During the summers of my college years, I worked at my local YMCA teaching swimming lessons, lifeguarding, organizing games at the day camp and teaching water aerobics. I taught water aerobics six times a week to three different classes.
I felt a sense of pride about my teaching these classes because when I started, I was only filling in for someone else. After getting my own class, it sold out and there was a waiting line. The same happened with my second class and my third.
The summer following my senior year, I was enjoying one last frolic of youth at the YMCA before I started my banking job in September. Classes sold out. Summer was good. In the week before I was to start my banking job, a new trainee was going to join me to take over my classes in the fall.
The Aquatic Director wanted her to observe my classes to learn some of my steps as the students had often provided positive feedback about the class. The trainee, Jennifer, full disclosure here – in four years’ time she would become my wife and mother of my children, the trainee attended my 8:30 class on Monday morning.
Following the first class, the Aquatic Director asked Jennifer what she thought about the class and what she learned. Jennifer gave the most accurate assessment of my teaching pedagogy. An assessment that likely led to our dating and marriage. She replied, “Trent’s a twenty-one year old swimmer who prances around in front of geriatric women in a Speedo. I can understand why his classes are sold out.”
Here I thought I had some amazing low-impact techniques…
Welcome to Swimming in the Flood; a podcast where we develop the resilient leader’s mindset by navigating difficult currents in business. My name is Trent Theroux.
Have you ever misjudged your success? Ever thought, “I can’t believe how good I am at this?” I was in a finance class for my MBA during the irrational exuberance of the dot com bubble. One of my classmates told us that he quit his regular job to become a day trader because he made a couple of million in trading over the prior six months. Trust me. This guy was no Charles Schwab in the finance course. By the end of the term, he was asking his class partners if they knew of any job openings.
Much like my stint as an aerobics instructor, we both achieved success without really knowing why. We were right for the wrong reasons.
Dr. Anniruda Malpani describes four quadrants of actions. The first is that we were right for the wrong reasons. A place where you take credit for the success when the reality is that it happened for other reasons that are completely outside of your control. The challenge to this path is that we start to feel infallible. Can you imagine my fellow student making tens of thousands of dollars with every trade he made? After enough of this reinforcement, we can understand why he felt like he was becoming a financial wizard.
The same was true with me. At twenty-one, I thought I had dance moves. Sometimes I still do. Most people would suggest that I look like I am having spasms and that I should sit down before I hurt myself or worse hurt someone else with my flailing arms.
The second quadrant is being wrong for the wrong reasons. When I say reasons, I mean the wrong model. You are following the wrong model. In many cases, you may feel that you are doomed to fail from the outset because the odds of success are so low. We might think about this as a Hail Mary pass in football. We use the religious term because you are literally saying a prayer as a team makes a last desperation play to win the game. The odds of success in these circumstances are extremely low. And, the reason the model is wrong is that you (or your team) have put yourselves in a situation where you require beating extraordinary odds to achieve success.
The third quadrant is being wrong for the right reasons. This area is tricky in the lives of Developing Resilient Leaders. Morally, we would choose right over wrong, but in this case you have done everything right, yet still failed. I think of this quadrant when I think of inventors.
Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed 10,000 times – I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work. The scientific process is designed for this exact type of reasoning. Each iteration brings us close to the success we are seeking.
This is a zone where many of us live all our lives. We know that the process is right, but the results are not what we expected. How many times in your business have you thought, “We should be making more money doing what we are doing?”
Correct, it’s something we all have thought often. So, what process can we follow to achieve the type of success that we are all seeking?
I am now going to give you my unscientific, non-peer reviewed, resilient leader theory on achieving clear success. Are you ready? Got your pencils out? Here’s it is. Be right for the right reasons. You heard it. Be right for the right reasons.
The theory is simple. Here’s how it works.
To help us understand this theory let’s use two brothers who know a little about being right, Orville and Wilbur. Famously, the two brothers were the first to achieve sustained power flight in 1903. You may ask, “what is being right for the right reasons?” My definition is this – tenacity. Tenacity is the difference between being wrong for the right reasons and being right for the right reasons.
The best outcomes in life are not always secured early. Edison expressed joy in his thousands of failures, but it is only through tenacity did he achieve success. The Wright brothers were exactly the same. They notably had hundreds of failures on their way to aviating success. What made the difference may be when they questioned the model they were following.
One of the primary components of aviation is measuring lift. While the Wright brothers were still tinkering with gliders, they struggled using the commonly accepted lift equation of the time, the Smeaton coefficient. The Smeaton coefficient was originally used to define the use of water and wind to turn mills and other machines dependent on circular motion. The formula reads that lift equals the Smeaton coefficient time velocity squared times the area times a drag coefficient. I know. It’s a mouthful.
The Wright brothers relied on the Smeaton coefficient because it was the accepted standard, even though their glider experiments failed. Then, the Wright brothers considered changing the model. Initially, they thought they were getting the wrong results from the right model. But, maybe the model was wrong.
The Wrights created their own wind tunnel. It was only six feet long and through hundreds of experiments found that Smeaton was not right when it came to lift required for aircraft. Through tenacity proved that the model was wrong.
Employing their newly found coefficient for lift, the Wright brothers reshaped and resized the area of the wing and plane and….started flying.
Doing the right things for the right reasons requires careful scrutiny of your process and the tenacity to follow through to its best conclusion.
But, if you are looking for the cheap way out, you can always join one of my water aerobics sessions.
One – and two – and feel that burn – almost done.
Folks, thank you for listening to Swimming in the Flood. Resilient leaders face challenging currents and it is tough navigating, but with one tack or another we can get there together.