Alan Weiss's The Uncomfortable Truth‪®‬ Alan Weiss

Al McCree is a former fighter pilot who has flown 196 missions! He is an executive in the music business and has managed all kinds of talent. He’s also worked with top business executives.

We talk about the differences and similarities of combat flying and the competition of the music business and the challenges of changing hearts and minds in a business setting. Ironically Al thinks music can be a distraction at work, even though we see so many people with ear buds in all kinds of workplaces.

I challenge Al a bit on his belief that DNA and genetics are important for success. We both reflect on the wonderful, developmental feedback we obtained at the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation (and why he can play a musical instrument and I can’t, authoritatively validated).

We fondly recall Jeanne Robertson, a brilliant speaker and storyteller who, in a beauty contest, enthralled the judges with her “talent” of twirling an invisible baton, which she lit on fire and had it descend on the judges’ heads.

The role of luck is analyzed in any pursuit, and Al feels it’s a stronger factor than might be realized. But what is luck, really? And before we end we discuss how to exemplify what will make your kids successful, especially if they’ve led a privileged life and may not have the parents’ “hunger.”

Primary and secondary

1 End the “warehousing” of children
• Chronology is silly and hundreds of years old
• Socialization is important, but not at this cost
• Move kids as they learn
• Measure learning by outcomes: application, tests, etc.

2. Stop defaulting to college educations
• Prepare for a range of employment opportunities
• I sat next to too many duds in college
• Teach life skills: civics, account management, do-it-yourself repairs (remember shop and home economics)
• Growing tendency to hire competence and not credentials

3. End the teachers’ unions control of schools
• Introduce carrots and sticks for teachers
• The Rubber Room in New York City
• Albert Shanker’s quote
• Randi Weingarten’s $600,000
• The customers are the parents and kids, not teachers
• Make the job rewarding and also demanding
• Recreate school “open houses”
• End the mainstreaming of behavioral problems
• End the inclusion on non-English speakers
• My experience with Tourette’s Syndrome
• Teachers have lowest grade point averages and attend the worst academic schools
• Former president of URI: People with poor finances and/or grades go to inexpensive and mediocre schools
• Get rid of failed progressive nonsense like “new math”
• Allow for school choice of all kinds with vouchers

4. Change school financing
• The affluent/tax/attraction/more tax trap
• Pool money within the state for equal distribution
• Create true equal opportunity with equivalent resources, quality, teaching across the state

5. Enforce discipline
• Assistant principle might go to jail for stopping a female, black student from heading for a fight, she claimed he physically abused her in doing so. She had threatened the fight.
• Mandate school officers. Anyone who says that children are fearful of uniforms and police should understand they’d be more fearful of being beaten up or shot at.

6. Apply common sense and avoid political correctness and the woke
• Teachers may not involve themselves with personal, sexual, gender, and similar issues without involving parents, including names kids use, how they dress, and how they want to be addressed.
• Teachers’ personal politics, gender beliefs, and religious beliefs are not permitted in the classroom.

Not just about the government or the banks or big Pharma, but even sports when YOUR team loses! “The refs were crooked, it was rigged.”

9/11 was an “inside” job, and we never landed on the moon.

Key elements: belief in a pattern underlying the event; provocative and deliberate plans; coalitions or groups are involved, even disparate ones; there is a clear and present danger; secrecy that is hard to justify or believe by non-conspirators. Groups blamed are typical targets: wealthy, politicians, business leaders (especially bankers), historically stigmatized minorities, such as Jews or Roma.

Conspiracists defy pragmatism and evidence, e.g., “Princess Diana actually killer herself or faked her death.”

The threat of lack of control forces insecure people to find cause and effect outside of their control that explains their fate. (THEY are out to get me/us.) Paranoia is a key element, involving perceived victimization, social isolation, and the refusal to admit that others succeed by their talents and hard work. Paranoia generally starts individually but then lends itself to “groupthink.”

Conspiracy thinking, or the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, shares several characteristics with paranoia. Both involve ideas that harmful outcomes can be attributed to malevolent agents rather than to more benign or non-agentive causes. Other similarities in concept are notable, for example, both paranoia and conspiracy thinking represent suspicions that can be hard to falsify and may concern events or theories that later emerge to be true, for example claims about pandemic demands by the government that, scientifically, were incorrect and ineffective.

In an increasingly volatile age, without confirmations of power and control, people default to these “settings.” This will become worse.
Perhaps paranoid to begin with, see this as a conspiracy, though I doubt that Trump ever did.

The more pressure you feel, the more your talent is “masked” and the worse you perform. You control pressure.

You can’t allow yourself to feel “judged” every time you speak, write, or perform. And when and if you do need feedback, never accept it from unsolicited sources, which is always for the sender’s benefit, not yours. Seek solicited feedback from trusted people you respect.

It’s fine to feel anticipation and eagerness to proceed, which should heighten your performance, but not fear and dread which will diminish it. The greatest athletes are who they are not because of their everyday performance, but because of how well they perform in championship games, under maximum pressure from the other team, the media, and fans.

Maintain perspective. No one is shooting at you. You should fear a tornado in Kansas in a storm, but not a question in a conference room during a meeting.

We too often create pressure on ourselves by comparing our intended performance against great performances we’ve seen, and therefore fear being seen as inferior to them. In fact, we need simply to prepare well, do our best, and then go home. Our lives are greater than a single event or a single day.

When you’re afraid to post on social media, or have to rewrite or re-record something six times, you’re simply creating your own tornado. And this isn’t Kansas anymore, Dorothy.

Do you need shoes that you can put on without touching them, without bending down, without even sitting down? Barring those whose illnesses or conditions prohibit bending, just how lazy are the rest of us becoming?

Skechers sells some shoes which have a patented device near the top of the heel that allows you to slip into them without manipulating the shoe: no shoehorn, no wiggling, no close proximity at all. (Of course, you have to have the mental capacity to know your toes go in first.) I can understand this if you’re, say, 90. But they’re advertising this for everyone. How lazy are we becoming?

Our luggage has wheels these days. People can gamble on their smart phone apps and talk into their wrists. We may think that garage door openers and TVs “must” be remote, but why fireplaces? You no longer build a satisfying fire any more, you program one. How lazy are we becoming?

Vacuum cleaners now self-clean, and lawn mowers self-mow. Cars can self-park. Gym trainers assist their customers in lifting weights. Siri keeps interrupting intelligent thought to see if she can be of further annoyance. People try to cut turkeys with electric knives, which is like using a blowtorch to light up a cigar. How lazy are we becoming?

One of my cars “hands” my seatbelt to me, and the car manuals are six hundred pages because of all the automatic features. Meanwhile, I haven’t used cruise control, which has been on every one of my cars, in 25 years.

And now we have those Japanese toilets….

Some things we can control, some we can influence, and some we can neither control nor influence. It’s important to understand the differences, and it’s vital to never cede control nor underestimate our abilities to control.

Facing a prospect for the first time, what do you think you can control, influence, or affect neither? (Listen to the podcast to hear the examples.) Do you tend to surrender control because the prospect is powerful or wealthy? Do you sacrifice personal time, change important personal appointments, and inconvenience your family over client issues that the client could easily change?

You can control where your kids go to school, what kind of insurance you carry, where to go on vacation, and how to deal with colleagues. You can certainly influence the boss, clients or prospects, or suppliers, a lot more than you think (or currently are).

If nothing else, consider this: language controls discussion, discussion controls relationships, and relationships control business.

The larger and more diverse our vocabulary, the more we can use metaphors, analogies, metonymy, hyperbole, and so forth, the more we can influence. When someone objects to my fees I point out that my fees are less than they pay to plow the parking lots, mist the plants, and compensate for spillage and spoilage. Where is the best ROI?

You best ROI, of course, is listening to and heeding this free podcast!