KEVIN ROBERTS
How Kevin got past 65 …
Don’t Let The Old Man In (2024) January 19, 2024
If you make it to age 65 in the US today, there’s a 50% chance you’ll make it past 85.
Chip Conley, ex Airbnb boss, has just written a book about redefining mid-life.
And I’ve added a few thoughts of my own as I enjoy the third half of what I’m hoping will be my century.
So here we go – six thoughts on why we should enjoy our back third.
- You know who your true friends are; you know who you can count on. You’ve weeded out the false friends.
- You know not everyone likes you. You also know not everyone matters. You can’t please everybody, so make sure you please yourself and make happy choices.
- You know stuff. Your ability to think holistically – crystallised intelligence, wisdom – improves with age and doesn’t peak until your 70’s. Knowledge, experience, patterns – we learn more every day.
- You know where your story’s going, and where it’s likely to end. We are the ones we have been waiting for. Don’t do dumb sh-t. And everything will be OK in the end – if it’s not OK, it’s not the end.
- We have realistic expectations. We know what we know. We do what we can. We believe. We’re not as good as we once were. But we’re as good once as we ever were.
- We step off the treadmill. We live life slow. We move from doing, teaching and making others do – to – letting others do.
And finally – everything becomes more interesting. Just like most sports matches and the last acts of a play – all the real excitement comes later on.
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I talked earlier about exciting stuff coming from the edges, the margins, the fringes.
This is the biological idea that species change happens far out on the edge away from the center. This is where the pirates, the rebels, the outlanders who cause earthquakes will always come from, whether they are flying the Big Data drone in brave new directions or pumping juice into life with Big Love.
The crazies have always come from outer places, and this will always be so. Your newspaper industry example calls to mind Jeff Bezos picking up the Washington Post. What’s he going to do with this venerable but ailing property? It’s not certain. What is certain is that as an edge player he is going to do something different.
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CODA: Kevin Roberts’s Lessons on Failing Fast
I used to take great pride in making 30 decisions a day — and getting 25 of them wrong.
But then 15 years later, I realised to my horror that I was only making 10 decisions a day and getting all of them right. And it was shocking to me because I realised I wasn’t growing and putting myself out there.
I wasted five to six years trying to be perfect and good and therefore inhibiting my own growth. So I stopped that, and now I screw up all the time.
Fail fast. Learn fast. Fix fast. And a genius is someone who makes the same mistake once.
There are so many errors you can make, and you need to keep making them. I went too safe. I got carried away with my own self. I was the boss and therefore had to be always right. I was self-driven, and I was failing.
Fail fast. Learn fast. Fix fast. But make the same mistake once.
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But now, I’m doing things that I’ve never done before. I’m making things up along the way and screwing up a lot — but fixing it very fast.
If you are afraid of failure and you do not have a system that encourages failure and you’re self-demanding because you’re ambitious, you’ve got to wake up.
If you are afraid of failure and you do not have a system that encourages failure and you’re self-demanding because you’re ambitious, you’ve got to wake up.
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Focus on the learning and the fixing fast. Because when most people fail, they cover it up, they deny that they’ve made it, and then spend hours analysing it.
Clients, for instance, are reluctant to ever admit that they’ve made a mistake. They’d rather analyse it, review it, interrogate the data, and position it.
But what you need to do is front up. You need to learn how to do it right, chat with people fast, take responsibility, and then fix it.
I’ve only ever written one equation, which is this:
IQ is intelligence quotient, but it isn’t the intelligence quotient that’s commonly measured in universities. Who cares about that? I know a lot of very bright people who couldn’t run a piss-up in a brewery.
So business IQ is simply such that we score people out of a hundred on their ability to fail fast, learn fast, and fix fast. That is business IQ.
Take somebody who scores high in math. They fail a lot. They learn heaps, and they fix it. And they move to the next level at lightning speed. They are priceless people.
Business IQ is simply such that we score people out of a hundred on their ability to fail fast, learn fast, and fix fast.
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EQ means emotional quotient. Can you feel? Clients know what consumers say, and they know what they do. They have big data coming out of their ears and stand by their research. Everybody has the same stuff, but that is not what really matters.
What matters is not what consumers say or do, but how they feel — and knowing how they feel is your job.
You’ve got to be the people who empathise with your customers, who know the rhythm, the ebb, and the flow of the market, because your clients don’t.
They are driven by their brand, their business, and their problem. They don't feel. They don’t get up from behind the computer. And when they do, they ask a bunch of questions instead of observing and learning.
You’ve got to be the people who empathise with your customers, who know the rhythm, the ebb, and the flow of the market, because your clients don’t.
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TQ is technology quotient, and this asks the question, “Are you a slave to technology? Or do you use it to get to better outcomes?”
BQ is “bloody quick” because you don’t have an awful lot of time to get all this done.
All of this is powered by CQ or the creativity quotient. Without creativity,you’ve got nothing.
How do you show up as a leader in every moment? Learn how you can be the best version of yourself especially on critical moments.
Addendum: The Guardian has a story about Vera Lynn at age 92, and about the upcoming publication of her autobiography.
...at the age of 92, she has done it again, hitting No 1 in the album charts last night with her offering We'll Meet Again: The Very Best of Vera Lynn and usurping Bob Dylan, 68, as the oldest artist to grace the top spot... Her album fought off stiff competition from the Beatles, who occupied the 5th, 6th, 9th, 10th, 21st, 24th, 29th, 31st, 33rd, 37th and 38th spots...
It is 70 years to the month since Lynn, then 22, first recorded We'll Meet Again, which became a symbolic song of the second world war... Last night's No 1 made her the only artist to feature in the UK single and album charts in the 20th and 21st centuries.
On January 22, 1984, Apple placed an ad during the Super Bowl (yes, the Super Bowl used to be in January) that recreated a scene from George Orwell's book 1984. That got our attention. It was an ad for their new computer called a Macintosh, which was made available two days afterward. It took users by surprise by offering a usability experience that we all take for granted forty years later.
A life without challenge, a life without hardship, a life without passion, a life without purpose, is no life at all.
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
~ William James The Art of Making A Difference By Losing
“Open a book to mysterious page seventy-seven ( 77 ) and read . . . “