Unlock Your Potential: A Numbers Game to Success

Jim Rembach: Welcome to the Fast Leader show.

Kyle Austin Young: Hosted by leadership impact architect Jim Rembach. This is where leaders pursue results with clarity and momentum.

Jim Rembach: The podcast challenges leadership, innovation, and creativity

Kyle Austin Young: through the lens of results that matter. Each episode delivers insight that improves performance, strengthens execution, and helps leaders move onward and upward faster.

Jim Rembach: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Fast Leaders show, um, the official podcast of Call center coaching. Today we are diving into a topic, uh, that shapes every single leader's, uh, results. However, it is actually rarely ever talked about with, uh, any type of clarity, and that is the odds of success. Our guest, Kyle Austin Young, has spent years studying why some people achieve big goals while others with the same talent and motivation fall short. His book, Success is a Numbers Game, explains the hidden probabilities behind every goal and shows how anyone can improve their odds through better awareness, better mapping, and better decisions. Kyle writes for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Psychology Today, and other major publications, and his work blends research, real stories, and practical tools to help leaders understand why progress stalls, why obstacles repeat, and how certain thinking patterns quietly lower the chance of success without us even realizing it. This conversation is important for anyone leading teams in complex environments, especially for us in contact centers where bias, misinterpretation, and inconsistent decisions create what we call supervisor drift and unpredictable results. Kyle's work gives us a clear lens for why that drift happens. Uh, and when you start talking about the probabilities of success, you know, how we can use reinforcement systems to, uh, help us actually make better decisions, uh, and have better decision patterns. So I'm excited for this conversation because it connects directly, uh, to the work that we do at Call Center Coach and the new era of leadership development, how we develop leaders. So, Kyle, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Kyle Austin Young: I'm ready to do this. Let's go.

Jim Rembach: We had a great discussion, uh, about memory and, um, some fond memories and some accidents and things that we can learn from. Uh, and I think for us to start off, it'd probably be best to let, uh, everybody know is what problem are you trying to help people solve with success as a numbers game?

Kyle Austin Young: You know, I've found that there are a number of authors in the space, and I have a lot of respect for them, who have encouraged people to at least consider the role of risk in their lives, to consider the fact that it's not, you know, we don't make decisions in the context of what will happen. We make decisions in the context of what could happen. I felt like there was a gap. I felt like even though there were still Voices encouraging people to think that way. They weren't really teaching you how to think that way. They weren't giving you any tools for estimating how likely you were to succeed. At least not the voices I was listening to. And then they weren't, more importantly, giving you any reasonable ways to try to change your odds of success and put yourself in a better position.

Jim Rembach: To me, knowing what I know and the people who I've interviewed and having this type of discussion and, you know, learning more about human behavior and emotional intelligence and persuasion and, you know, um, even conversational intelligence and all that, I mean, there's a lot of questions that run through my head. Um, but I think when you start talking about most people, they really misjudge, uh, their odds. And so what do you think is the simplest way to understand the probabilities behind success or failure?

Kyle Austin Young: Sure. Well, ultimately, our odds can be understood as it's the. I won't use the technical term. What we have to do is we have to figure out what has to go right in order for us to get what we want. And ultimately, we can break big predictions down into smaller predictions. And that's the same system that some of the leading forecasters in the world use to predict major world events. So if you're comfortable with it all, unpack it in the context of an example, please do so. Let's say that you're training to run a marathon. That's a goal that you've set for yourself. You want to run a marathon, it's on pretty short notice. So you hire a running coach in hopes that she can help you get ready in time. And she says, I can do this. I can get you ready. You're going to succeed on race day if you do three things for the period that you have between now and when the, the starting gun goes off. You have to eat, sleep, and train exactly how I tell you to. If you follow these three things, you'll be ready to go. If. If you don't, there's no way I can get you ready on such short notice. So in this case, there are three prerequisites to your success. There are three steps that you're going to have to take in order to ultimately be successful at this goal of running a marathon. So what we have the opportunity to do is now that we've broken this big prediction down into smaller ones, we can make some estimates on how likely do we think we are to do each of these three things. In some contexts, there might be published data that we can use to inform the likelihood of different prerequisite steps. But in this case, it really comes down to you, you, your commitment and your lifestyle. How likely do you think you are to eat the way that you're supposed to, sleep the way you're supposed to, and train the way that you're supposed to for this extended period of time? So, just to illustrate it, let's use really, really easy, simple numbers. Let's just say we think it's 70% across the board. 70% chance we'll eat the way we're supposed to. 70% chance we'll sleep the way we're supposed to.70% chance that we're going to train the way that we're supposed to. Now, this is where a lot of people make a mistake. I think that most humans, intuitively, when they're considering a goal, try to think of a general sense of what's it going to take for me to accomplish this. And I think that we have a gut check of, uh, do I think I can do all of those things. But a lot of people at that point fall into a trap called averaging. If they are approaching a goal where they have to eat, sleep, and train a certain way, and they feel pretty good about their ability to do each of those three things individually, that translates into them feeling pretty good about their ability to accomplish the goal as a whole. Unfortunately, that's not mathematically sound. We can't average those three numbers. We have to multiply them. And if we do that, in this case, we find that we only have a 34% chance of being ready on race day. We expect to fail at this goal, or at least somebody who understood the math would expect us to fail at this goal. But all of the time, people are entering into goals where because they feel good about the individual prerequisites, they feel good about the outcome. It doesn't work like that. And because of that, I don't say that to discourage people. I say that to highlight how important it is to be very serious about optimizing our odds of success, about doing everything we can to put ourselves in, in a position to be more likely to get what we want. So let's think about these individual steps, uh, needing to train the way that we're supposed to. What I encourage people to do is think negative. Try to identify the potential bad outcomes that could happen instead of the one that you need to. Because probability can be understood kind of similar to how we've traditionally understood matter. It can't be created or destroyed, but it can be transferred and rearranged and the odds that you want are hiding in your potential bad outcomes. You can't conjure better odds into existence, you can't desire better odds into existence or wish you have to go make the bad outcomes less likely to increase your chances of getting what you want. So I'll just do a couple of them. But in the context of training, what if it rains on a day when we need to go for a run? As we prepare for this marathon, we can't wish that bad outcome away. But there are things we can do to de risk it. We can systematically m de risk our goals by using our creativity. Maybe we need to get a gym membership for the next few months. Maybe we need to buy a treadmill for the next few months, something that we can have indoors so that we can train on days when the weather's not agreeable. What if we're concerned about a lack of motivation ultimately derailing our training goals? Maybe we need a running partner. Maybe we need somebody who can hold us accountable. So those are examples of us taking some practical steps to make bad outcomes less likely. And doing that, we can increase our odds of sticking with the training. We could do the same thing for eating, the same thing for sleeping. And after optimizing these different steps, we can expect a better outcome.

Jim Rembach: As you're sitting here and saying that, I start thinking about our own existing neural pathways and I talk a lot about as leaders, I'm like, when we think about development and helping others to become successful, if, if we don't have anything in our own well to draw out, we're not going to nourish them, right?

Kyle Austin Young: Mhm.

Jim Rembach: And therefore when you start talking about, think about these bad outcomes, when you start talking about that, we have very specific patterns that we've gone through that are associated everything from when we were little kids growing up, through our life experiences. And I start talking about, you know, so then I start thinking about what about the limitations of even exploring that. So how do you help people come overcome that? It's like you're really limited in your thinking. Right. We need to expand that a little bit so that you can actually see if you know what or determine what the reality of your numbers are.

Kyle Austin Young: Sure, yeah. What I found is that when I invite people to think negative, typically they're pretty good at it. We're typically, uh, you know, skilled at identifying bad outcomes that could happen. A lot of people don't do that because they've been told to think positive. They've been told, you know, don't worry about what could go wrong. That'll just demotivate you. Don't worry about what will go wrong. You know, if it's meant to happen, it'll happen. I don't agree with that. I don't. I mean, I'm fine with the idea that some things are maybe m meant to happen, but I think, I don't think that desire is an antidote to uncertainty. I don't think that wanting something or, you know, being really committed to something is, you know, a way to de risk your goals. I don't think that, uh, wanting to run a marathon is going to keep it from raining or keep you from getting an injury like a shin splint. I think that, you know, there's some stretches that might help, and that's a creative solution that we can implement. So I think that part of it is just inviting people to think negatively. Where I think we have to, just like you said, transition from maybe a childlike mentality to an adult mentality is as kids, we were sometimes able to identify fears, identify bad outcomes, but we often lacked the agency to actually do anything about them. And sometimes I think that has followed us into adulthood where we don't want to think about what could go wrong because we. What could we even do about it anyway? And we need to realize that as adults, as people who have created opportunity for selves in our careers, as people who have developed skill sets and made connections, we typically can do things. We typically can take actions in response. You know, when I just graduated from college, this was well over a decade ago, close to 15 years, but I wasn't excited about the entry level positions I was seeing. So I decided to do something really audacious. I found a job posting to become the product development director of this growing health organization. And I was 21 years old, Bachelor's degree, and I said, I'm going to apply for this job. And ultimately I got an interview. And I was up against people who had decades of experience on me. Ah. And I was going to be leading people who were in their 50s, 60s, 70s, at a time when I was 21. But I got the interview and I wanted to make the most of it. So rather than think positive, rather than, you know, cross my fingers and say, maybe this is my big break, I did the exact opposite. I tried to identify the bad outcomes that could keep me from getting this job. And, and one of them was the thought that, you know, the obvious one, they don't hire me because of how young I look. And I thought, uh, what can I do about that. And so really simple response. I grew a beard. I grew a beard to look older than I was to make it feel like less of a concern about my youth. A second bad outcome that I identified was what if they don't hire me because they're concerned that I just don't have the resume for this? I don't have the background. So I actually typed up a plan for how I was going to turn this department around. It was so thick I had to spiral bound it. It was a book by the time I was done. And, and when they would ask questions about my resume, I would just find ways to redirect their attention to the vision that I had for this department. So we didn't spend a lot of time talking about my resume. Whereas the other candidates, it was all about the past. Mine was all about the future. The third and final thing I did was I knew that there was a risk. What if they don't hire me because they're worried I can't fit in with the team? There's such an age gap and I'm actually in charge. What if there's just no way that they think that I could do that? So I asked an existing team member if they'd read any books lately as a department. She gave me three titles and I went out and read all three. And in the interviews I was able to connect with the team members. I could make inside jokes, I understood their jargon. I knew what they were after because I'd read the same books that they had. And I'll never forget, there was a group interview, me and these other gray haired former executives. I'm 21 years old, I'm sitting there with my, my newly grown beard. And I remember they talked about an idea that they were considering. And one of the books that they'd had me read was called the Wuffy Factor. This is you know, like 15 years ago, but it was a book about how to get gain social capital as a brand. And I said, I think that's an idea that could lead to a lot of wufi. And I remember looking around as these other candidates, their eyes are bulging out of their heads. What did he just say? What on earth is wuffy? But all of the existing team members are laughing. They know exactly what I'm saying because those are the books that they'd read. So after I got the job, which was crazy, uh, I was, you know, this 21 year old department manager, I remember asking one of those people who'd hired me, you know, what made you choose Me and they said we couldn't think of a reason not to. And that's the goal that I'm trying to help people accomplish across their lives is put you in a position where reality can't think of a reason not to give you what you want.

Jim Rembach: Okay, so that story is fantastic. And the process that you went through, you're right. I mean, it was a separation activity. Um, when you start looking at your peer group, your peer group was really people that were applying for the job when it came down to it. Right. And separated yourself out from that peer group. Um, but then I start thinking about, well, how's this book going to help somebody to be able to do what you just talked about?

Kyle Austin Young: Sure, yeah, absolutely. So I try to give people the training that they need to think, creatively, identify. Well, first of all, I teach people how to create something called a success diagram. A success diagram is where you list out everything that has to go right in order for you to get the outcome you want. That's a very important part of my process, but really just, uh, an important part of success in general. We need to have a real sense of what it's going to take for you to ultimately get the outcome that you want. That is something you can start by doing just based on your knowledge of the situation. You can certainly do research to understand that better. You can go to AI and ask, you know, chat, GPT. Make me a list of the steps to becoming a published author. Make me a list of this. You know the career trajectory it would take to become a Fortune 500 CEO. Those things that have to go right in order for you to get what you want. I call those critical points. And in the success diagram, we list them out. And then beneath everything that has to go right, we write out the potential bad outcomes, the things that could happen instead of what we need to happen. Instead of, you know, us eating, sleeping and training the way we're supposed to, instead of the hiring squad offering me the job, what are the things that might happen instead? And then ultimately we do what I call probability hacking. The creative work of finding ways to take the risks out of those bad outcomes and put ourselves in a position to succeed better. So it's certainly context specific to some extent, but what a success diagram makes possible is it gives you a bird's eye view. Now you know what the opportunity is. Now you know what the risks are. And it creates so many. It makes it so much easier to collaborate. I now have the ability to ask for advice. You know, historically I've almost Been opposed to asking people for advice. And that's not because I think I know everything. But I just found that the advice people give me tended to be so rooted in their goals, in their context, that a lot of times it was bad advice. I had a situation a few years ago. I tell the story in the book, this is a short story, but I was considering this consulting contract that was going to pay me a lot of money, but it was also going to create a lot of stress. And, and I was trying to decide if it was worth it for me. So I went to some friends and colleagues and asked them, what would you do? And about half of them said, I would take the job. And about half of them said, no, I don't think it's worth the stress. And I thought, well, this isn't helpful at all. I was kind of frustrated about it until I realized there was a trend. The people who had less money than I did almost all said, take the job, make the money. The people who had more money than I did almost all said, don't take the job. Why would you want to deal with that stress? And what that taught me was they were giving me advice that made sense to them. They weren't being dishonest, but it was very rooted in their context. The people who didn't need money said, why would you want stress you don't need? The people who did need money said, why would you deny an opportunity for income? So I think that's one of the limitations of advice. The great thing about a success diagram is it gives you the ability to sit in front of a whiteboard with somebody, or pull out a piece of paper, forward an email and say, here's my goal. Here's what has to go right. Here's what I perceive as things that could go wrong. Let's have a conversation about this. You know, what are the risks that I'm not thinking about? What, what could I do to take the risk out of this potential bad outcome? You know, what are the critical points that, you know, one thing you can do that I think is really trans. Well, I'm, I'm gonna, I'll address that separately because that's a powerful thing, and I want to give you a chance to speak into this. But when you have a success diagram, collaboration becomes so much easier. And so I think that's one of the biggest opportunities that the book gives people for ultimately thinking through their objectives and optimizing their odds of success.

Jim Rembach: To me, I, I, I hear precision. I hear, you know, you know, succinct. I hear. Excuse me, I hear ways by which you're taking out some of their biases. Um, and that's very powerful because those exist, uh, in a multitude of different ways. Now, you also, in the book, you use something called a term called pbo. Now, uh, it's probability blocking obstacle. So explain, uh, what is a PBO and plane language and why do people miss them?

Kyle Austin Young: Interesting. I don't. I've never used the words probability blocking obstacle, but I like that. I think that makes a lot of sense. A PBO for me, is a potential bad outcome. It's something that could happen instead of what you want. But it's not inaccurate to say that a, uh, PBO is a probability blocking obstacle in the sense that it's something that is standing between you and better odds. So I think that that's a nice way to put it. I may. I may steal that one from you.

Jim Rembach: Sure, go right ahead. So if you could explain what it is in plain language, and then why do people miss them?

Kyle Austin Young: Sure. So, again, a potential bad outcome is something that could happen instead of what you want. In the context of the marathon, you know, if I need to, uh, follow a certain training schedule, potential bad outcomes include injury that keep me from training the way I'm supposed to. Potential bad outcomes include a busy schedule, you know, unexpected, uh, commitments rising up where I have to put out a fire instead of, you, uh, know, trying to be faithful to this goal that I've set for myself. And so when we have a list of the potential bad outcomes that could happen, the odds of all possible outcomes for a certain situation have to add up to 100%. So my odds of sticking with the training Regimen are basically 100%, minus the sum of my odds of all the bad things that could happen instead of me sticking with the training regimen. And so if I am, you know, consistent and trying to take the risk out of those goals, I have an opportunity to change my odds, change my outcome, and change my life. So in the context, for example, of what if an unexpected, you know, a fire pops up and I have to put out the fire, so to speak, something swamps my schedule. What can I do about that? Now, a lot of people are trying to address their problems in real time, and in doing so, they leave a lot of great solutions on the table. Because a lot of times, you. You can't implement, uh, a solution in the moment. But if I'm concerned about something showing up swamping my schedule, I'm not able to go for a run that day, Do I have an opportunity to train first thing in the morning? Is that a response that could put me in a position where I'm getting ahead of all of the ways that something might ultimately interfere with my calendar? So potential bad outcomes are, you know, the product of thinking negative. They're the things that are hogging probability that you want. And if we go after them and ultimately pillage and plunder their probability, bring it over to our side, then we could, you know, go for somebody who, you know, has a, uh, 34% chance of success to, if we could get to 90% across the board, a 90% chance that we're going to eat the way we're supposed to, a 90% chance we're going to sleep the way we're supposed to, a 90% chance we're going to train the way we're supposed to. I think that equates to a 73% chance of success. So we've just taken this goal of running a marathon, thinking that maybe originally we could do it because we were committed to it, because we wanted it. We then realized that the risks weren't associated with a lack of desire. They were real world outcomes that could interfere with the things that we want. We used creativity to try to take some of those risks away, changed our odds of each individual step and ultimately changed our outlook. And we've gone from somebody who could have succeeded, somebody with a 34% chance can succeed, but we've become somebody who should succeed, somebody that we would actually expect to get a good outcome, run that race, and then potentially build on that success to accomplish other things.

Jim Rembach: Uh, so I hit on a little bit how bias can impact, you know, these odds and these probabilities. Um, what are the biases that most distort how people see their chances of success? That you often find

Kyle Austin Young: averaging is a big one. That's certainly a problem. Uh, thinking that if I feel good about each of my individual prerequisites, then I should feel good overall. That's not true. There's also a big extent to which, when we try, well, people who don't do a comprehensive job of really considering what has to go right to accomplish a goal can leave a lot on the table. I mean, to think of that in the context of numbers. Imagine if you have a goal where there's 10 things that have to go right. There's a 99% chance that the first nine go right. Each of those things, 99%, 99%, just, just slam dunks across the board. But there's this One thing that's going to have to go right this true prerequisite to your success. Maybe you need somebody's approval and there's only like a 4% chance that you're going to get it. Well, if you overlooked that step, if you overlooked that reality, then you could go into this thinking that you, you have odds of success, you know, in the 90s or the high 80s, when in reality it's like 3%, because there's a prerequisite you haven't thought of. So a lot of our biases come from that. And that's why it's important to really stop and consider what's it going to take for me to get what I want in this situation and collaborate. When you have that visual diagram, go to other people and say, is this comprehensive? You know, put it into chat GPT. Am I missing anything? What are the other steps that might be a part of this? Because if there is, you know, for example, a really unlikely step on the path to your goal, there are things we can do about that. We can try to change our odds. If I need somebody's approval, what are some things I can do to ultimately increase my odds of getting it? Well, if we're concerned that one of the bad outcomes is this is somebody who's temperamental, they might be in a bad mood that day. Can we check in with their assistant, you know, first thing, and say, hey, what kind of mood is this person in? Is the day going well, or should I stop back by later? That would just be a really easy solution that might help our odds a little bit. Another thing we can do is we can try to reorder the steps that we're going to take to accomplish this goal. If we need somebody's approval, odds are low. If possible, we could consider trying to get that first in the process before we invest any resources, any time. There's no value in spending a month accomplishing all of these steps that, you know, have a 99% chance of happening, only to then fail at the end. That's not failing fast, that's failing just about as slow as you possibly can. But it's human nature to want to procrastinate on the things that scare us. But from a probability standpoint, if we find a way to front load unlikely steps and take them head on, then we can put ourselves in a position to either fail fast, not lose a lot of resources, move on to the next thing, or if we're successful, if in this case we get that person's approval, our odds have Just gone from like 3% to high 80s, low 90s, because the remaining steps were all very likely to happen. So now we know where to invest our resources.

Jim Rembach: You know, uh, as you're saying that, I start thinking about what we've all been conditioned through in regards to our educational process or maybe even working in organizations on how we have to go about getting certain things approved, how we have to go about, um, maybe getting funding. I mean, and you hear some of the. Every once in a while, you hear these exceptions, for example, like somebody getting, um, you know, some major funding for something they hadn't even built yet. Right? Uh, so it's. These things are possible, right?

Kyle Austin Young: Totally.

Jim Rembach: But then I start thinking about personality traits and how they come involved. Now. Um, and I'll give you, for example, my mother passed away a few years ago, but she was declining in health. And so we started having conversations about her, about what were her wishes, what did she want, you know, if, you know, her health declined, where, you know, how does she want all that? And she refused to talk about it. And I said, mom, talking about, you know, probabilities. I said, last time I checked, the mortality rate is 100%. None of us get out of this alive, right? I said, so you have an opportunity to now have and m. Make some decisions. Otherwise, decisions have to be made for you. Trying to have her, you know, feel some ownership and have some power and control over what was happening to her. She refused. Absolutely refused. And so when I start thinking about going through this process and using some of the tools that you're making available, I start thinking about personalities like my mother. I start thinking about what we've done to our youth over the past several decades when we continuously tell them, well, you can be anything you want to be. And I'm like, that ain't true. I mean, so I have one child who's, uh, quite an introvert. And so like many kids, they're enameled about, hey, this YouTubers making a million dollars a week, right? You know, it's like, okay. And I'm like, okay, that's great. I said, you do know that everything in their life is exposed to everyone. I said, that's not your personality. So you mean I'd fail? I'm like, um, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying you need to consider what your personality traits are and what you feel comfortable in doing and whether or not that's a right suit or fit for you. And then I become the negative Nelly, and I'm like, well, I think we have to go through these, uh, in this type of analysis. Same thing when my, when my older daughter was thinking about universities to go through, I said, okay, well let's get, let's create a decision matrix so you can take emotion out of your decision process. She refused to do it. Right. So I start thinking about these personality traits and what are the likelihood of people being successful with, um, you know, executing really and having the success that you're talking about that you're sharing in the book.

Kyle Austin Young: Sure. I can't force people to care about their odds of success. I can't force people to. The good news is I think life's a pretty good teacher. Why do I care about my odds of success? Because I've failed. Because I've experienced what it's like to put a lot of time and resources into something, only for it to blow up at the last minute and me to be left holding the pieces wondering, could this have gone differently? You know, in reality? What brought this book into the world for me was I went through a couple of layoffs back to back. One of them being from that health organization where I got this really unlikely position. It certainly accelerated my career. But a round of layoffs took me out. And then I, uh, accepted another job, round of layoffs took me out again, another leadership position. And so I was in this position where I kept losing these high paying jobs with good visibility. And it was at really inopportune times. There's never a good time for a layoff. But once I just bought my first house. Again, this is a long time ago. The second time my wife and I were in the, in the process of adopting our daughter, which is a famously expensive process. Not a good time to lose your income. So one of the things that I learned from that experience was it wasn't enough to show up and do a good job and think that that offered me job security, which is what I was raised to believe. I was raised to believe that if I showed up, you know, conducted myself with integrity, over delivered, I was good to go. I learned that wasn't the case. What I took away was an understanding that to some extent I had to share in the responsibility for the outcome of the projects that I was a part of, even for the organizations that I was a part of. If I had an opportunity to make projects or organizations more likely to succeed, I needed to lean into that. I couldn't just settle for the fact that, well, I did my job. That might be a reason to sleep well at night, but it wasn't going to keep me paid. So ultimately, when I got laid up the second time, I was really fortunate. People knew me, they knew my work, and, uh, I was respected at what I did. And so I had four different companies offered me a job. The day after that second layoff, people who were calling me who kind of heard the news, and I was trying to decide which one to work with, and a couple of friends were really generous. One took me to lunch, one called me on the phone, and they said, I think you should take fractional roles with all four, that you should diversify your income. I think you should stop putting all your eggs in one basket. You've got four people who want to work with you. That's special, that's rare. Work with all four and see where that takes you as a consultant. So that was over a decade ago. It worked really well. But as I entered into that consulting work, I brought with me that sense of ownership. I brought with me that understanding that I had to care about my odds of success. I had to care about the project's odds of success, the organization's odds of success. And that is ultimately what made me as successful as I've become, is I was coming into these situations and taking accountability for outcomes, and often outcomes that nobody was expecting me to take accountability for, but I was investing at that level. I got a nice compliment recently. I was working with a nonprofit that. That digs wells in Africa, but they do, you know, around 40 million a year in donations, so there's. There's some real money moving around. And I finished up a project with them, and I got a call from one of the project leads, and he said, I wanted to give you a piece of feedback about your consulting. And I kind of thought, oh, you know, here we go. But I wanted to learn from whatever it was. But typically, you don't get unsolicited calls. And I said, all right. He said, we just did kind of a debrief with the team, asking, what did you think about working with Kyle? He said one of the things that everybody said, and he paused. And so I'm, you know, sweating bullets over here. They really admired how you never say you. You always say we. You never say you have a problem. You say, we have a problem. You never say you made a mistake. You say, we made a mistake, and you find some way to kind of position yourself as part of the group when we're taking ownership for things that aren't going well, or when we're looking ahead to things that might be kind of scary or daunting and he said that was something we've never seen before. Everybody who comes in here is just saying, you, you, you. Everything's our problem. You made us feel like you were sharing in that hope with us. You were sharing in that risk with us. And I just want to say that meant a lot to me. Okay. You know, thanks for the phone call. A lot of people wouldn't do that. But again, it was the failures that taught me that I had to care about my odds of success. So to the person whose personality type, you know, makes them think that they don't want to engage in something like this. Sure. Uh, call me when you change your mind.

Jim Rembach: You know, I think that's, you know, hopefully life will give you the lessons by which you ultimately come to the conclusion. Conclusion to where your approach has to change. Um, and like you said, hopefully you're there when that does happen. Okay, so you talk about critical points and a goal. What is a critical point? And how can leaders identify those moments in real time?

Kyle Austin Young: A critical point is something that has to go right in order for you to get what you want. And a lot of times, we'll find ourselves in situations where we don't know what all the critical points are. And for that reason, we wouldn't necessarily want to do what I call a predictive hack. The example of the marathon is a predictive hack hack. I'm estimating how likely I am to accomplish that because this expert, this running coach, told me there's three things that have to go right, and I'm confident that she knows what she's talking about. In other cases, we aren't confident that we know everything that has to go right. And so we need to, you know, embrace the reality of that uncertainty. In that case, we can do what I call an easy hack. And that's the example of me getting that job out of college. If we know even one thing that has to go right, we have the opportunity to look for the things that could go wrong and try to find creative opportunities to improve our odds. So in that case, you know, we can still make a success diagram. List out everything that we're aware of. The great thing about a success diagram is it's interactive one. It's. It's very rooted in your context. A lot of base rates aren't. And that's why I think it's helpful to design something that is. Here's what it's going to take for me to be successful. I might have challenges that other people don't have. I might have opportunities that other people don't have. But here's what's going to take for me to be successful. And so when we make a list of everything, we know that has to go right, and we collaborate with other people and ask questions, you know, am I missing anything? When we leverage tools like AI, do our homework, then over time we have the ability to get, uh, a really clear picture. And if something new appears out of nowhere and we realize, oh, there's another path on this road to success, great, add it to the diagram. Think about the bad outcomes. Do what you can to optimize your odds of success.

Jim Rembach: Okay, so the book lays out a probability hacking framework, and you've talked through that quite a bit. Uh, and you talked about the core steps. But how can I easily get started with that?

Kyle Austin Young: Sure. I think at the beginning it's identify one thing that has to go right and then think about what could go wrong. The challenge with a lot of base rates, a lot of published statistics, is, again, they don't take your specific context into account. So let's talk about maybe your odds of playing in the National Basketball Association. You mentioned that you have a son who wants to be a YouTuber. That's great. A lot of kids, you know, want to play basketball. At least that's what I did when I was a kid. If you are, uh, the average male in the United States, then you're around 5 foot 9. And if that's your reality, then your probability of playing in the NBA is 1 in 1.2 million. That's terrible odds. Terrible, terrible odds. And so a lot of people hearing that would say, oh, I don't, you know, I should never even pursue that. And maybe not. But here's what's really interesting. If you're between six feet tall and six foot three, your odds go from one in 1.2 million to one in a hundred thousand. That's still unlikely, but it's ten times better. If you're between six, four and six, seven, your odds are one in eight thousand. If you're between six, eight and six, eleven, one in two hundred. And what's really astonishing is if you're one of the very few people who are over seven feet tall, your odds of playing in the NBA are, uh, one in seven. One out of seven people in this country who are over seven feet tall, research says, are playing in the National Basketball Association. So one of the things that we're trying to do is we're trying to get a sense of what are our strengths. What are the areas where we're above average because we see how you even incrementally, the odds were improving so much as we went up just a few inches at a time. So I would encourage people to consider what are the goals that I could pursue today where my odds are pretty good. And how could those goals make subsequent achievements possible? One for me was I knew that I wanted to write a book. I've had that goal since I was a kid. The way I remember it, I was leaving my great grandfather's funeral. We were going from the church to the graveside. My mom said, what do you want to do when you grow up? That's how I remember it. I said, I, uh, want to write a book. And she said, okay. Now, that was like 25 years ago. What did I have to do to put myself in a situation for that? Well, I had to demonstrate my authority and credibility. So there was a goal, you know, about 10 years ago that I was going to write for the Harvard Business Review. I was going to write for Forbes. I was going to write for Psychology Today. I was going to demonstrate my expertise in these smaller publications. So I accomplished those goals. And that made so many things possible. So many things possible. Having that credibility. I knew I was going to have to have certain connections to publish a book. I was going to know literary agents. I took several consulting opportunities that put me in the room with literary agents that weren't the best paying consulting opportunities weren't necessarily the ones that I would have taken otherwise. But I knew what my goal was. I knew where I wanted to get to, and I knew what had to go right for me to get there. I knew that one of the steps was I had to have a literary agent. So I intentionally took on projects that would position me closer to those gatekeepers. So that's the opportunity that we have when we start thinking ahead, uh, to what are our goals? Well, first of all, what are the goals that I could potentially pursue now, where I feel like my odds are pretty good because of my individual attributes, but also, what are the goals that I have for the future? What's going to have to go right? And then we can just live our lives collecting the advantages we need to optimize our odds over time. It's almost passive. When you're at a networking event, somebody tells you what they do. All of a sudden you know what you're looking for because you have a sense of what it's going to take to accomplish goals that might still be a decade away.

Jim Rembach: Well, as you're talking, I start thinking about you know, timelines and time horizons. And um, one of the things that I had read, uh, about organizations in the way that they go through their strategy process is that a lot of times they'll talk about three to five year plans and they won't go past that. Now one of the issues with, uh, having that type of shorter timeline and time horizon is that for most organizations, what they have as an output of their strategic plan and is really what people call a glorified operational plan.

Kyle Austin Young: Sure.

Jim Rembach: You're not going to really get somebody to Mars, you know, in a three to five year window. That's just not the way it works. Right. Even like when you started talking about I want to write a book, how long did it take you? Right. And all these things that you needed to do in order to be able to get there. So I think part of the reality is to be able to determine what can I, uh, you know, what can I do within a certain given timeline and time horizon, uh, and how does that impact what actions I need to take?

Kyle Austin Young: I think that's absolutely true. Big goals can be broken down into smaller goals. And just as doing that makes it often less daunting from a productivity standpoint, it can make, make it less daunting from a probability standpoint. I mean, think about running that marathon. When we knew that we had to eat the way we were supposed to, we felt pretty good about that individual goal. Well, maybe we do have the ability to transform our eating right now, even if it's not the time for us to go running and in doing so, put ourselves in a better position when we're able to add some of those other things.

Jim Rembach: Okay, so you, um, you, you talked a lot about, you know, even your own personal experiences in your own personal plan and how you know that that made an impact. So part of my under, uh, you have the book what's Next?

Kyle Austin Young: Before I answer that question, and I will answer that question, you said something earlier that I really wanted to respond to, but I was waiting for the right time. You mentioned that you were trying to give some advice to your kids, particularly your son, about this goal of maybe becoming a YouTuber. I want to share something that's in the book, but it's not my idea. It comes from Jeff Hayden. He's an ink columnist who I know and really respect. He recommends something called the two week rule. And I want to say this really fast. The two week rule is he says if you're considering pursuing a goal and you want to see if it's the kind of thing you'd want to stick with long term. You want to put yourself in a position where you're not going to want to give up. He says, try pursuing it for two weeks, but don't make any big financial investments. Don't do anything you can't undo for two weeks, and then after that two weeks is over, stop and say, did I enjoy the actual lifestyle of a YouTuber? For example, I think a potential opportunity might be record content for two weeks. Don't publish it. See if you actually like the process of recording content, but do it on your phone. Don't go buy a $4,000 camera. Let's learn that before we make that investment. So, uh, that was something you mentioned earlier that I wanted to point out to people because you're asking great questions about, like, what can I do today? One thing you can do today is recognize that one of the biggest potential bad outcomes in any goal is quitting, especially if the odds are on your side. If that's the case, then quitting is arguably your biggest risk of all. So how do you avoid quitting? Well, there's things you can do to stay the course, but there's also things you can do to make sure you're choosing goals that you are predisposed to want to stick with. And a great way to experiment with that is that two week rule. You asked, what's next after the book? You know, this is a fun opportunity for me that in some ways this is a chance to be generous and finally have a place to send people to if they're maybe not the ideal fit as a coaching client, as a consulting client, I've been fortunate to write for a lot of big publications. And sometimes people will come to me and say, I have a question about lead gen. And I say, great, you know, here's a Forbes article or something like that. I don't have time to hop on a call and talk about Legion, but I've written about that I didn't have anywhere to send people for a more holistic approach to strategy that involved, you know, what can we do to ultimately pick the right goals, optimize our odds of success for those goals, create a plan, and then go implement. So this has given me the ability to help people that I couldn't have helped before. It's also given me the ability now to formalize a framework that I think will empower me to bring other people on board that I can then teach the methodology to and hopefully widen, you know, the scope of the number of people that I'm Able to serve. Because up until this point, I've had to say no more than I've said yes. And I'm hopeful that we can get some coaches on board who can work with more people and put us in a position to be more useful in the world.

Jim Rembach: That's, that's audacious. Um, and that is absolutely appropriate at it, um, with what you're talking about and what you're doing. So working with a lot of contact centers is what I, you know, work with and help with developing leaders in that particular area. We see supervisor drift. And supervisor drift is, you know, this is the expectation and whether or not I am meeting that expectation. And I'm not talking about performance, uh, sometimes performance is an impact, sometimes it isn't. But if we start thinking about culture, am I a culture builder or am I apathetic to the culture? I don't necessarily build it, I just kind of live it, you know? Or am I potentially even eroding it? Those are all drift patterns. Um, and those are driven by a lot of the biases, inconsistent decisions. Um, we talk about phone factors which are just human behavior, things which are fear, uh, overconfidence, negative impressions. I don't want people to think bad about me. Um, and then what we call execution blindness is like, well, I don't really know what they're doing over there regards to leading their people. And, uh, so I just kind of do my own thing. And also, senior level executives don't have visibility in how their people are leading people. Right. So it's. You have a lot of these things happen. Um, and so when I start thinking about a lot of what you're referring to requires behavior change. I need to behave differently to be able to make better decisions. Um, you know, we talk about a leadership execution system to help people become better leaders. Now, how do you see us being able to use the things that you're doing in order to be able to impact people, um, on an ongoing and consistent basis. So we start actually having healthy patterns and making better decisions. Because one of the issues that organizations deal with is execution. We're not getting stuff done.

Kyle Austin Young: Sure. I think that a success diagram is a really effective way to create team alignment because we now know what the outcome is, we know what the steps are in order to get there. And I think it's a great way to prevent some of that drift that you're talking about. The reality is, most drift happens in the context of decision making. We make decisions, and we don't realize that those decisions actually took us A little bit away from what the objective used to be. We've made a compromise along the way or we've restructured. When you have a diagram saying, no, this is where we're going. This is what it takes to get there. Here's what could go wrong. I find that you have the ability to make decisions with confidence. What a lot of people worry about in the context of decisions is, you know, decision fatigue or option overwhelm. We're going to have too many choices and it's going to. It's going to make it hard for us to ultimately stick this or ultimately discern the right answer. I don't worry about that very much because what I find is that if you have a clear standard for what you're looking for, then it doesn't matter how many options you have, you just put it against the standard and choose the best one. I think about Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison was in a race to invent the first practical incandescent lamp. And the challenge that everyone trying to do that in this competition for patents was dealing with was they needed to find a filament that could get hot enough to glow and incandesce without catching on fire and without snuffing out so quickly that it wasn't worth the hassle of trying to bring a light bulb into your house. And so all these people were trying to find a filament that would ultimately allow them to get these patents and, you know, be the person who invented kind of this precursor to the light bulb. What Edison did that was different is he experimented with 6,000 different plant filaments to find the one that was going to be ultimately most successful. He leveraged the power of multiple attempts. You know, one of the most reliable ways to accomplish a goal with a 1% chance of happening is to try over and over and over and over and over again. Now, that can be painful and expensive, but it is a path to overcoming bad odds. And that's what he did with these 6,000 plant materials. He ultimately found that carbonized bamboo, which is not one that I would have, you know, intuited as the right answer was the. Was the solution that was able to incandescent think it was for 1200 hours when electrified. So this gives him patents that ultimately are really instrumental in his career, gives him advantages on subsequent goals. I find that a success diagram can be like that. Just as he's standing there with a stopwatch, just measuring how long does this thing glow before it goes out? When we know what has to go right when we Know what could go wrong as we evaluate these different decisions, we do it in that context. If I'm considering, you know, objective A or objective B, I, uh, look at the diagram and say, how does this affect my potential bad outcomes? Does this make them more likely to happen or less likely to happen? Does this introduce new potential bad outcomes that could ultimately hurt my odds of success? Am I going to hire, you know, candidate A or candidate B or promote candidate A or candidate B? Do it all in the context of the risks that you expect to experience as you try to accomplish this goal? I find that can be the standard that allows you to weigh dozens or even hundreds of options quickly and efficiently and ultimately make decisions that don't pull you away from your optimized chance of getting what you want.

Jim Rembach: I'll tell you, one of the things that I talk about in regards to being able to accomplish certain things is maintaining focus and just attempting to make a movement. Of course we want it to be a forward movement, but at least making a movement, uh, ah, every single day. And so I talk about you being able to accomplish that goal is what you do every single day all along the way. So it has some cadence to it. So people can. Okay, I know, because anxiety will overtake you when you start thinking about some of these good bit, you know, huge goals that you're trying to accomplish. Uh, and that's, I think, where people get bogged down. That's why we have a lot of, I think that's why we have a lot of anxiety in our schools. You know, this whole educational anxiety. Uh, and, you know, I have to get into the school, um, I have to get this grade. Um, I think we have the same issue from an athletic perspective. I need to make it to a D1 school. I can't. I mean, and so people start thinking about that and they don't really think about what they need to do every single day all along the way. With that being said, if I start thinking about people taking away the one thing from your book that's going to help them move, what is it?

Kyle Austin Young: I would encourage you to think negative. I know that's counterintuitive, but I would encourage you to embrace anxiety exists for reason. Anxiety is not your enemy. Where anxiety takes over your life is where you experience these fears, the idea of these risks, and then you don't know what to do with them. And ultimately you just live with the fear. You live with the risk. If you ultimately are able to identify a potential bad outcome. Use your creativity. You know, when I was Trying to apply for this job that ultimately changed the trajectory of my career. 21 year old department manager, that was crazy. That put me in a position that, you know, my siblings were not in, that my friends were not in. It was so instrumental in the success that came after that. The fear that, what if they think I'm too young? What if they think I'm too young? What if they think I'm too young? I didn't just repeat that and live in that fear. I grew a beard, I wrote a plan. I read the books that this team was reading. I put myself in a position to be successful. So every time I am presented with that type of anxious thought, I say thanks. Good point. And then try to figure out what I can do about it. And if you do that every single day, all along the way, you can change your odds of success. And in the context of a single goal, it can change your outcome. Over the context of several goals, it can change the trajectory of your career. And over the context of a lifetime of goals that can change your legacy.

Jim Rembach: Kyle Austin Young. Fantastic conversation. How does the Fast Leader Legion get in touch with you?

Kyle Austin Young: Yeah, please, uh, please get in touch with me. You can grab a copy of the book on gosh, everywhere, Amazon, Barnes and Noble Target directly on the Penguin Random House website. Um, you are welcome to reach out to me. I have a website, kyleaustinyoung.com but what I really enjoy is when people just find me on LinkedIn. Kyle Austin Young, send me a message. I really enjoy connecting with people there. If you have a question from the show or want to reach out, it would be great to hear from you.

Jim Rembach: Kyle, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and we wish you the very best.

Kyle Austin Young: Thanks for having me.

Jim Rembach: Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leaders show today. For recaps, links from every show, special offers, and access to download and subscribe. If you haven't already, head on over to fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.