Good air team. It's Harps. I hope you're terrific. Welcome to another installment of life. As many of you know, I'm sure my main job. I do lots of different things, but I guess what I've done the most of consistently over the last twenty years, but I've start I've been speaking for thirty years before that, a lot of exercise
physiology and training people. But in terms of my job, the last twenty years, I've been speaking to teams and organizations and companies here in Australia overseas in lots of different capacities, sporting clubs, not for profits, government, Victoria, police, big organizations, little organizations, mostly in the three dimensional face to face realm. More recently a lot of online stuff. And I'm in the of doing some gigs right now at the moment, and so I've been doing that for
a long time. But I did my first paid speaking gig when I was twenty six, which was thirty three years ago. I got paid one hundred dollars. It was for a bunch of blokes at a timberyard. I spoke for about I can't remember if it was thirty or forty minutes. Probably forty odd minutes. I spoke to them in what was their smoko room. They're kind of their lunch room. I can't even remember how many guys, maybe twenty.
And I remember preparing for that talk for weeks because the guy who owned the business was a personal training client of mine, and I used to talk to him about all the stuff I talk about, you know, health and fitness and getting in shape and bitter nutrition. Bit of mindset, very fun until back in the day. Of course, pretty rudimentary, but nonetheless, he thought there was value in it. And he said, you know, the stuff that you talk to me about, could you come in and talk to
my dudes, my guys about that. Could you talk to my team about physical health and a bit about nutrition, a bit about looking after themselves. Like I said, pretty rudimentary, fundamental stuff back then, but nonetheless, and I was excited because I'd done a little bit of speaking in front of groups not paid. I kind of enjoyed it, and you know, I thought, maybe, imagine if I could do
this as a living or part of my living. Imagine if part of my income could be standing in front of people talking to about the shit that I love, the shit that I'm passionate about. So I rocked up. I did my gig. I stumbled and started a few times. Ah and I I after two weeks of prep and copious amounts of planning and note writing, I think I came. We came up with like a one page dot point with a million dot points on it of what I
was going to talk to them about. Well, of course I started, and then I forgot about my dot points. And then I looked at my dot points and I couldn't fucking remember what I'd spoken about and not spoken about. And I've forgot the story that I was going to tell to highlight that particular points. And I thought I would try and be a bit amusing and funny. That didn't work. Bottom line is I spoke for whatever it was thirty or forty minutes, and I wasn't very good.
I wasn't very good at all. I would give me for where I was at then in terms of skill and knowledge and competence, maybe I'd give me a three or four out of ten. But now with what I know and my skill level now in competence and understanding, now I would give me a one. I did not do a great job at all. There were no questions,
there was no interaction. Nobody wanted to know anything. Nobody spoke to me when I finished, as soon as I said, you know, I'll be here if anyone's got a question, And everybody got up and fucking run out of the room,
run out of the room. And that happened not long later, doing a fitness industry thing, talking to some would be personal trainers, or perhaps it was jim instructors in those days, but anyway, I did a similar thing, but this time I spoke for two hours, talking about strength training and writing programs and all that kind of stuff. Same thing happened. This was within a few months of each other, and I finished, Everyone left the room. No one asked a question.
A young lady came up to me, and I thought I was on a winner because she had a question. So she must have been a bit interested. And she did have a question, but unfortunately for me, the question was will you be here teaching next week? The answer was yes, I will be. The look on her face was one of disappointment, and she promptly left the room and she did not come the following Why didn't she come?
Of course, she didn't want to fucking hear me, I was no good, so failing embarrassment, not being good, not having a high level of skill or competence, That's where I've always started. I've done most of my learning through trial and error. Yes I've done academic learning, and yes I've sat in classrooms and set exams, and yes I'm
doing a PhD right now. But in terms of in terms of my ability to do what I do, in terms of my ability to run a business, to solve problems, to negotiate different things that I need to, To be able to stand in front of an audience and build rapport and connection and tell a story and be funny and share thoughts and ideas in a way that's broadly relevant and relatable. That is something that has happened through trial and error. That is something that's happened through falling
down and getting up. That's something that's happened through me being comfortable with not being good. The starting point for everything that I'm now, I guess you would say good at or somewhat competent at, or skilled at, or paid for. The starting point for me was incompetence, ignorance, lack of knowledge, lack of skill, and inability to be able to perform at a high level at that thing.
That is where I started. I started as the white belt. I started as the white belt, and I metaphorically got strangled and kicked and choked and punched, and I did not do a good job. But I came back and I kept training, and I kept showing up, and I kept doing the work, and I kept asking questions, and I kept learning through my failure. I kept learning through my mediocrity. I kept learning through my poor results. And many of you know that this podcast Life is, in
fact my fifth podcast. My fourth is the U Project. And you also know some of you that I did three podcasts before the U Project that didn't work.
They failed. I made no money in fast, In fact, I lost money, and that was over two years. And then when I started the U Project, it took at least another two years of almost daily shows daily now but almost daily shows back then, so four years of podcasting in total before I made a dollar. So I was losing money for four years. I was losing money for what added up to around eight hundred episodes of The U Project and my other shows before I had
something that was commercially viable. Before I could say well, this is working now, it wasn't. It was working in that we were producing shows and some people were listening. But depending on watch a metric for successes, it's conceivable that we could say I failed for eight hundred episodes.
I don't think I failed for eight hundred episodes because I learned and I grew and I evolved and I developed inside understanding, awareness, skill competence, and I got better and I learned how to interview people better and listen better, and produce better and know where to go and where not to go in a podcast. It was all learning, It was all development, It was all skill acquisition. But on a level I was losing money, making no dough
and failing. But that is why the title of this episode is the successful failure, because while I was failing in a sense, I was getting closer to success because I was simply doing what's required to build the right muscles to become a successful podcast. I was building the right muscles when I was younger, although I was falling down and getting up and failing and fucking up. When I opened my first personal training center, the first one Australia,
at twenty six, I made a million mistakes. I failed in inverted commas many times because I didn't know what I was doing. But I couldn't get good at the thing that I wouldn't do, So I had to do the things I wasn't good at in order to learn, in order to develop, in order to understand, and in order to be able to get good over the long term.
This aversion that so many of us have to not failing, to not looking silly, to not being embarrassed, to not being able to cope with anything other than a positive outcome, is actually a massive self limitation. I want to do the things that make me better, and if that is periodically failing, falling, looking silly, I'm completely up for that. I want to go where I grow. I want to be in the room where I'm the dumbest. I want to be in the room where I'm the least skilled.
I want to be in the room where I'm the least successful because I want to surround myself with a culture, with a mindset, and with people that are better than me, so that I'll get dragged up. That's how I learn when I'm constantly mixing with people that I have more skill, knowledge, and understanding in a particular area than all I'm doing is making myself look good and stroking my ego. I want to be. I want to be the perpetual student, and of course there'll be times when I'm standing in
front of an audience to teach. I'm not talking about that so much. I'm just talking about putting myself. I'm talking to you about putting yourself in the middle of a situation, an environment, a culture, a process that you are going to grow in, and it will feel like failure, but really, over the long term, it's part of becoming successful. Seeing tomorrow