September 23, 2025 • 38 mins
In this high-impact episode of Beyond Confidence, host Divya Parekh is joined by award-winning strategy consultant and HBR contributor Kyle Austin Young to break down a bold truth: success isn’t just about willpower—it’s about odds.
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Beyond Confidence is broadcast live Tuesdays at 10AM ET on W4WN Radio - Women 4 Women Network (www.w4wn.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Beyond Confidence TV Show is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Beyond Confidence Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:20):
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Speaker 2 (00:25):
This is Beyond Confidence with your host dvpark. Do you
want to live a more fulfilling life? Do you want
to live your legacy and achieve your personal, professional, and
financial goals? Well? Coming up on ZVO Parks Beyond Confidence,
you will hear real stories of leaders, entrepreneurs, and achievers
who have steps into discomfort, shattered their status quo, and
(00:45):
are living the life they want. You will learn how
relationships are the key to achieving your aspirations and financial goals.
Moving your career business forward does not have to happen
at the expense of your personal or family life or
vice versa. Learn more at www dot divpork dot com
and you can connect with tv ants contact dants dvpark
dot com. This is beyond confidence and now here's your
(01:09):
host TV Park.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Good morning listeners. So great to be here with y'all.
And I just want to share today. Sometimes it's important
to extend kindness to yourself as well. So and when
I talk about kindness is sometimes it's also the kindness
comes as a gentle nudge, and I want to share.
(01:34):
As it was, it was hard for me to wake
up in the morning, and I gave myself a gentle nudge,
got out of the bed, and this was not in
the mood. And then all of a sudden I came
upon this tiny little sprinkler and a ray of sunshine
falling on it that inspired me to write the poem.
(01:56):
So at my core of my heart, I am a writer.
I just want to share that little poem before it
gets started today. So this morning I nearly surrendered to
the warmth of the bed, to the whisper that said stay.
I rose, unwilling, steps heavy, the world dull and gray.
(02:17):
Then a sprinkler scattering diamonds in the sun, ordinary turned luminous, resistance,
turn and wonder, and I knew if I had not moved,
I would have missed this miracle. So I want to
invite your shelf to be kind to your shelf by
(02:37):
even nudging, because sometimes we will give into our zone
of comfort. So that's my little share for the day,
and let's bring on our guest.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
I'm sorry, I didn't mean interrupt you.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Oh no, you're fine. Welcome.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Thank you for having me. What a beautiful poem. How
am I going to follow that?
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Oh, it's it's just it was in the moment, nothing there,
And I thought that it was very becoming. Since you
talk about success, you talk about achieving those bigger goals
by changing the odds.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
And.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
This experience was just very befitting. So let me ask
you usually start out from your childhood, youth, or anyone
in your life who left to positive mark on you.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm going to tell a story
from my early twenties. When I graduated college, I was
very motivated to try to skip as many rungs as
I could on the corporate ladder. I wasn't really inspired
by the entry level positions that I was seeing, so
I wanted to try to pursue something that had the
opportunity to grow as a leader and to try to
make a real impact in an organization. So I worked
(03:53):
very hard and did some very creative things. I talk
about those in the book when I talk about how
to improve your odds of getting a promotion or a
job that might feel out of reach. And I ultimately
became the product development director at a growing health organization.
And at that time, this was almost fifteen years ago,
I was managing people who were twice my age, had
more credentials, more experience, more education than I did. And
(04:15):
it was great to get the job, but there was
a lot of pressure and there were a lot of
people who were really questioning whether or not I could
do this well. And I knew that if I made
a big mistake, there was going to be a risk
that I wasn't going to be able to hang onto
this job for very long. And I did make a
big mistake. I made a mistake pretty quickly. Actually, I
misunderstood a relationship that we had with a contractor, a
graphic designer. I thought this person was being paid by
(04:37):
the project, and turned out there being paid by the hour.
I had either been told incorrect information, or I'd misunderstood
or misremembered it, and so we had made some decisions
in the work that we gave this person that had
an enormous impact on our bill, things that we could
have done internally. We sent off thinking that it was
all paid for and it wasn't. And so again, this
is about fifteen years ago, and one day I came
(04:57):
to work, opened my inbox and I found an expected
invoice for six thousand dollars that was not in the budget.
And it was the result of this misunderstanding and the
relationship we had with this contractor. And at first I
thought he's mistaken, that that's not our agreement. Then finally
I was able to find the original agreement from my predecessor,
(05:18):
and I saw that the contractor was correct. He had
built us appropriately and we really did owe him six
thousand dollars. And this was that big mistake that I'd
been dreading making that I thought I had the potential
to derail this exciting position before it really even got going.
And so I had to face the music and I walked,
you know, walked through the halls to the cfo's office.
I reported directly to the CFO and I knocked on
(05:39):
the door. He was sitting there on the computer. He
turned around. He said, what's going on? And I said,
I need to tell you the truth. We have this
contractor and I've misunderstood our relationship with him, and as
a result, I've spent six thousand dollars that was not
in the budget. And I take that really seriously. I
feel terrible about this. It's not going to happen again,
but I wanted to tell you directly and let you
know that this happened. And I still remember the CFO
(06:01):
again fifteen years ago. He leans back, he closes his eyes,
he takes a deep breath, and I thought, I'm about
to get fired. And then finally he leans forward and
he said, you know, Kyle, when we learn something, there's
usually a cost, and in some context we call that
cost tuition. And in the context of you know, school,
we're very very comfortable with the idea that learning comes
(06:21):
at a cost. We're very comfortable with the idea that
we pay tuition for the insights that we gained in
this life. And he said, I think a lot of
us forget that when we move into our professional lives,
and you've recently made that transition from school into your
professional life. And he said, we're going to call this
six thousand dollars bill tuition, and the tuition is go
find all the agreements that your predecessor entered into, read them,
(06:43):
and do your best to abide by those terms. And
then he just turned back around and went back to work, okay,
And so I went back and I did exactly that,
And it was a helpful lesson for me, both in
the context of doing some homework to not make any
assumptions about the terms of these different agreements that we had,
but also this idea that learning comes at a cost,
(07:03):
that we can call that tuition, and that when we
are comfortable with the idea that we're typically going to
pay some form of tuition or other in order to
learn the things that we need to succeed in life,
it can help us, you know, have the confidence to
take risks and to experiment and to do the things
that will ultimately make us better tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Yes, that's a beautiful story, and it's such a fine,
such a fine example of leadership. Rather than penalizing you,
he helped you see just a different side and a
different angle from looking at the situation from a different
lens and saying that listen, I'm here to support you.
(07:43):
Just don't make it again. And he also gave you
the path to that. I love that story. Thank you
for sharing it. So share with us. You know some
of the things you mentioned that you did not want
to climb many wrongs while you reached to the top
of the letter. So any of their stories, like you know,
(08:05):
where did your life Johnny take you after that? And
any nuggets as you grew in your career.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Sure in the context of that organization, I ultimately did
very well for several years and was able to have
a great impact and got excellent reviews. I ended up
being a part of a layoff, and so that derailed
my life a little bit. I accepted another leadership position.
I was laid off again. That derailed my life a
little bit. And at that point I was tired of
telling my wife that I'd lost my income so unexpectedly,
(08:35):
so I decided to start consulting. I wanted a more
diversified income. I wanted to have several clients so that
I could never be in that position again. So I
used the skills that I got from those two leadership positions.
I started consulting and I was working with a long
list of clients. These were all people who had big goals,
and since I was just starting out at that time
many years ago, a lot of them were people who
other consultants had passed on. These weren't necessarily the people
(08:57):
who were the most likely to succeed. I knew that
my job, if I was going to find success in
this field of consulting, was I was going to have
to ultimately do everything in my power to optimize these
people's odds of success, to do whatever I could to
help them achieve the things that they wanted to achieve.
Some people kind of base their careers around the idea of, well,
I did what I was hired to do, you know,
I did what I was paid for. I did my part.
(09:19):
And I always recognized that if my clients weren't successful,
even though they might have positive feelings toward me, if
the projects failed, they weren't going to be able to
pay me, they weren't going to be able to continue
hiring me. That these people and their organizations had to
be successful for me to be employed long term as
a contractor with these different companies. So a lot of
(09:40):
times I went well outside the scope of my job
and trying to understand what would it really take for
these people to find success, And through that I developed
a tool which is the foundation of my new book.
It's called a success diagram, and a success diagram is
where you map out everything that has to go right
for you or for your client to get the outcome
that they want. Everything that has to go right. You
(10:01):
brainstorm the potential bad outcomes, what are the things that
could happen instead of what we need to happen, And
you have an opportunity if you want to, to layer
some very simple math on top of that that you
can do on your cell phone calculator and get a
real sense of your odds of success currently. And then
in the book, I take people through a five step
framework for improving their odds and when they're done, they
(10:21):
can do the math again, see how it's improved, and
make more informed decisions about what goals to pursue and
make smarter decisions in the context of those individual goals.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Yeah. No, absolutely, so it sounds like definitely creating that
certainty in the uncertainty of situation and things. So if
our listeners are like, you know, like you know, as
they're listening to our conversation. I'm definitely sure they're curious, like,
what are those five steps?
Speaker 4 (10:51):
Sure? Well, when I teach people, some of those steps
are contextualized in the book, but the general principles First,
you need to create a success diagram, and a success
diagram the building blocks of that are what I call
critical points. Critical points are everything that has to go
right in order for you to get what you want. So,
if you're comfortable with it, can I share an analogy
of that?
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Oh? Please, definitely, And also kind of I'm sure, like
you know, the next question is going to be that
how do we know, like you know, which other right
things or which other things that have to go right.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
Sure, I'm going to put that one on hold just
really quickly while I explain the framework a little bit,
and then I'll try to speak to how we identify
the things that need to happen in order for us
to accomplish our goal. So I'm going to use the
analogy of maybe you are thinking about running a marathon,
and you don't have a lot of time to prepare,
but that's a goal a lot of people have, a
lot of people are interested in running a marathon, and
while a lot of organizational goals are very context specific.
(11:41):
This is something I think we can all kind of
wrap our heads around. So let's say you're preparing for
a marathon on short notice. You have ninety days to
get ready, and you know that's not a lot of time.
So you hire a running coach, and your running coach
tells you, we're short on time. But this is doable
if you can do three things. She says, I have
a plan that has three different steps. The first thing
is you're going to have to stick to my fitness
plan for ninety days. You're going to run, you're going
(12:02):
to train, You're going to get ready physically.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
She says.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
The second thing you're going to have to do is
you're going to stick to my nutrition plan. If you
aren't eating the way that I need you to eat,
you aren't going to be able to recover, you aren't
going to be able to train. It's not going to work.
And then she says, the third thing you have to
do is I have a sleep schedule, and you have
to sleep according to the sleep schedule so that you're
going to be ready. And if you do all three
of these things, I can get you to the point
where you're going to be able to run that marathon
in ninety days. All of my clients who actually stick
(12:26):
with this plan are able to make it. But if
you cheat on any of these things, if you only
do one of them, or you only do two of them,
or you only do them half the time, you're not
going to be ready. You're not going to be able
to finish that race in just three months. So let's
take this idea. We're making this up, but this is
a situation where we have three things that need to
go right for us to accomplish our goal. We need
to stick with a fitness plan, a nutrition plan, and
(12:47):
a sleep schedule. Okay, so we have an opportunity to
ask ourselves how likely do we think we are to
accomplish each of those three steps? And I want to
keep this really simple, but I am going to put
some numbers to it. Let's say that I think if
there's a seventy percent chance I'll stick with the fitness plan,
a seventy percent chance I'll stick with a nutrition plan,
and a seventy percent chance I'll stick with the sleep schedule.
(13:07):
I'm keeping this very simple. There's three things that need
to go right. We think there's a seventy percent chance
that will do each of those things well. What most
humans do in this situation is something called averaging. We
look at a goal we consider, to some extent in
our own minds, the things that need to go right,
and if we feel good about each of them individually,
then we will feel good about the goal as a whole.
But that's actually not realistic. If these are true prerequisites
(13:31):
to success, where every single one of them has to
go right in order for us to accomplish what we
intend to accomplish, then we can't average. What we actually
have to do from a mathematical standpoint is we have
to multiply. In this case, that's point seven times point
seven times point seven. That's very easy. I've picked up
my cell phone, I've typed that in and what I
find is I have a thirty four percent chance of
(13:52):
accomplishing this goal. If it's true that I have to
stick with this fitness plan, this nutrition plan, and this
sleep schedule in order to be ready to run this
marriag on, I only have a thirty four percent chance
of doing all three of those things, even though individually
they look good. The odds that I'm going to slip
up on at least one of them are pretty high,
and the odds that I'm ultimately going to successfully run
twenty six miles are very low. So what the book
(14:15):
teaches you how to do is after you've created a
success diagram, after you've gotten a sense of how likely
you are to accomplish a goal, we then start brainstorming
what are the potential bad outcomes that could keep you
from accomplishing each of these individual steps. So let's take
the idea of the fitness plan. What are some things
that might keep me from following through and actually accomplishing
(14:36):
what I'm needing to do in order to prepare physically well.
It's possible that on a day when I have to run,
it might be raining outside and I wouldn't be able
to go for a run. What can I do in
response to that, Well, it might be smart to have
a gym membership. It might be smart to have a
treadmill in my house. It might be smart to buy
an extra set of running shoes and keep them in
the car so that there's a break in the weather,
I can make the most of it whenever and wherever
(14:57):
I am. So those are some responses we could have
to what if I'm concerned that I'm going to deal
with the lack of motivation. You wrote a beautiful poem
that started with you feeling like you didn't want to
leave the warmth of bed, Right, Well, if I don't
want to leave the warmth of bed on a day
when I need to run, what can I do to
help with that? Well, one thing that might help is
maybe I need a running partner. Maybe I need someone
who can bring some accountability and who can help me
stay motivated to actually get up and follow through on
(15:19):
these intentions. What's the third thing that could derail me?
You know, it's possible that I could be derailed, and
again I'm making these up as we go, but maybe
by some kind of injury. So a good stretching routine,
something that could prevent things like shin splints might be
really smart. So what we're doing is we're trying to
identify what are the bad outcomes that could keep us
from doing this. And what most humans do in this
situation is, rather than thinking about what could go wrong,
(15:42):
we try to double down on this desire to succeed.
We try to use desire as this antidote to uncertainty.
If somebody said, you know, why are you so confident
that you're going to be able to run this marathon?
They might say, well, I just really want it, I'm
really committed to this, I'm really focused. But at the
end of the day, none of those things measurably improve
(16:02):
your odds of success. Being really confident or being really
focused isn't going to prevent the rain from coming tomorrow.
Being really committed to running a marathon isn't going to
prevent a shin splint. The things that could actually prevent
that are what I call these hacks, these ways to
try to take the risk out of a potential bad outcome.
At a friend who read the book recently, he said,
(16:23):
you've created a plan for systematically de risking your goals,
and I think that there's a lot of truth in that.
So what I teach people how to do is after
they've identified their critical points, after they've layered some math
on it potentially, and after they have identified the bad
outcomes that could get in their way, we look at
ways to make those less likely. And so I just
want to demonstrate the impact of that. I talked about
how in the previous example, we had about a thirty
(16:45):
four percent chance of successfully being ready on race day
based on what this running coach has told us. So
let's change the numbers. Let's say that after creating all
these contingency plans, after buying the extra set of running shoes,
after getting the gym membership, after finding a running harder,
after initiating the stretching routine, and being similarly intentional with
(17:05):
the idea of a nutrition plan, with the idea of
a sleep schedule. Let's say that after that we are
convinced that there's a ninety percent chance will follow through
from a fitness point of view, and a ninety percent
chance will follow through from a nutrition point of view,
a ninety percent chance will follow through from a sleep
point of view. If we multiply that out, we find
that we now have a seventy three percent chance ultimately
being ready on race day. So we went from a
(17:27):
thirty four percent chance of success to a seventy three
percent chance of success. And we did that by diagramming
what had to go right, being honest with ourselves about
what could potentially go wrong, and using our creativity too,
as my friend says, systematically de risk this goal, and
in doing so, we took something that was a predicted
failure and we turned it into a predicted success. There's
a seventy three percent chance guarantee that you're going to
(17:49):
follow through on all of these things. It doesn't guarantee it,
but we've dramatically changed our odds over the course of
a single goal that can change your outcome, over the
course of many goals that can change your career, and
over the course of a whole lifetime of goals that
can change your legacy.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Oh that was beautiful because what I'm hearing, Kyle is that, Okay,
here's what you want, here's the outcomes, like you know
you talked about like in Marathon in ninety days. You
have your outcomes, and then what obstacles can get in
the way. And now you have these obstacles, the potentials
that could go wrong, that could happen, and you've got
(18:26):
a plan into place. And that is such a beautiful
way to have that because now you're removing the uncertainty.
And when you remove the uncertainty, it takes the fear
out of the equation. And most of the times the
demotivation comes through having that fear of uncertainty, like, oh,
what will happen if this goes wrong and that anticipation,
(18:49):
So you're making that anticipation more tangible. So great insights.
Now we have kind of passed out what does it
look like, and of course in the book will go
into details. I'm sure you know our listeners an audience
will be looking to get your book. Is The next
question that comes to mind is all right, I've got
(19:11):
all of these things in place, Now how do I
know which are the right things that I need to
do to achieve my goal?
Speaker 4 (19:21):
That's absolutely right. I'm glad that you remember that question.
I was going to bring us back there. I promised
I would do my best. Obviously, I can't tell you
the exact steps for every goal that you might want
to pursue. If you're trying to earn a pilot's license,
the steps to accomplishing that are going to be very
different than if you're trying to grow tomatoes in your backyard.
Some tips that I can give you are often the
(19:42):
steps for how to accomplish something. Aren't that difficult to
find If you go to the internet, if you go
to chat GPT, if you do a little bit of research,
if you buy a book about a specific goal in question.
You're usually going to be able to find the recommendations
of how to do something, or you can talk to
someone who's already accomplished it before, say what did you do.
You're usually going to be able to get a sense
of what is expected of you if you do the research.
(20:03):
I wrote this book because I felt like there was
a gap. I felt like there were a lot of
books telling you how to do things, but there wasn't
a book that was helping you optimize your odds of
actually accomplishing it. And so this was my attempt to
give people a way to understand their odds, change their odds,
and hopefully see better outcomes as a result. So, in
terms of the context of an individual goal, those are
(20:25):
a few tips for identifying what the steps might be.
My goal, again, is to help you maximize your odds
of ultimately accomplishing it, and also to give you an
opportunity to prioritize and to make better decisions. A lot
of the people I work with as a consultant are
very smart, they're very ambitious, and they might have ten
different goals that they're thinking about pursuing, and one of
(20:47):
the big challenges for them is which one to pursue first,
or some of them struggle to not say yes to
all ten, and that they'll try to pursue ten different
goals at the same time. One of the nice things
about this framework is it's something that can help you
prioritize when many people are considering which goal to pursue
next in their lives, they'll resort to the idea of
maybe looking at their personal values and saying, which goal
aligns the most with my personal values. And there's wisdom
(21:10):
in that some people will look at which goal might
make the most things possible in the future, sort of
an order of operations. There's a lot of wisdom in that.
I talk about both of those things in the book.
But the reason I think both of those frameworks are
incomplete is they don't take into account your odds of success.
And if you have a goal that is expected to
fail the vast majority of the time, then it might
(21:33):
not matter how much it aligns with your values. It
might not matter what it could make possible if it
were to succeed, because we don't expect it to succeed.
And so when you have a framework like this, you
can take the different goals you're considering you can create
a success diagram, get a bird's eye view of what's
going to have to go right in order to actually
accomplish these things, and then you can make more intentional decisions.
You can, in the context of knowing which goals actually
(21:55):
are expected to succeed, stop and say which one aligns
the most with my Bay values, Stop and say which
one would make the most things possible in the future.
You can also make smarter decisions in the context of
an individual goal when you've mapped out the steps that
have to go right. We use the example of running
a marathon earlier. Those were three things that were being
done concurrently. You needed to follow the fitness routine, the
(22:17):
nutrition routine, and the sleep routine for the full ninety days.
So that's a little bit different. But many goals are
step by step. You maybe I need to get a
person's approval, then I need to develop a prototype, then
I need to sign a manufacturing agreement. Those are steps
that would be in a more specific order. What you
can find is that when you identify a low probability
step along the path to success, sometimes it's very wise
(22:39):
to put that at the beginning of your goal. It
might not be the way you would have done it otherwise.
But if there's a big risk of the project failing
on step seven of ten, something that might theoretically be
a few months out, if you can find some way
to attack that now, then if it's successful, you're going
to have dramatically improved your odds of success. If it
is not successful, you're going to have failed fast. You're
(23:01):
going to have learned that this is a goal that
isn't going to pan out the way you wanted to,
or at least not through this path much earlier in
the process, before you've invested all the time and resources
to get to that. So by front loading these lower
or higher risk steps, steps that have a lower chance
of succeeding, and moving the goal forward, you again have
an opportunity to avoid a lot of potentially unnecessary costs
(23:24):
to try more goals. And one of the things we
talk about in the book in the first chapter is
that repeated attempts can be very powerful. If I have
a ten percent chance of accomplishing something, that doesn't mean
I can't accomplish it. It means that over the course of
ten attempts, we expect me to succeed nine times and
fail one time. And one of the keys to being
able to try several times is making sure that no
one failure completely derails you forever. And the sooner in
(23:47):
the process that you can fail when it's going to happen,
the better off you'll be.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Now some very powerful insights over there, and something that
you mentioned about that it's not about giving up. It's
about learning from those failures and creating those breeding grounds
for future opportunities. So so many times what happens is
that we have the outcomes you have talked about the
(24:16):
steps that could derail it. Now, let's say you have
multiple choices, how can you expose using your method, you
know what the potential futures could be.
Speaker 4 (24:29):
Sure, well, that's the goal. By brand storing potential bad outcomes,
The goal is to get a sense of what could
go wrong so that we can then start proactively trying
to prevent those things from happening. But I think that
you made a really important point when it comes to
the idea that what if something fails, how do we
learn from it? This framework is designed to help you
do that for a couple of reasons. One, a lot
(24:49):
of people who fail at their goals this is surprising.
They can tell you the goal failed, they can't tell
you why. And one of the reasons I think they
can't tell you why is they never stopped to actually
consider the potential bad outcomes that could derail their chances
of ultimately succeeding. And so they get to the end
of something and they know that they didn't get the promotion,
but they never stopped to try to understand why did
not get the promotion. They never stopped to try to
(25:10):
understand why did the business not succeed. And so this
is something that can be incredibly helpful when you're trying
to look back and trying to find those insights for
two reasons. One, it can give you real insight into
why the goal failed. You now have a map that
you can turn to to try to pinpoint the exact
moment where something went wrong, and that will tell you
that that's an area where maybe you're lacking the resources
(25:31):
to be successful. So if you're going to need that
same person's approval for a different goal and you weren't
able to get it this time, we should be very
mindful of that as we consider future goals that might
require that person's approval. It's also going to tell you,
or rather remind you, of the things that did go well.
It's going to show you the steps that you did accomplish.
It's going to show you the steps that you took
to minimize the risk with each one of those steps
(25:53):
by attacking those potential bad outcomes. And so in doing that,
you're now going to have a lot of strategies that
you can apply to a future goal you are going
to need. You know, we've made up the idea of
a working prototype and a future goal. Well, everything that
you apply to this situation, you now have a document.
You now have a record that shows the actions you
took and how they panned out when it came to
that step in your process. So if you encounter another
(26:15):
goal that has a similar prerequisite to success, a similar
step that you have to accomplish, you can often repurpose
the things that you've learned from these past projects. So
by living more intentionally, it's easier to spot the insights
as they come to us. And I think that these
insights are all around us every day. It's just a
matter of seeing them.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Hmm. You said that it's a matter of seeing them,
and that's the piece that's so many times what happens
is that people don't have the awareness. People are so
caught up in the loop and then they're stuck and
like going through that spiral. What are some of the
ways to bring people out of that?
Speaker 4 (26:58):
Tell me more about the spiral, specifically bring them out
of what's spiral.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
And also for example, let's say you know somebody has
failed a couple of times, Sure, and they know that
the odds are there, but brain has its own way.
Mind has its own way of derailing people when they're
getting stuck into the negative spiral. Like you know, those
negatives and negative emotions are there, and sometimes numbers may
not mean as much during that time. So what could
(27:23):
they do to move out of it?
Speaker 4 (27:26):
Yeah, it's a great question. Well, the beauty of this
frameworks it gives you a proactive way to respond to
those type of fears, and it all starts with asking
the question why. If you're telling me I'm nervous as
goal is going to fail, my response is going to
be why. And then if you tell me, well, I'm
worried that I'm not going to be able to get
this person's approval, I'm going to say why. And if
(27:47):
you say, well, I'm just worried they're going to be
in a bad mood. And I'm going to say why, Well,
sometimes they show up in a bad mood on days
when you know that the weather isn't nice outside. Then
I'd say, okay, great, now we've gotten somewhere. So if
we wake up and the weather's bad, what are we
going to do to try to change this person's mood
before the conversation. Maybe we don't want to have a
meeting with them first thing in the morning. Maybe we
(28:09):
need some time for them to settle in. Maybe we
want to send in a colleague to try to have
a friendly conversation with them improve their mood before we
go in there and ask for this. You know, maybe
we want to try to reschedule the meeting. Maybe if
I'm going to try to get someone's approval on a
day when I think they're likely to be in a
bad mood, maybe I'll send them a note and say, hey,
book today, can we move this to tomorrow on a
(28:29):
day when the weather's better. And this kind of silly
analogy that we're making up, But the goal in all
of this is that as we deal with the fears
of things that could go wrong. A lot of people
excuse me, A lot of people criticize us for that,
and we say, hey, be positive, focus on the positive,
you know, don't think so negatively. And I disagree with that.
I think that these are real threats to our success,
(28:50):
and I think that there's incredible value in trying to
understand where the risk lies and trying to take away
as much of that risk as we can.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Yes. Absolutely, And that's the thing, right, the power of
association that when you are negating your own feelings and
emotions like oh, you've got to be positive, you're not
acknowledging the failures that could happen. And it's super important
to acknowledge that reality. So what I'm hearing and understanding
call over here is that what you're doing is you
(29:21):
are taking the goals and bringing some a dash of reality,
a dash of planning, and a dash of acts that
can preempt what could go wrong.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
That's exactly the goal. The goal is to preempt what
would go wrong. Some people we use the phrase we'll
cross that bridge when we come to it, but in
many situations, you aren't going to be able to fix
something once it's past a certain point. Whereas you could
quite likely prevent it entirely once that person tells you no.
For example, the person who's approval you need, you might
(29:56):
not really have a path toward getting them to reconsider that.
But if you can get the yes the first time,
then that's certainly something that's worth being intentional about. So
we joke that an ounce of prevention is worth a
pound of cure. I think that focusing on your odds
of success is one of the most reliable ways to
get more of what you want in life. There are
a lot of books that will teach you how to
(30:16):
optimize some aspect of your life in general, how to
become more emotionally intelligent, how to improve your habits, how
to create a great morning routine. Each of those things
can be individually valuable, but none of them are positioned
to help us transform our odds in the context of
a specific goal. To do that, we have to understand
what's going to need to go right, what could go wrong,
(30:39):
and what can I do to minimize the risk of
those bad outcomes. If we start consistently doing that every time,
we can truly change the outcomes that we're seeing each
and every day. And you don't have to use numbers.
The book is called Success as a Numbers Game, but
this is a story driven framework. I just told you
a story about running a marathon, and there weren't a
lot of numbers in that. Even if we had taken
the numbers out, we still could have experience against the
(31:00):
power of it, identifying what was going to have to
go right, brainstorming what could go wrong, and doing everything
we could to take the risk out of those bad outcomes.
We wouldn't necessarily have a prediction of how likely we
were to succeed, but we could be confident that we
did improve our odds of success. And you asked earlier,
how do we identify the steps on the path to
our goal? Well, there are going to be some goals
where you may not have the full picture up front,
(31:22):
and that's okay. What you can do is you work
on the steps that you do know about. It may
just be one step at a time. I know what
the next thing that I need to do is great.
We need to identify the risk and we need to
do what we can to take it out of that
And if we're successful at that step and we moved
to the next one, we're going to do the same
thing again, one step at a time, until we ultimately
end up where we're hoping to end up.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yeah. No, that's definitely powerful. It's almost like driving your
car and a fog you cannot see it. You have
your headlights, and it's knowing that, Okay, I able to
see the ten feet, then I'm going to see the
next ten feet. And one thing I do want to
come back on is when you talked about getting the
approval of someone or having that opportunity to get the
(32:08):
buy in from your stakeholders. So it's important to build
the relationships that if you know where you're going, you
know you've got to collect some of these buy ins.
You've got to have influence on these people. So as
you're thinking it through, you can even kind of go
and do a deeper dive that Okay, what's in it
for them, what's in it for you? And looking at
(32:30):
it from you know, different lenses of like the personal
lens and organizational lens and the relational lens. When you
do that, that relationship will take you long ways. And
going back to what you said is like, it's again,
what could go wrong? So if you are anticipating that,
then even the human factor is captured in.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
That that's absolutely right in the book. I sometimes call
that passive probability hacking. If I know what's going to
have to go right in the future for me to
accomplish a goal that I'm actively pursuing, or maybe a
goal that I'm just thinking about, I can start living
my life today looking for ways to change my odds
of success. So if there's a potential goal that I'm
considering that's going to involve a certain person's approval, I
(33:13):
can start investing in that relationship now in preparation for
the possibility that someday I'll need it, whether you know,
whether on a goal that I'm actively pursuing or one
that I'm just considering. So when you have a sense
of what you want to accomplish in life and of
what it's going to actually take, you can start collecting
assets and advantages, kind of in the same way that
(33:33):
you know you might go on an Easter egg gun,
You pick up the egg, you put it in your basket,
and then you'll you'll open up the eggs later. I
find that accomplishing our goals can be a lot like that.
When we have a map of where we're headed, and
that's what a success diagram is intended to be. It's
been very helpful for my clients. It allowed me to
empower them to accomplishing is that nobody thought they were
going to accomplish. And that's what changed my consulting career
(33:55):
was people succeeding who no one really expected to succeed,
and they said, what's their secret advantage? How are they
doing this? Well? I was doing everything I could to
take the risk out of their goals and that led
to some exciting opportunities writing for Harvard Business Review and Forbes,
and Psychology Today, the Boston Globe, a host of other places,
and ultimately I was really fortunate to get the opportunity
to write this book.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
Congratulations Kyle on your success and you're absolutely right. You're
using this great framework that allows people to have the
clarity as to where they're going and allowing them to
focus on the efforts that need to happen, and as
a result of that, that creates momentum towards the goal.
So thank you for joining us. Any last thoughts you'd
(34:37):
like to share with our audience.
Speaker 4 (34:39):
Well, first and foremost, I want to say thank you
so much for having me. I'm honored to be here.
This has been a lot of fun. What I would
encourage people to consider is that every goal that you're
pursuing has two hidden numbers attached to it. There's a
probability of success and a probability of failure. Most people
never think about that. They assume that their goals, or
their odds rather are unknowable. They're unchangeable and therefore irrelevant.
(35:00):
I don't think that's true. I think that you have
an opportunity to get a real sense of how likely
you are to accomplish your goals. I think that in
doing that, you can prioritize more effectively. I think that,
perhaps even more importantly, you have an opportunity to change
your odds. That's the subtitle to my book, Achieve bigger
goals by changing the odds. Don't settle for the odds
you're dealt. A lot of people they think the game
(35:21):
is rigged. They think that it's so unfair that so
many of the things they're trying to accomplish don't go
the way that they want. And one of the challenging
conversations I often have to have with clients is looking
back at some of these goals and saying I wouldn't
have expected that to succeed based on what I'm looking
at in this success diagram. A lot of times people
haven't truly considered what has to go right. They haven't
truly considered the risks of what could go wrong. They
(35:43):
haven't done the math and broken this kind of trap
of averaging in their heads instead of realizing that if
you need all of these things to go right, you
can't average, you have to multiply. So I would encourage
you to be very intentional about this. I know that
it's tempting to just want to resort to willpower, to
want to resort to desire, to want to resort to
just the idea that I'm very committed to this goal.
(36:05):
I would just say again, that is not an antidote
to uncertainty. That is not a solution to the challenges
or the risks that you're going to face. Being proactive,
being intentional is, and it's so much easier to be
proactive and intentional and effective if you have a diagram
showing you what to look at.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Absolutely some great points there, Kyle, and thank you for
joining us. Some very powerful nuggets there, and a wonderful audience.
I'm sure that you know you're going to head over
to Amazon check out Kyle's website, and if you want
to share your website very quickly and share with us,
(36:45):
where can we find the books and how can people
connect with you?
Speaker 4 (36:49):
Sure success is a numbers game, is the title of
the book. I'm Kyle Austin Young. You can find that
on Amazon. You can find the Marnes and Noble. You
can buy it directly on the Penguin Random House website.
I would very much appreciate that, and I'm confident that
it'll have a big impact on your life if you
want to connect with me directly. I was sharing my
website url for a while and then I was on
a show where I heard another guest say connect with
me on LinkedIn, and I thought that was really charming
(37:10):
and accessible. So you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm
Kyle Austin Young. I have websites and contact forms and
all of those things, but it would be a lot
more fun to just have a conversation with you. So
look me up, send me a message, be an honor
to connect well.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
Thank you for joining us, and keep making the difference
because it's important to make an impact in our lives. Today.
We are surrounded by so many things that can be
negative and that can be just pulling the people's morale down.
So keep making a difference, keep making an impact and
(37:44):
wonderful audience. Reach out to us, let us know how
we can support you in your journey and help you
live the life that you deserve. And thank you one
for making the show possible. Be well and take care
until next time.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Thank you for being part of Beyond Confidence. With your host,
d V Park, we hope you have learned more about
how to start living the life you want. Each week
on Beyond Confidence, you hear stories of real people who've
experienced growth by overcoming their fears and building meaningful relationships.
During Beyond Confidence, Vapark shares what happened to her when
she stepped out of her comfort zone to work directly
(38:21):
with people across the globe. She not only coaches people
how to form hard connections, but also transform relationships to
mutually beneficial partnerships as they strive to live the life
they want. If you are ready to live the life
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(38:41):
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(00:20):
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Speaker 2 (00:25):
This is Beyond Confidence with your host dvpark. Do you
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(01:09):
host TV Park.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Good morning listeners. So great to be here with y'all.
And I just want to share today. Sometimes it's important
to extend kindness to yourself as well. So and when
I talk about kindness is sometimes it's also the kindness
comes as a gentle nudge, and I want to share.
(01:34):
As it was, it was hard for me to wake
up in the morning, and I gave myself a gentle nudge,
got out of the bed, and this was not in
the mood. And then all of a sudden I came
upon this tiny little sprinkler and a ray of sunshine
falling on it that inspired me to write the poem.
(01:56):
So at my core of my heart, I am a writer.
I just want to share that little poem before it
gets started today. So this morning I nearly surrendered to
the warmth of the bed, to the whisper that said stay.
I rose, unwilling, steps heavy, the world dull and gray.
(02:17):
Then a sprinkler scattering diamonds in the sun, ordinary turned luminous, resistance,
turn and wonder, and I knew if I had not moved,
I would have missed this miracle. So I want to
invite your shelf to be kind to your shelf by
(02:37):
even nudging, because sometimes we will give into our zone
of comfort. So that's my little share for the day,
and let's bring on our guest.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
I'm sorry, I didn't mean interrupt you.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Oh no, you're fine. Welcome.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Thank you for having me. What a beautiful poem. How
am I going to follow that?
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Oh, it's it's just it was in the moment, nothing there,
And I thought that it was very becoming. Since you
talk about success, you talk about achieving those bigger goals
by changing the odds.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
And.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
This experience was just very befitting. So let me ask
you usually start out from your childhood, youth, or anyone
in your life who left to positive mark on you.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm going to tell a story
from my early twenties. When I graduated college, I was
very motivated to try to skip as many rungs as
I could on the corporate ladder. I wasn't really inspired
by the entry level positions that I was seeing, so
I wanted to try to pursue something that had the
opportunity to grow as a leader and to try to
make a real impact in an organization. So I worked
(03:53):
very hard and did some very creative things. I talk
about those in the book when I talk about how
to improve your odds of getting a promotion or a
job that might feel out of reach. And I ultimately
became the product development director at a growing health organization.
And at that time, this was almost fifteen years ago,
I was managing people who were twice my age, had
more credentials, more experience, more education than I did. And
(04:15):
it was great to get the job, but there was
a lot of pressure and there were a lot of
people who were really questioning whether or not I could
do this well. And I knew that if I made
a big mistake, there was going to be a risk
that I wasn't going to be able to hang onto
this job for very long. And I did make a
big mistake. I made a mistake pretty quickly. Actually, I
misunderstood a relationship that we had with a contractor, a
graphic designer. I thought this person was being paid by
(04:37):
the project, and turned out there being paid by the hour.
I had either been told incorrect information, or I'd misunderstood
or misremembered it, and so we had made some decisions
in the work that we gave this person that had
an enormous impact on our bill, things that we could
have done internally. We sent off thinking that it was
all paid for and it wasn't. And so again, this
is about fifteen years ago, and one day I came
(04:57):
to work, opened my inbox and I found an expected
invoice for six thousand dollars that was not in the budget.
And it was the result of this misunderstanding and the
relationship we had with this contractor. And at first I
thought he's mistaken, that that's not our agreement. Then finally
I was able to find the original agreement from my predecessor,
(05:18):
and I saw that the contractor was correct. He had
built us appropriately and we really did owe him six
thousand dollars. And this was that big mistake that I'd
been dreading making that I thought I had the potential
to derail this exciting position before it really even got going.
And so I had to face the music and I walked,
you know, walked through the halls to the cfo's office.
I reported directly to the CFO and I knocked on
(05:39):
the door. He was sitting there on the computer. He
turned around. He said, what's going on? And I said,
I need to tell you the truth. We have this
contractor and I've misunderstood our relationship with him, and as
a result, I've spent six thousand dollars that was not
in the budget. And I take that really seriously. I
feel terrible about this. It's not going to happen again,
but I wanted to tell you directly and let you
know that this happened. And I still remember the CFO
(06:01):
again fifteen years ago. He leans back, he closes his eyes,
he takes a deep breath, and I thought, I'm about
to get fired. And then finally he leans forward and
he said, you know, Kyle, when we learn something, there's
usually a cost, and in some context we call that
cost tuition. And in the context of you know, school,
we're very very comfortable with the idea that learning comes
(06:21):
at a cost. We're very comfortable with the idea that
we pay tuition for the insights that we gained in
this life. And he said, I think a lot of
us forget that when we move into our professional lives,
and you've recently made that transition from school into your
professional life. And he said, we're going to call this
six thousand dollars bill tuition, and the tuition is go
find all the agreements that your predecessor entered into, read them,
(06:43):
and do your best to abide by those terms. And
then he just turned back around and went back to work, okay,
And so I went back and I did exactly that,
And it was a helpful lesson for me, both in
the context of doing some homework to not make any
assumptions about the terms of these different agreements that we had,
but also this idea that learning comes at a cost,
(07:03):
that we can call that tuition, and that when we
are comfortable with the idea that we're typically going to
pay some form of tuition or other in order to
learn the things that we need to succeed in life,
it can help us, you know, have the confidence to
take risks and to experiment and to do the things
that will ultimately make us better tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Yes, that's a beautiful story, and it's such a fine,
such a fine example of leadership. Rather than penalizing you,
he helped you see just a different side and a
different angle from looking at the situation from a different
lens and saying that listen, I'm here to support you.
(07:43):
Just don't make it again. And he also gave you
the path to that. I love that story. Thank you
for sharing it. So share with us. You know some
of the things you mentioned that you did not want
to climb many wrongs while you reached to the top
of the letter. So any of their stories, like you know,
(08:05):
where did your life Johnny take you after that? And
any nuggets as you grew in your career.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Sure in the context of that organization, I ultimately did
very well for several years and was able to have
a great impact and got excellent reviews. I ended up
being a part of a layoff, and so that derailed
my life a little bit. I accepted another leadership position.
I was laid off again. That derailed my life a
little bit. And at that point I was tired of
telling my wife that I'd lost my income so unexpectedly,
(08:35):
so I decided to start consulting. I wanted a more
diversified income. I wanted to have several clients so that
I could never be in that position again. So I
used the skills that I got from those two leadership positions.
I started consulting and I was working with a long
list of clients. These were all people who had big goals,
and since I was just starting out at that time
many years ago, a lot of them were people who
other consultants had passed on. These weren't necessarily the people
(08:57):
who were the most likely to succeed. I knew that
my job, if I was going to find success in
this field of consulting, was I was going to have
to ultimately do everything in my power to optimize these
people's odds of success, to do whatever I could to
help them achieve the things that they wanted to achieve.
Some people kind of base their careers around the idea of, well,
I did what I was hired to do, you know,
I did what I was paid for. I did my part.
(09:19):
And I always recognized that if my clients weren't successful,
even though they might have positive feelings toward me, if
the projects failed, they weren't going to be able to
pay me, they weren't going to be able to continue
hiring me. That these people and their organizations had to
be successful for me to be employed long term as
a contractor with these different companies. So a lot of
(09:40):
times I went well outside the scope of my job
and trying to understand what would it really take for
these people to find success, And through that I developed
a tool which is the foundation of my new book.
It's called a success diagram, and a success diagram is
where you map out everything that has to go right
for you or for your client to get the outcome
that they want. Everything that has to go right. You
(10:01):
brainstorm the potential bad outcomes, what are the things that
could happen instead of what we need to happen, And
you have an opportunity if you want to, to layer
some very simple math on top of that that you
can do on your cell phone calculator and get a
real sense of your odds of success currently. And then
in the book, I take people through a five step
framework for improving their odds and when they're done, they
(10:21):
can do the math again, see how it's improved, and
make more informed decisions about what goals to pursue and
make smarter decisions in the context of those individual goals.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Yeah. No, absolutely, so it sounds like definitely creating that
certainty in the uncertainty of situation and things. So if
our listeners are like, you know, like you know, as
they're listening to our conversation. I'm definitely sure they're curious, like,
what are those five steps?
Speaker 4 (10:51):
Sure? Well, when I teach people, some of those steps
are contextualized in the book, but the general principles First,
you need to create a success diagram, and a success
diagram the building blocks of that are what I call
critical points. Critical points are everything that has to go
right in order for you to get what you want. So,
if you're comfortable with it, can I share an analogy
of that?
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Oh? Please, definitely, And also kind of I'm sure, like
you know, the next question is going to be that
how do we know, like you know, which other right
things or which other things that have to go right.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
Sure, I'm going to put that one on hold just
really quickly while I explain the framework a little bit,
and then I'll try to speak to how we identify
the things that need to happen in order for us
to accomplish our goal. So I'm going to use the
analogy of maybe you are thinking about running a marathon,
and you don't have a lot of time to prepare,
but that's a goal a lot of people have, a
lot of people are interested in running a marathon, and
while a lot of organizational goals are very context specific.
(11:41):
This is something I think we can all kind of
wrap our heads around. So let's say you're preparing for
a marathon on short notice. You have ninety days to
get ready, and you know that's not a lot of time.
So you hire a running coach, and your running coach
tells you, we're short on time. But this is doable
if you can do three things. She says, I have
a plan that has three different steps. The first thing
is you're going to have to stick to my fitness
plan for ninety days. You're going to run, you're going
(12:02):
to train, You're going to get ready physically.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
She says.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
The second thing you're going to have to do is
you're going to stick to my nutrition plan. If you
aren't eating the way that I need you to eat,
you aren't going to be able to recover, you aren't
going to be able to train. It's not going to work.
And then she says, the third thing you have to
do is I have a sleep schedule, and you have
to sleep according to the sleep schedule so that you're
going to be ready. And if you do all three
of these things, I can get you to the point
where you're going to be able to run that marathon
in ninety days. All of my clients who actually stick
(12:26):
with this plan are able to make it. But if
you cheat on any of these things, if you only
do one of them, or you only do two of them,
or you only do them half the time, you're not
going to be ready. You're not going to be able
to finish that race in just three months. So let's
take this idea. We're making this up, but this is
a situation where we have three things that need to
go right for us to accomplish our goal. We need
to stick with a fitness plan, a nutrition plan, and
(12:47):
a sleep schedule. Okay, so we have an opportunity to
ask ourselves how likely do we think we are to
accomplish each of those three steps? And I want to
keep this really simple, but I am going to put
some numbers to it. Let's say that I think if
there's a seventy percent chance I'll stick with the fitness plan,
a seventy percent chance I'll stick with a nutrition plan,
and a seventy percent chance I'll stick with the sleep schedule.
(13:07):
I'm keeping this very simple. There's three things that need
to go right. We think there's a seventy percent chance
that will do each of those things well. What most
humans do in this situation is something called averaging. We
look at a goal we consider, to some extent in
our own minds, the things that need to go right,
and if we feel good about each of them individually,
then we will feel good about the goal as a whole.
But that's actually not realistic. If these are true prerequisites
(13:31):
to success, where every single one of them has to
go right in order for us to accomplish what we
intend to accomplish, then we can't average. What we actually
have to do from a mathematical standpoint is we have
to multiply. In this case, that's point seven times point
seven times point seven. That's very easy. I've picked up
my cell phone, I've typed that in and what I
find is I have a thirty four percent chance of
(13:52):
accomplishing this goal. If it's true that I have to
stick with this fitness plan, this nutrition plan, and this
sleep schedule in order to be ready to run this
marriag on, I only have a thirty four percent chance
of doing all three of those things, even though individually
they look good. The odds that I'm going to slip
up on at least one of them are pretty high,
and the odds that I'm ultimately going to successfully run
twenty six miles are very low. So what the book
(14:15):
teaches you how to do is after you've created a
success diagram, after you've gotten a sense of how likely
you are to accomplish a goal, we then start brainstorming
what are the potential bad outcomes that could keep you
from accomplishing each of these individual steps. So let's take
the idea of the fitness plan. What are some things
that might keep me from following through and actually accomplishing
(14:36):
what I'm needing to do in order to prepare physically well.
It's possible that on a day when I have to run,
it might be raining outside and I wouldn't be able
to go for a run. What can I do in
response to that, Well, it might be smart to have
a gym membership. It might be smart to have a
treadmill in my house. It might be smart to buy
an extra set of running shoes and keep them in
the car so that there's a break in the weather,
I can make the most of it whenever and wherever
(14:57):
I am. So those are some responses we could have
to what if I'm concerned that I'm going to deal
with the lack of motivation. You wrote a beautiful poem
that started with you feeling like you didn't want to
leave the warmth of bed, Right, Well, if I don't
want to leave the warmth of bed on a day
when I need to run, what can I do to
help with that? Well, one thing that might help is
maybe I need a running partner. Maybe I need someone
who can bring some accountability and who can help me
stay motivated to actually get up and follow through on
(15:19):
these intentions. What's the third thing that could derail me?
You know, it's possible that I could be derailed, and
again I'm making these up as we go, but maybe
by some kind of injury. So a good stretching routine,
something that could prevent things like shin splints might be
really smart. So what we're doing is we're trying to
identify what are the bad outcomes that could keep us
from doing this. And what most humans do in this
situation is, rather than thinking about what could go wrong,
(15:42):
we try to double down on this desire to succeed.
We try to use desire as this antidote to uncertainty.
If somebody said, you know, why are you so confident
that you're going to be able to run this marathon?
They might say, well, I just really want it, I'm
really committed to this, I'm really focused. But at the
end of the day, none of those things measurably improve
(16:02):
your odds of success. Being really confident or being really
focused isn't going to prevent the rain from coming tomorrow.
Being really committed to running a marathon isn't going to
prevent a shin splint. The things that could actually prevent
that are what I call these hacks, these ways to
try to take the risk out of a potential bad outcome.
At a friend who read the book recently, he said,
(16:23):
you've created a plan for systematically de risking your goals,
and I think that there's a lot of truth in that.
So what I teach people how to do is after
they've identified their critical points, after they've layered some math
on it potentially, and after they have identified the bad
outcomes that could get in their way, we look at
ways to make those less likely. And so I just
want to demonstrate the impact of that. I talked about
how in the previous example, we had about a thirty
(16:45):
four percent chance of successfully being ready on race day
based on what this running coach has told us. So
let's change the numbers. Let's say that after creating all
these contingency plans, after buying the extra set of running shoes,
after getting the gym membership, after finding a running harder,
after initiating the stretching routine, and being similarly intentional with
(17:05):
the idea of a nutrition plan, with the idea of
a sleep schedule. Let's say that after that we are
convinced that there's a ninety percent chance will follow through
from a fitness point of view, and a ninety percent
chance will follow through from a nutrition point of view,
a ninety percent chance will follow through from a sleep
point of view. If we multiply that out, we find
that we now have a seventy three percent chance ultimately
being ready on race day. So we went from a
(17:27):
thirty four percent chance of success to a seventy three
percent chance of success. And we did that by diagramming
what had to go right, being honest with ourselves about
what could potentially go wrong, and using our creativity too,
as my friend says, systematically de risk this goal, and
in doing so, we took something that was a predicted
failure and we turned it into a predicted success. There's
a seventy three percent chance guarantee that you're going to
(17:49):
follow through on all of these things. It doesn't guarantee it,
but we've dramatically changed our odds over the course of
a single goal that can change your outcome, over the
course of many goals that can change your career, and
over the course of a whole lifetime of goals that
can change your legacy.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Oh that was beautiful because what I'm hearing, Kyle is that, Okay,
here's what you want, here's the outcomes, like you know
you talked about like in Marathon in ninety days. You
have your outcomes, and then what obstacles can get in
the way. And now you have these obstacles, the potentials
that could go wrong, that could happen, and you've got
(18:26):
a plan into place. And that is such a beautiful
way to have that because now you're removing the uncertainty.
And when you remove the uncertainty, it takes the fear
out of the equation. And most of the times the
demotivation comes through having that fear of uncertainty, like, oh,
what will happen if this goes wrong and that anticipation,
(18:49):
So you're making that anticipation more tangible. So great insights.
Now we have kind of passed out what does it
look like, and of course in the book will go
into details. I'm sure you know our listeners an audience
will be looking to get your book. Is The next
question that comes to mind is all right, I've got
(19:11):
all of these things in place, Now how do I
know which are the right things that I need to
do to achieve my goal?
Speaker 4 (19:21):
That's absolutely right. I'm glad that you remember that question.
I was going to bring us back there. I promised
I would do my best. Obviously, I can't tell you
the exact steps for every goal that you might want
to pursue. If you're trying to earn a pilot's license,
the steps to accomplishing that are going to be very
different than if you're trying to grow tomatoes in your backyard.
Some tips that I can give you are often the
(19:42):
steps for how to accomplish something. Aren't that difficult to
find If you go to the internet, if you go
to chat GPT, if you do a little bit of research,
if you buy a book about a specific goal in question.
You're usually going to be able to find the recommendations
of how to do something, or you can talk to
someone who's already accomplished it before, say what did you do.
You're usually going to be able to get a sense
of what is expected of you if you do the research.
(20:03):
I wrote this book because I felt like there was
a gap. I felt like there were a lot of
books telling you how to do things, but there wasn't
a book that was helping you optimize your odds of
actually accomplishing it. And so this was my attempt to
give people a way to understand their odds, change their odds,
and hopefully see better outcomes as a result. So, in
terms of the context of an individual goal, those are
(20:25):
a few tips for identifying what the steps might be.
My goal, again, is to help you maximize your odds
of ultimately accomplishing it, and also to give you an
opportunity to prioritize and to make better decisions. A lot
of the people I work with as a consultant are
very smart, they're very ambitious, and they might have ten
different goals that they're thinking about pursuing, and one of
(20:47):
the big challenges for them is which one to pursue first,
or some of them struggle to not say yes to
all ten, and that they'll try to pursue ten different
goals at the same time. One of the nice things
about this framework is it's something that can help you
prioritize when many people are considering which goal to pursue
next in their lives, they'll resort to the idea of
maybe looking at their personal values and saying, which goal
aligns the most with my personal values. And there's wisdom
(21:10):
in that some people will look at which goal might
make the most things possible in the future, sort of
an order of operations. There's a lot of wisdom in that.
I talk about both of those things in the book.
But the reason I think both of those frameworks are
incomplete is they don't take into account your odds of success.
And if you have a goal that is expected to
fail the vast majority of the time, then it might
(21:33):
not matter how much it aligns with your values. It
might not matter what it could make possible if it
were to succeed, because we don't expect it to succeed.
And so when you have a framework like this, you
can take the different goals you're considering you can create
a success diagram, get a bird's eye view of what's
going to have to go right in order to actually
accomplish these things, and then you can make more intentional decisions.
You can, in the context of knowing which goals actually
(21:55):
are expected to succeed, stop and say which one aligns
the most with my Bay values, Stop and say which
one would make the most things possible in the future.
You can also make smarter decisions in the context of
an individual goal when you've mapped out the steps that
have to go right. We use the example of running
a marathon earlier. Those were three things that were being
done concurrently. You needed to follow the fitness routine, the
(22:17):
nutrition routine, and the sleep routine for the full ninety days.
So that's a little bit different. But many goals are
step by step. You maybe I need to get a
person's approval, then I need to develop a prototype, then
I need to sign a manufacturing agreement. Those are steps
that would be in a more specific order. What you
can find is that when you identify a low probability
step along the path to success, sometimes it's very wise
(22:39):
to put that at the beginning of your goal. It
might not be the way you would have done it otherwise.
But if there's a big risk of the project failing
on step seven of ten, something that might theoretically be
a few months out, if you can find some way
to attack that now, then if it's successful, you're going
to have dramatically improved your odds of success. If it
is not successful, you're going to have failed fast. You're
(23:01):
going to have learned that this is a goal that
isn't going to pan out the way you wanted to,
or at least not through this path much earlier in
the process, before you've invested all the time and resources
to get to that. So by front loading these lower
or higher risk steps, steps that have a lower chance
of succeeding, and moving the goal forward, you again have
an opportunity to avoid a lot of potentially unnecessary costs
(23:24):
to try more goals. And one of the things we
talk about in the book in the first chapter is
that repeated attempts can be very powerful. If I have
a ten percent chance of accomplishing something, that doesn't mean
I can't accomplish it. It means that over the course of
ten attempts, we expect me to succeed nine times and
fail one time. And one of the keys to being
able to try several times is making sure that no
one failure completely derails you forever. And the sooner in
(23:47):
the process that you can fail when it's going to happen,
the better off you'll be.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Now some very powerful insights over there, and something that
you mentioned about that it's not about giving up. It's
about learning from those failures and creating those breeding grounds
for future opportunities. So so many times what happens is
that we have the outcomes you have talked about the
(24:16):
steps that could derail it. Now, let's say you have
multiple choices, how can you expose using your method, you
know what the potential futures could be.
Speaker 4 (24:29):
Sure, well, that's the goal. By brand storing potential bad outcomes,
The goal is to get a sense of what could
go wrong so that we can then start proactively trying
to prevent those things from happening. But I think that
you made a really important point when it comes to
the idea that what if something fails, how do we
learn from it? This framework is designed to help you
do that for a couple of reasons. One, a lot
(24:49):
of people who fail at their goals this is surprising.
They can tell you the goal failed, they can't tell
you why. And one of the reasons I think they
can't tell you why is they never stopped to actually
consider the potential bad outcomes that could derail their chances
of ultimately succeeding. And so they get to the end
of something and they know that they didn't get the promotion,
but they never stopped to try to understand why did
not get the promotion. They never stopped to try to
(25:10):
understand why did the business not succeed. And so this
is something that can be incredibly helpful when you're trying
to look back and trying to find those insights for
two reasons. One, it can give you real insight into
why the goal failed. You now have a map that
you can turn to to try to pinpoint the exact
moment where something went wrong, and that will tell you
that that's an area where maybe you're lacking the resources
(25:31):
to be successful. So if you're going to need that
same person's approval for a different goal and you weren't
able to get it this time, we should be very
mindful of that as we consider future goals that might
require that person's approval. It's also going to tell you,
or rather remind you, of the things that did go well.
It's going to show you the steps that you did accomplish.
It's going to show you the steps that you took
to minimize the risk with each one of those steps
(25:53):
by attacking those potential bad outcomes. And so in doing that,
you're now going to have a lot of strategies that
you can apply to a future goal you are going
to need. You know, we've made up the idea of
a working prototype and a future goal. Well, everything that
you apply to this situation, you now have a document.
You now have a record that shows the actions you
took and how they panned out when it came to
that step in your process. So if you encounter another
(26:15):
goal that has a similar prerequisite to success, a similar
step that you have to accomplish, you can often repurpose
the things that you've learned from these past projects. So
by living more intentionally, it's easier to spot the insights
as they come to us. And I think that these
insights are all around us every day. It's just a
matter of seeing them.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Hmm. You said that it's a matter of seeing them,
and that's the piece that's so many times what happens
is that people don't have the awareness. People are so
caught up in the loop and then they're stuck and
like going through that spiral. What are some of the
ways to bring people out of that?
Speaker 4 (26:58):
Tell me more about the spiral, specifically bring them out
of what's spiral.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
And also for example, let's say you know somebody has
failed a couple of times, Sure, and they know that
the odds are there, but brain has its own way.
Mind has its own way of derailing people when they're
getting stuck into the negative spiral. Like you know, those
negatives and negative emotions are there, and sometimes numbers may
not mean as much during that time. So what could
(27:23):
they do to move out of it?
Speaker 4 (27:26):
Yeah, it's a great question. Well, the beauty of this
frameworks it gives you a proactive way to respond to
those type of fears, and it all starts with asking
the question why. If you're telling me I'm nervous as
goal is going to fail, my response is going to
be why. And then if you tell me, well, I'm
worried that I'm not going to be able to get
this person's approval, I'm going to say why. And if
(27:47):
you say, well, I'm just worried they're going to be
in a bad mood. And I'm going to say why, Well,
sometimes they show up in a bad mood on days
when you know that the weather isn't nice outside. Then
I'd say, okay, great, now we've gotten somewhere. So if
we wake up and the weather's bad, what are we
going to do to try to change this person's mood
before the conversation. Maybe we don't want to have a
meeting with them first thing in the morning. Maybe we
(28:09):
need some time for them to settle in. Maybe we
want to send in a colleague to try to have
a friendly conversation with them improve their mood before we
go in there and ask for this. You know, maybe
we want to try to reschedule the meeting. Maybe if
I'm going to try to get someone's approval on a
day when I think they're likely to be in a
bad mood, maybe I'll send them a note and say, hey,
book today, can we move this to tomorrow on a
(28:29):
day when the weather's better. And this kind of silly
analogy that we're making up, But the goal in all
of this is that as we deal with the fears
of things that could go wrong. A lot of people
excuse me, A lot of people criticize us for that,
and we say, hey, be positive, focus on the positive,
you know, don't think so negatively. And I disagree with that.
I think that these are real threats to our success,
(28:50):
and I think that there's incredible value in trying to
understand where the risk lies and trying to take away
as much of that risk as we can.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Yes. Absolutely, And that's the thing, right, the power of
association that when you are negating your own feelings and
emotions like oh, you've got to be positive, you're not
acknowledging the failures that could happen. And it's super important
to acknowledge that reality. So what I'm hearing and understanding
call over here is that what you're doing is you
(29:21):
are taking the goals and bringing some a dash of reality,
a dash of planning, and a dash of acts that
can preempt what could go wrong.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
That's exactly the goal. The goal is to preempt what
would go wrong. Some people we use the phrase we'll
cross that bridge when we come to it, but in
many situations, you aren't going to be able to fix
something once it's past a certain point. Whereas you could
quite likely prevent it entirely once that person tells you no.
For example, the person who's approval you need, you might
(29:56):
not really have a path toward getting them to reconsider that.
But if you can get the yes the first time,
then that's certainly something that's worth being intentional about. So
we joke that an ounce of prevention is worth a
pound of cure. I think that focusing on your odds
of success is one of the most reliable ways to
get more of what you want in life. There are
a lot of books that will teach you how to
(30:16):
optimize some aspect of your life in general, how to
become more emotionally intelligent, how to improve your habits, how
to create a great morning routine. Each of those things
can be individually valuable, but none of them are positioned
to help us transform our odds in the context of
a specific goal. To do that, we have to understand
what's going to need to go right, what could go wrong,
(30:39):
and what can I do to minimize the risk of
those bad outcomes. If we start consistently doing that every time,
we can truly change the outcomes that we're seeing each
and every day. And you don't have to use numbers.
The book is called Success as a Numbers Game, but
this is a story driven framework. I just told you
a story about running a marathon, and there weren't a
lot of numbers in that. Even if we had taken
the numbers out, we still could have experience against the
(31:00):
power of it, identifying what was going to have to
go right, brainstorming what could go wrong, and doing everything
we could to take the risk out of those bad outcomes.
We wouldn't necessarily have a prediction of how likely we
were to succeed, but we could be confident that we
did improve our odds of success. And you asked earlier,
how do we identify the steps on the path to
our goal? Well, there are going to be some goals
where you may not have the full picture up front,
(31:22):
and that's okay. What you can do is you work
on the steps that you do know about. It may
just be one step at a time. I know what
the next thing that I need to do is great.
We need to identify the risk and we need to
do what we can to take it out of that
And if we're successful at that step and we moved
to the next one, we're going to do the same
thing again, one step at a time, until we ultimately
end up where we're hoping to end up.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yeah. No, that's definitely powerful. It's almost like driving your
car and a fog you cannot see it. You have
your headlights, and it's knowing that, Okay, I able to
see the ten feet, then I'm going to see the
next ten feet. And one thing I do want to
come back on is when you talked about getting the
approval of someone or having that opportunity to get the
(32:08):
buy in from your stakeholders. So it's important to build
the relationships that if you know where you're going, you
know you've got to collect some of these buy ins.
You've got to have influence on these people. So as
you're thinking it through, you can even kind of go
and do a deeper dive that Okay, what's in it
for them, what's in it for you? And looking at
(32:30):
it from you know, different lenses of like the personal
lens and organizational lens and the relational lens. When you
do that, that relationship will take you long ways. And
going back to what you said is like, it's again,
what could go wrong? So if you are anticipating that,
then even the human factor is captured in.
Speaker 4 (32:51):
That that's absolutely right in the book. I sometimes call
that passive probability hacking. If I know what's going to
have to go right in the future for me to
accomplish a goal that I'm actively pursuing, or maybe a
goal that I'm just thinking about, I can start living
my life today looking for ways to change my odds
of success. So if there's a potential goal that I'm
considering that's going to involve a certain person's approval, I
(33:13):
can start investing in that relationship now in preparation for
the possibility that someday I'll need it, whether you know,
whether on a goal that I'm actively pursuing or one
that I'm just considering. So when you have a sense
of what you want to accomplish in life and of
what it's going to actually take, you can start collecting
assets and advantages, kind of in the same way that
(33:33):
you know you might go on an Easter egg gun,
You pick up the egg, you put it in your basket,
and then you'll you'll open up the eggs later. I
find that accomplishing our goals can be a lot like that.
When we have a map of where we're headed, and
that's what a success diagram is intended to be. It's
been very helpful for my clients. It allowed me to
empower them to accomplishing is that nobody thought they were
going to accomplish. And that's what changed my consulting career
(33:55):
was people succeeding who no one really expected to succeed,
and they said, what's their secret advantage? How are they
doing this? Well? I was doing everything I could to
take the risk out of their goals and that led
to some exciting opportunities writing for Harvard Business Review and Forbes,
and Psychology Today, the Boston Globe, a host of other places,
and ultimately I was really fortunate to get the opportunity
to write this book.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
Congratulations Kyle on your success and you're absolutely right. You're
using this great framework that allows people to have the
clarity as to where they're going and allowing them to
focus on the efforts that need to happen, and as
a result of that, that creates momentum towards the goal.
So thank you for joining us. Any last thoughts you'd
(34:37):
like to share with our audience.
Speaker 4 (34:39):
Well, first and foremost, I want to say thank you
so much for having me. I'm honored to be here.
This has been a lot of fun. What I would
encourage people to consider is that every goal that you're
pursuing has two hidden numbers attached to it. There's a
probability of success and a probability of failure. Most people
never think about that. They assume that their goals, or
their odds rather are unknowable. They're unchangeable and therefore irrelevant.
(35:00):
I don't think that's true. I think that you have
an opportunity to get a real sense of how likely
you are to accomplish your goals. I think that in
doing that, you can prioritize more effectively. I think that,
perhaps even more importantly, you have an opportunity to change
your odds. That's the subtitle to my book, Achieve bigger
goals by changing the odds. Don't settle for the odds
you're dealt. A lot of people they think the game
(35:21):
is rigged. They think that it's so unfair that so
many of the things they're trying to accomplish don't go
the way that they want. And one of the challenging
conversations I often have to have with clients is looking
back at some of these goals and saying I wouldn't
have expected that to succeed based on what I'm looking
at in this success diagram. A lot of times people
haven't truly considered what has to go right. They haven't
truly considered the risks of what could go wrong. They
(35:43):
haven't done the math and broken this kind of trap
of averaging in their heads instead of realizing that if
you need all of these things to go right, you
can't average, you have to multiply. So I would encourage
you to be very intentional about this. I know that
it's tempting to just want to resort to willpower, to
want to resort to desire, to want to resort to
just the idea that I'm very committed to this goal.
(36:05):
I would just say again, that is not an antidote
to uncertainty. That is not a solution to the challenges
or the risks that you're going to face. Being proactive,
being intentional is, and it's so much easier to be
proactive and intentional and effective if you have a diagram
showing you what to look at.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Absolutely some great points there, Kyle, and thank you for
joining us. Some very powerful nuggets there, and a wonderful audience.
I'm sure that you know you're going to head over
to Amazon check out Kyle's website, and if you want
to share your website very quickly and share with us,
(36:45):
where can we find the books and how can people
connect with you?
Speaker 4 (36:49):
Sure success is a numbers game, is the title of
the book. I'm Kyle Austin Young. You can find that
on Amazon. You can find the Marnes and Noble. You
can buy it directly on the Penguin Random House website.
I would very much appreciate that, and I'm confident that
it'll have a big impact on your life if you
want to connect with me directly. I was sharing my
website url for a while and then I was on
a show where I heard another guest say connect with
me on LinkedIn, and I thought that was really charming
(37:10):
and accessible. So you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm
Kyle Austin Young. I have websites and contact forms and
all of those things, but it would be a lot
more fun to just have a conversation with you. So
look me up, send me a message, be an honor
to connect well.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
Thank you for joining us, and keep making the difference
because it's important to make an impact in our lives. Today.
We are surrounded by so many things that can be
negative and that can be just pulling the people's morale down.
So keep making a difference, keep making an impact and
(37:44):
wonderful audience. Reach out to us, let us know how
we can support you in your journey and help you
live the life that you deserve. And thank you one
for making the show possible. Be well and take care
until next time.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Thank you for being part of Beyond Confidence. With your host,
d V Park, we hope you have learned more about
how to start living the life you want. Each week
on Beyond Confidence, you hear stories of real people who've
experienced growth by overcoming their fears and building meaningful relationships.
During Beyond Confidence, Vapark shares what happened to her when
she stepped out of her comfort zone to work directly
(38:21):
with people across the globe. She not only coaches people
how to form hard connections, but also transform relationships to
mutually beneficial partnerships as they strive to live the life
they want. If you are ready to live the life
you want and leverage your strengths, learn more at www
dot Dvpark dot com, and you can connect with vat
(38:41):
contact at dvpark dot com. We look forward to you
joining us next week
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