with them. And what happens is we end up reinventing the wheel. The last one is self-censoring. This is when we kill our own ideas before they even have a chance to flourish, to see the light of day. We all have that sort of inner critic, that inner voice of judgment that says, that's a bad idea. If I voice this,

I'm going to look stupid. And we end up killing our own ideas, shutting down our own creativity. So I'm screwed. We all are. The good news is that those are the things that the brain reflexively engages in, basically because it's the way most of us have been schooled and brought up in a particular system. The good news is that there are easy fixes for all of them. So which of these do you think are the, or are they all fairly equal, or does one trip more people up than the others,

or is one the first thing that falls, or give me a hierarchy here if there is one. Okay, yeah, there is. The most prevalent by far is the very first one, leaping to solutions. We do that just naturally. Voice a problem or an issue that you're having, and without them asking a single question of you, they'll begin offering you up solutions. They just can't help themselves. That's the most prevalent, but it's not the deadliest.

I would call the deadliest, but not the most prevalent, the last one, that self-censoring flaw, where we just simply kill our own ideas before they get a chance to even be born. So this jumping to solutions, how do you not do that? I mean, we're raised that. You take a test in school. Here's the problem. You've got five minutes to solve it. Yeah, exactly. And you solve it. Yeah, exactly. And you nailed

it. That is exactly the source of that, combined with the fact that we've all learned that if we get people in a room, give them a problem, and toss out ideas, that's the way to solve problems. So brainstorming combined with this notion of we've got to get the answer very quickly for the teacher or the boss, that's the flaw. The fix is this, and I've learned. I've learned because my day job really is working with creative teams. I act as the facilitator. I have learned that getting people to slow down, you know, adopt the good old Rodin thinker pose and think deeply about a problem just doesn't work. So what I've learned to do is to give people the feeling of solutioning and brainstorming, but I change the nature of the brainstorming. Instead of allowing them to go

right to ideas and solutions, I have them brainstorm questions. And I call this framestorming. When I give someone a problem or a thought challenge, the first thing that they have to do is to list 10 to 12 framing questions that begin with words like, why? Or what if? Or how might we? And that gives them the feeling that they're doing something and actually getting something done because we have this immediate bias for action. But what they're really doing is pausing to think about the problem in different ways. And lo and behold, when you do that, you can stand back, take a look at all of those questions that have been generated. And generally speaking, most times one of them really is a provocative approach to the problem that leads people to off-road thinking and a great solution emerges. So that's the quick fix. Instead of going right to the solution, brainstorm questions. I'm speaking with Matthew May. He is an innovation strategist, a speaker, and author of a couple of books, one of which is Winning the Brain Game, fixing the seven fatal flaws of thinking.

Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride.

We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left-field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of

several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest.

Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control

not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell,

the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Matthew, you caution against jumping to solutions, but eventually you have to get to solutions.

I mean, that is the whole purpose of this, yes? Yes. So how do you know when you get there? How do you know that this solution is better than that solution? And I've heard people say, well, you know, the first three solutions you should probably throw out because that's the low-hanging fruit and that's probably not the best solution. You need the fourth solution or the fifth solution. How do you know when you get there?

There's no way to be completely certain, and this sort of lands us in the territory of the overthinking flaw, which is, well, how do we know if we spend too much time trying to justify an idea that on the face of it sounds and looks good and is different and creative and looks to solve the problem given all the constraints of the problem, the only way that you can know with any kind of certainty is to test the idea out. And that gets us to the fix for overthinking, which I call proto-testing, which is running simple, fast, frugal tests of prototype concepts and

mock-up solutions that are roughly right and getting feedback. That is what the great designers do. That's what all the great innovators do. When you have a concept, you certainly don't know that it's a good concept until you have proof. And the only proof that is worthwhile is to get human behavior, human reaction to that solution. A number of great books are out there, one of them being the Lean Startup, which talks about the Toyota's scientific problem-solving method of testing out ideas. But the best ideas really are those that have been developed by getting out and testing them. And once you have that proof of concept, that's the only time that you can tell whether or not it's actually a good

idea. But even when you test it out, there are plenty of products and things that are tested and proof of concept, and then they go to market and they flop. Absolutely. And oftentimes, the reason for that is that they spend too much time, money, and resources in developing the concept first and then taking it to market without doing these little quick, I'm talking about 20-minute tests and iterating on those. They do what's called a waterfall approach, which is, and you've seen this, you've probably, any great failure is probably guilty of this, where it's the invention that has been patented, but it really hasn't been tested.

It's been developed, it's been designed, it's been engineered, like the Segway, right? And it hits market and no one wants it. The problem was they didn't test out lower level prototypes of those ideas. So the key is these mock-ups, these prototypes that are minimal. They're minimally viable. They're barely workable and getting feedback and iterating and developing on them in a very circular way. So nothing is certain.

We're horrible at predicting the future, but the best that we can do is to do a really good job of testing things at very low levels and then building on them. In the process of coming up with solutions or products or whatever you're coming up with, oftentimes I think people get that feeling that, yeah, this feels right. This seems like we just nailed it. Is that a good, bad, or hard to tell indicator? It's probably not the best indicator because what seems like a great idea to you is going to look

like a horrible idea to someone else. And here's the magic question, if you will, and I learned this from a very smart gentleman by the name of Roger Martin. When you have an idea, the best way to be sure that what you think is a good idea actually is a good idea, and even before that, making sure that it's not a bad idea, is to ask a question that goes like this, what must be true? What must be true in order for this to be a good idea? And what that question does is to open up the entire domain of all the assumptions that you're making in your idea. And you ask that question along a number of lines.

What must be true about the industry we're working in? What must be true about the customer and what the customer truly values? What must be true about our own capabilities? What must be true about how the competitors would react? And when you surface all of those, and there's probably dozens of them, dozens of answers to that question, you pick the one that you believe is the greatest leap of faith that you are making in your idea or concept, and you take that assumption and you begin constructing your experiments and prototypes around that assumption. There are a lot of ideas and products and services, though,

that are developed without this kind of formula, without this kind of checks and balances that still do fine. Somebody just comes up with an idea and boom, magic. Yes? Yes. And the unfortunate part of that is that that's hard to replicate. What you're talking about is serendipity, where something suddenly goes viral, if you will, because it struck a chord somehow. You can't bottle that. You can't can it.

You can't train to it. And it's great when it happens to the purveyor of that idea or solution. But gosh, we can't make a business out of it. Can't you reverse engineer it and realize what you did? You can in retrospect. And what happens is you may never come across the same confluence of forces that made that idea work. And the reason for that is time marches on. Markets change. Customers change. Our values change. What goes viral today would not have gone viral last week. It's very, very difficult to predict the future. Are there ideas, though, that it's just the je ne sais quoi? There's no rhyme or reason for this, but magically it happened.

Oh, of course. I mean, you know, when we see that is around holiday time. All of a sudden, everyone needs a pet rock, and it doesn't happen again. You can't repeat that. It's a one-trick pony, right? It's a one-shot wonder. But that does happen. But it's like winning the lottery. Now, I know you wrote a book called the elegant solution.

Sounds so wonderful. Sounds so elegant, but what is an elegant solution? Well, my definition of it, um, is, is fairly simple. It's one that achieves the maximum effect with the minimum means. And so can you give me an example? The easy example is the interface that you've probably already used a dozen times today, which is Google. It's mostly white space. It's one little box. And yes, you know, over the course of 20 years, they've hidden a number of things behind that interface, but it's an elegant solution. It takes something very complex.

You know, you or I probably would never be able to figure out that mathematical algorithm that drives Google, the search algorithm. It's very complex. They've hidden it behind a very simple and thus very elegant and seductive, if you will, interface. That's an elegant solution, and it has taken the world by storm. So the notion of elegance, there are several factors that go into an elegant solution.

One is the notion of subtraction. Something has been left to the imagination. My favorite example of that is, I don't know if you were a fan of The Sopranos, you know, a few years ago. You know, it had an eight-year run, and by all measures, and all critics ushered in a new era, if you will, of TV dramas. But do you remember how it ended? I don't know if you were a fan of it. I was a fan of it.

Yeah, I remember it ended, and Tony died. He didn't. He was left up to the audience. All of a sudden the screen went black and we don't know what happened to Tony. Half the world thought that he got shot and half of times people watched the show. David Chase purposely put clues in the last episode. And, you know, it happened on a Sunday night. We were all tuned in. We're waiting to see what would happen. And at the very end, right, you know, in the final seconds, everyone's screen went absolutely black and everyone shouted down the hall, did you pay the cable bill? Everyone saw it as, you know, as something gone wrong, not as the ending. And the world went absolutely bonkers. The next day, everyone, you know, cried foul. How could you leave us without a conclusion, without closure? And within 24 hours, Chase came out and said, everything you need to know about the fate of

Tony Soprano is in that episode. Turns out he embedded all these little clues, visual clues, sound clues, stuff on clothing, past show references, even the way things were lit. And by the third day, the original 12 million viewers had grown to 36. So the impact was undeniable. He had not provided an ending. Three distinct endings emerged on the Internet, some of them on YouTube, each one with a very logical case for why Tony died or didn't die. seductive. It tripled the number of viewers. It was subtractive. It left out a part of a traditional story, if you will, and had a greater impact because of it. And it was seductive. People could not help themselves going back and looking at that episode time and time again. And to this day, the fourth element of elegance is sustainability. To this day, people talk about it. Not too long ago, I think it was last year, they did a retrospective with all of the cast. And do you know what the

discussion focused on? The last episode. I learned the notion of an elegant solution when I was working with Toyota many years ago. They had this mantra inside that made my life very difficult. It was, people don't want our products and services. They want solutions. And when it comes to solutions, simple is better. Elegant is better still. And the reason my life was difficult is because there was no working definition of elegance. And when you look up elegant, you can't find elegant solution in the dictionary.

And when you look up elegance, it gives an example as in an elegant solution. So I just sort of figure it out by virtue of looking at all the ideas that were ultimately rejected to come up with a working definition that works for me in terms of what an elegant solution is. I feel so much smarter now talking to you. You have fixed my fatal thinking flaws and taught me how to create an elegant solution. So I'm good to go. Matthew May has been my guest. He's author of the books

Winning the Brain Game, Fixing the Seven Fatal Flaws of Thinking. And his other book is The Elegant Solution. There are links to his books in the show notes for this episode of the podcast. I appreciate the conversation, Matthew. Thank you, sir. And Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong.

And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle.

On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Nothing quite feels like failure. I felt it, you felt it, and it feels horrible. Even when you hear the advice that you're supposed to learn from your mistakes and dust

yourself off and get up and try, try again, failure still sucks. It feels terrible. And yet everyone fails. Most products fail. Failure is all around us. Megan McArdle knows about failure. Today, she's a successful blogger, author, and editor, but she's had plenty of bumps along the way, and she's taken a long, hard look at failure. Her book is called The Upside of Down, Why Failing Well is the Key to Success. Welcome, Megan. So why the interest in failure? I mean, you know, there's so many millions of books on success, and you took the opposite approach and wrote one on failure. How come?

The number of people who say things like getting sent to prison and losing a job and getting left at the altar were the best thing that ever happened to them. But in fact, you know, freedom really can be just another word for nothing left to lose. And I look at my own experience with losing a job and spending two years trying to figure out what I wanted to do, eventually ending up with an amazing job in journalism because that two years of struggling and trying to figure out had given me the freedom to say, you know what, journalism is a little risky. I don't have any experience in this area, but I love it. And what do I have to lose? And ending up 12 years later, you know, with a book and a pretty great job. And I want more people. This is the

book I'd wished I'd had when that happened to me. And so, you know, it really is how both people and kind of the economy and society move forward if we get the process right and learn how to pick ourselves up after it's happened. Well, it is interesting what you say about people having those what would be conventionally assumed to be bad experiences and coming out and saying at the end that it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I think that's a somewhat universal experience, and yet we don't kind of absorb that and realize that the next time something bad happens, we get all depressed and sad and feel horrible. Exactly. You know, failure feels bad and it kind of has to

because failure is nature's way of saying, stop doing that. In the same way that it hurts when you touch a hot stove, doing something and having it not work out does feel bad. But there are people who actually manage to use failure as what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset about failure. When they try something and they're not good at it and it doesn't work out, and failure is what's going to happen if you try things you've never done before, those people say, wow, I'm deepening my talent pool. I'm learning. I want to try that again. Then you have people who have what's called a fixed mindset. They're people who think of talent as something that you're just kind of born with. And every time you take a test or meet a challenge,

it's like a dipstick measuring your talent. And so they're terrified of failing. And what they do is they protect themselves. They don't take on new challenges. And as a result, they don't grow as much. And when they do fail, they're fragile. They tend to get mired in, oh, wow, I guess I just found out that I'm not good enough instead of, oh, wow, I guess I just found out that I didn't know how to do that, but I found some stuff that I don't know. So now I can, I can take that and learn and get better. So what's the difference though? I mean, why can some people do it well and what do they have that other people don't? Well, you know, some of it may be inborn, but the good news is that you really can change how you think about this. And a lot of people have asked me, is this a self-help book?

Well, for me, it has definitely been a self-help book because I'm a fixed mindset person. A lot of writers are. We tended to be very good in school, certainly in English class. And that gave us what Dweck says is a very bad lesson, which is that success is about finding work easy, when in fact success is about trying things and deepening your talents. And the way you do that is often by kind of spectacularly blowing up. You can convert yourself by focusing on, instead of focusing on it's a fixed quantity, but first of all, by telling yourself, which is true, that by failing, you're getting better,

that you're increasing the number of connections your brain is making in your learning. But second of all, by focusing less on the person than on the process. You know, success and failure, they're not something that you are. They're something that happened. And so there are ways to make yourself stop short, say, okay, that happened. You know, it wasn't great. I didn't enjoy it. But you know what?

I got a lot out of it, and where do I go next? There are definitely ways to turn yourself into more of a growth person, and I definitely have. So how do you know, though, that what you're doing, at what point do you declare it a failure versus the learning curve? So while I am encouraging people to take more risks and dare more greatly, you also want to be taking smart risks. And one way to take smart risks is to not bet the farm, right? Don't go in and say, if this doesn't go well, I'm going to lose my house and my marriage and so forth.

But the second thing is you need to be alert. As soon as you're embarking on a new project, you need to be watching really carefully. How is it going? What sort of response we're getting? And so the example I always give of this is New Coke, right? So Coca-Cola, their sales are kind of stagnant. Pepsi is coming up hard on their heels. And so they decide to get rid of their old brand and replace it with a new soda. What do they do?

First of all, they bet the farm, and that was a bad move. They took the old soda off the shelves and put the new one on, and then people freaked out. But the good thing that they did was that they responded very quickly. New Coke was not on the shelves very long. Instead, they said, wait, we've heard you, you loved the old brand, and we're going to put old Coke back. And in fact, in the end, because they responded so quickly and thoroughly to their customers, they actually ended up giving themselves a leg up against Pepsi. So they turned that failure into success by watching,

monitoring what was happening, and responding to that outside information instead of doing what a lot of us do, which is ignore it because it's scary and it's telling us that we might have made a mistake. There are other people, though, older people perhaps in particular, who, you know, feel a bit lost that they, you know, their old skills are not needed. They try things and they don't get it, and it's frustrating them, and they don't seem to be really kind of fitting in. And I mean, at what point do you say, I quit? I mean, that's it. I'm done. Well, in my view, you say that when you're dead. Before that, you never know. And one of my favorite stories, Colonel Sanders, he was a serial failure. He was at one point, his wife left him

because she was so tired of his losing jobs, of his get-rich-quick schemes and so forth. Finally in his 40s he got it together, and he opened a little roadside cafe in Kentucky on a pretty big highway. And then when he is 65 years old, the state of Kentucky builds a new thruway and bypasses his business, so he loses his business. And I was really interested in this because my grandfather owned a service station, had something similar happen to his gas station,

and had to totally reinvent the business around the same time in the 50s. So Colonel Sanders could have said, wow, I'm 65, you know, it's pretty much over, I'm just going to move in with my kids and wait to die. But he doesn't. Takes a pressure cooker, goes on the road to restaurants, conventions, telling restaurateurs, give me five cents a chicken and I will show you how to cook the best fried chicken you've ever had, finds a guy in Utah who's willing to take him up on the offer, and the rest is history, Kentucky fried chicken.

It is never too late. People are never too late to take what they have and keep trying. And the main characteristic of the people who succeed, whether it is in getting another job, you know, older workers do face a challenge. But it's also true that the biggest determinant is not how old you are. It is how much time you spend looking for a job and how willing you are to consider new opportunities and things that maybe weren't what you thought you were going to be doing for the rest of your life, but turn out to be somewhere where you can really add value to an employer and, of course, to your own life. Do you think, though, that whatever you do next ought to be rooted in what you did last to some extent, or do you think you're better off

just blazing a brand new trail? Look, we're always connected to the past. And no, obviously, if you've spent a lifetime building up skills, you don't want to just say, oh, well, I guess they're all useless. I mean, maybe sometimes you do see that. But, you know, Colonel Sanders had been cooking fried chicken in his restaurant. What he did was look at a different way to do that. And similarly, you know, I had been supposed to be a management consultant. And what I ended up doing while I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life was writing a blog. And on that blog, I ended up writing a lot about my business school curriculum because that's what I knew, and there weren't a lot of people explaining basic accounting concepts and how economics works to a mass audience at the time.

And so in the course of that, I built up a skill set. I was able to take those blog posts to The Economist and say, hey, look, I can write about economics. Hire me for this position on your web team. And because I had that experience, I was a fit for the job. So it's about building on what you have, but taking it in new directions. And when people decide to do that, what's the procedure? What's like step one, step two, step three? You just sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and just start writing ideas? I mean, where do you begin the process? Well, the first place that you begin is what I call the way of the shark, right? If sharks stop moving, they die.

And that's how you have to think about it is it is less important to focus on exactly what you're going to do and have a master plan with 80 steps because, frankly, like all other plans, when they meet contact with reality, they're probably not going to be exactly the way you planned it out. Absolutely the most important thing is to commit to the process, is to commit to I am going to try, you know, I'm going to make 30 phone calls, I'm going to talk to eight people, whatever it is. Get out of your house, work at Walmart, volunteer, make connections, be connected to your church because every time you leave the house and do something, you are creating an opportunity for something to happen. And the second thing, though, is what would you like to try that's new,

that you haven't done before, where maybe, again, you can bring those old skills you had. I already had some skill at writing and some skill at business school curricula. How do you combine things that maybe you hadn't thought about putting together before? I mean, you see a lot of people, especially, you know, retirees and so forth, who are building businesses out of things that they'd done as hobbies before. But because they had other experiences, you know, they put their business experience together with their hobby,

and they build an entirely new thing. It does take guts, though. I mean, it does take a leap of faith that at some point, even though you feel like you're failing, that you will land on your feet. It does take guts. But, you know, the thing that I say and the thing that I want people to take away from the book is to say you're not a failure, you're someone who's failed. And it sounds a little bit like a motivational speaker and so forth, but it's really true that, you know, someone asked me the other

night, well, what about the people who really have failed, unlike these successes that you profile in the book? And I said, well, look, at the moment when they were failing, they didn't know that the next thing was coming. You know, you look at someone like Steven Spielberg, who's one of the best filmmakers in the world, made a really terrible movie called 1941 that just bombed at the box office. And, you know, he felt just as bad about that as we feel about the things that happen in our life. And he was Steven Spielberg. You don't, it does feel bad. And there's no way to say, oh, well, I just won't feel bad about it because that's not how human beings are built.

But you can focus on the future. And you can focus on getting the little wins. Like I said I was going to make 30 calls today for my job search and I made 30 calls. Okay, I checked that off. I did what I was supposed to do. You can focus on the process and focus less on feeling bad about yourself because the fact is these amazing people in history, also Julius Caesar once freaked out. He came across a statue of Alexander and started crying because Alexander at his age had already conquered the world and then died. You know, at the age of 33 and Julius Caesar was 40 and said,

well, my life is over and I've done nothing. And, you know, look at everything that was ahead of him, the Roman Empire. But he didn't know at that moment. And so always remember, this is a snapshot. This is not the movie of your life. Well, and it's easy to get stuck in that movie, thinking it's a movie that I'm just a big fat failure and that's the end of that. Yes, thinking that you've reached the end of the movie and now it closes with you.

But in fact, that's not the case. Again, unless you're dead, there is always a chance to do something. And the way that you make that happen, it isn't because the people who make things happen are just special, wonderful people who were born with this talent for overcoming defeat. I certainly spent a lot of time really close to despair and beating myself up and not doing what I should have been doing. And most people who've had these experiences can tell you the same thing. They spent some time making some big mistakes after they'd failed because it felt so bad, but then they got over it. And it wasn't just because they're special people. It was because they learned to think about failure in a different way.

They forced themselves to think about going forward instead of what they'd lost and the mistakes that they had made. Well, anybody who's had that punch-in-the-gut failure feeling can not only take comfort in what you say, but also that's some good actionable advice to help people move on. So thank you, Megan. Megan McArdle has been my guest. Her book is The Upside of Down, Why Failing Well is the Key to Success.

There's a link to her book in the show notes for this episode of the podcast. You've probably heard that some people put a little piece of tape over their webcam so that nobody could hack into their webcam and spy on them. But is that really necessary? Well, in a word, yes. It is advisable because people can spy on you. Many internet-connected webcams have their own IP address to permit remote access. That allows you to connect directly to the webcam from anywhere in the world. However, if the camera is not protected by a strong password,

and many of them are not, it makes it all that much easier for hackers to get in. As for computer-connected webcams, hackers can use malware to access the camera. This can happen when you accidentally click a bad link or download some sinister file. There's even some evidence, according to Reader's Digest, that the FBI has also hacked into people's computers in order to access their webcams for surveillance. So a little piece of tape over the lens could save you a lot of trouble.

And that is something you should know. That does it for this episode. I'm Mike Carruthers. Stay safe, stay healthy, and we'll see you in the next episode of Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.

She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions,

and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.

Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.