Mistake → Recalibration → Optimization: The Fast Track to Growth

hello there, my friend Jonathan Doyle with you once again.

Welcome aboard to the Daily Podcast.

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Friends, we're gonna talk today about probably my all time

favorite psychologist Alfred Adler.

I just think this guy has such interesting wisdom for the world and I love coming

back to him quite frequently to teach myself because every time I read him,

I'm like, this stuff is really good.

It's actually so practical and it resonates with my experience.

And I think if you want wisdom in life, you wanna grow, it often

helps to have content that you go, yeah, I've felt that resonates.

So let me read this to you and then I wanna talk to you a little bit

about how this applies to your life.

He says this.

What do you first do when you learn to swim?

You make mistakes, do you not?

And what happens?

You make other mistakes.

And when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning

and some of them many times over, what do you find that you can swim?

Life is just the same as learning to swim.

Do not be afraid of making mistakes for, there is no other

way of learning how to live.

This is gold.

This is so good.

It's just an interesting metaphor that you know, any of us, if you can, I,

I don't know if maybe you were too young to remember learning to swim.

I I've got vague memories of it.

I grew up in a tropical kind of climate through when I was that age, so I think

it was just something everybody did.

And, but I can I can take his point here, right?

Nobody jumps into the pool and just does a full Michael Phelps, straight

away, absolutely dialed in, elite, international standard swimmer.

We all get in there and we flail around and someone will be there.

We probably got a flotation device on just to make sure nothing terrible

happens, and then we go on and on.

We get a little bit more confidence and we make more mistakes and we get a little bit

more confidence and we make more mistakes.

It's such a simple but profound insight that something worth doing for us.

Something interesting will always require mistakes.

If I can bore you for a moment with my obsessive love for golf it's

the game that I've played since I was very young and I, thank God

I play it pretty well these days.

I guess I'm not, i'm not probably gonna retire on my golf

winnings, I play pretty well.

My brothers are very good, so I gotta grow up around it.

But it's interesting when I read Adler's quote, I just thought,

my gosh, this is so true.

Golf is not so much.

It necessarily about skill acquisition as it is about mistake removal.

I saw a, an Instagram the other day, somebody sent to me of one of

their friends playing golf, and the second I saw this image like this

is, it was a Instagram of somebody who doesn't play golf very often.

And they're a young person that fit, healthy, athletic, but their

swing was all over the place.

And I could instantly see, oh that, and that.

I could see all the mistakes.

Why?

Because I'd made so many of them, and I'd corrected them that I know exactly what

it looks like and feels like to swing the club in a pretty reasonable manner.

So in my own pursuit of that game.

And getting better at it.

I've just made so many mistakes and it, and the mistakes get smaller and you start

to notice them and you get a feel for it.

But progress comes at the price of mistakes.

Can you think it back to your first date?

I don't know if it went perfectly, your first crush.

Did you, had you absolutely mastered the art of self-confidence

and romance in that first date?

Probably not.

You probably, were awkward and it was, maybe it didn't go perfectly

and you had some relationships as the years went by, that didn't go great.

And did you have a relationship where you gave in on everything and

just tried to be whatever the other person wanted and you figured out

that's not a great way to do it.

And then you made some mistakes and you changed again, and then this happened

and apply it to just about any area.

Make mistakes and it's in the mistakes that you learn.

I'll give you another example recently, if you're following me

on Instagram at j doyle speaks, you saw that I was doing what did I do?

Five half marathons in five days, and I was like training and doing all this stuff

and I was lifting heavy weights every day.

And.

Did a bunch of research.

'cause I thought, yeah, I'm really tired here and going Jonathan,

you're such a brain surgeon.

Do you think you're tired?

Do you even know why?

But my I did a bunch of research on sort of a whole bunch of aspects of my training

and I realized that I was just doing.

I was doing way too much.

There wasn't enough recovery stuff, and it was just like, oh, hang on.

I realized that how I'd been training was really a bit of a mistake

after all these years of training.

I was like, you're off here.

Like this is just not working.

And so the mistake allows me to recalibrate and then optimize.

So maybe we could just do it like that.

Mistake, recalibration optimization.

There you go.

I'm gonna trademark that.

That we make mistakes, we recalibrate, and then we optimize

based off the recalibration.

So you can apply this to almost any area of your life that if you want

to do something different, new, interesting, can you give yourself

the permission to make some mistakes?

Because if you're too rigid about that, you'll get anxious for a start, and

you'll be a perfectionist and you'll beat yourself up and you'll probably

angry at people around you as well.

But allow yourself to fail.

We're not perfect.

We're not angels.

This side of heaven, we are going to be frail humans with incredible

poten potential, but also the ability to get things wrong.

So head out there today and ask yourself some questions.

What am I, what would I like to try?

What am I not doing that, I don't wanna embarrass myself.

I've got teenage kids, and one of the things that sometimes with teenage

kids is that they just so nervous.

They don't want to stand out or get it wrong or make mistakes.

And one of, one of the cool things we can do as parents is help them to

bypass that, and just go out there and just have a go at things and try

things and learn from the mistakes.

So look, the basis of this message is for complex reasons.

I think as a society that we are socialized into mistake

avoidance, and I get it right?

If you're running a nuclear plant, you probably don't

wanna make too many mistakes.

I get it.

I get there's, in that context, we have systems and processes and procedures.

'cause we've learned that we have to do things quite a rigid manner.

But I do think that as a culture, we can get quite socialized to not want to

fail and stand out and make mistakes.

I get it like, nobody wants to do this.

But again, as I often say, this could be the price tag of admission.

The price tag of the things that you want may come at the cost of mistakes,

and those mistakes will then allow you to learn, which is your recalibration.

And the recalibration that allows for optimization allows

you to become an expert.

It allows you to become a master.

You could pick anybody, right?

You could pick like the anybody who is operating at the highest

levels in anything from brain surgery to professional sport.

There's been a lot of reps.

There's been a lot of reps. There's been a lot of repetition.

There's been a lot of starting from scratch.

The greatest athletes, musicians, painters, authors, everybody

started from scratch somewhere and it was not a linear progression.

It was not.

So if it works for them, it'll work for you.

Pick something, cut yourself some slack and make mistakes and get

out there after a bigger tomorrow.

All right, that's it for me today.

You have my blessing.

Go make mistakes, learn, optimize.

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Hit that subscribe button.

Come and say hello on Instagram.

J Doyle speaks.

Everything else is on the website.

Jonathan Doyle dot co.co.

If you wanna book me to speak consultancy, I do some private coaching for executives.

Everything is on the website for you there, Jonathan doyle.co.

God bless you my friend.

This has been the Daily Podcast and you and I are gonna talk again tomorrow.