Personal Development Training and Motivational Humor from the Motivational Smart Ass!

Having you ever walked into a situation assuming things would be simple and easy, only to find yourself scrambling when nothing seems to go right? I certainly have.

One memory I have of such an occasion is from my old college intramural basketball playing days. I would like to share this story with you because a) it’s the closest I am going to come to a good, “Glory Days” sports story and b) there are some very useful lessons you can take away from it.

In college I played on an intramural basketball team – I know, you look at me, a 5’8″ stocky Indian guy and instantly think, “basketball star!” But it’s true, I played a lot of basketball and loved it.

(Side note: Our team name was “Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy,” which shows you a) what a warped sense of humor we all had and b) how ridiculous college students can be, even – or maybe especially – us hoity toity Ivy League folk…)

During my senior year we had a game against a “friendly rival.” We each knew members of the other team and there was a certain amount of trash talking going on.

Here’s the thing: this other team wasn’t good. At all. And we were good that year – we even made it a few rounds into the playoffs.

Our starting point guard. Ok, so maybe we were not taking it as seriously as we should have

Don’t Take Anything For Granted!

I don’t know what happened, but the game started and we were getting demolished! There was no rhyme or reason to it; it’s not like they had a bunch of ringers or anything. They were just beating the pants off of us. It was as if they could not miss any of their outside shots.

It was getting embarrassing. We were down by almost twenty points in the first half!

Question: Have you ever gone into a situation assuming it would be simple, only to be unfortunately shocked? If so, remember to never take anything for granted and always bring your “A” game – you never know when you’ll need it.

Thankfully, half-time gave us a chance to regroup. We talked it over, and basically said, “this is crazy. We should be killing these guys. Let’s go out and do i

Just try harder. Or I’ll kill you.

Which brings us to lesson #2:

“Trying Harder” With a Losing Strategy Accomplishes Nothing!

Yup, our basic big half-time strategic plan was to “do better.” No changes, just, “play harder, do better.” Well that’s just dumb.

We went out and “tried harder,” and guess what? We kept losing! The other team kept hitting their shots, and we stayed just as ineffectual.

Question: Do you ever react to something not working by simply “trying harder”? You do see the futility in that, right? Next time, instead of trying harder, try to actually rethink your strategy.

Now it’s early in the second half, and we are still down by a lot. Then an interesting thing happened. One of my teammates who was not in the game at this time starts yelling from the sidelines, “They can’t dribble! Press them! They can’t dribble!”

Up to this point we had been playing defense the way we always did: a couple feet away, taking away the drive and being able to contest the shot. This is standard defense because it takes away the ball-handler’s ability to drive to the basketball and create all source of defensive switching problems, and it forces the player to make outside shots. As we saw, in this case they were making all of their outside shots. But as my friend pointed out, since they couldn’t dribble, we didn’t need to worry about them driving past as.

After hearing my buddy’s advice I had that, “‘Bruce Leroy suddenly realizes he is the Master’ ah-ha! moment.” I immediately got right up in the ball-handlers face and sure enough, he turned the ball over. Everyone on my team started applying a lot more pressure, and this led to turnover after turnover.

Who’s the master? I am!

Sometimes You Need An External Observer!

What’s funny is my friend who called this out was not the biggest basketball fan. He enjoyed playing, but didn’t watch countless hours of basketball, analyzing offenses and defenses. And he never played organized ball. The rest of us who were playing at that moment were much bigger, “students of the game,” if you will. And yet none of us who were playing saw this simple strategic flaw. But as soon as he yelled it out, we all realized that it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Sometimes when you are in the thick of things, you miss obvious fixes and solutions. This is one of the reasons we so often try to apply the “try harder” approach. We are too close to the situation to objectively see any alternatives.

Question: Do you have a (or a few) source of external feedback? Someone who can look at you with a more objective eye and point out some of the obvious things you may be missing? Whether it’s a friend, family member, colleague, or paid professional, I would highly recommend you find some people to give you this kind of help – it can cut massive amounts of time off your learning and advancement.

The game continues, and now, armed with our new defensive strategy, we manage to come back and win the game. I wish I had some heroic story of how it game down to a final shot and my team in-bounded me the ball and I did a beautiful crossover dribble – drive – pull up jumper at the buzzer to win the game. But no, nothing like that happened.

I don’t really remember how the game ended. All I remember is that we almost royally screwed up what should have been an easy win. I learned a lot of lessons that day, and I hope that now you have too.

P.S. If you want some awesome basketball music video motivation, watch this Larry Bird video:

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Here’s a story about a guy who, while on a Ryanair flight, won $13,600 from a scratch-off lottery ticket. The ticket was from the airline, so the guy wanted to collect his money right then and there. When told by the crew that he would have to send in his ticket for validation and to collect the money, he got mad. Really mad. So what did he do? The logical thing, of course: he ate the ticket!

Read the story here:

Furious Ryanair passenger eats his $13,600 winning lottery ticket

If there’s an example of unleashing brilliance by observing stupidly, this has to be it. What could possibly be going through this man’s head?

Here is how I imaging the conversation went:

“Hey, I won $13,000+ from this lottery ticket! Excuse me, may I collect my winnings right now?”

“I’m sorry sir, but we don’t pay out in flight. You have to send it in.”

“What?! Are you telling me part of your job description is not paying out lottery winnings? What the hell??”

“No, it’s not. Not to mention the fact that we don’t keep $13,000 in petty cash on hand on flights.”

“Well that is just the stupidest thing I have ever heard of!”

“Really sir? That’s stupider than expecting an airline to pay out a five digit scratch card payout mid-flight”

“Arrrgh!! You make me so angry!”

“Sir, if you don’t calm down i will summon the air marshal.”

“Arrrgh!! That’s it! I’ll show you – I will eat this ticket!”

“Umm, sir, you do realize that if you eat the ticket, you can’t collect, right? I mean, the airline does not accept eaten and digested tickets.”

“Arrrgh!! I don’t care! I am so mad! This will show all of you! Chomp, chomp, chomp – Gaachk!”

“Sir, are you all right?”

“Grghg hahlkj jahjah.”

“Sir, are you choking on the lottery ticket you just ate?”

(Man nods furiously)

“No problem. That will be $2.”

“RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

POP! (Man’s head explodes. Rest of plane claps. Except for man’s seat mate, who causally wipes off man’s exploded head remains to claim winning lottery ticket, then calmly puts it into his pocket to turn in later like a proper, sane person).

We all run into situations that make us angry, but the world would be such a better place, and so many people’s lives would be so much easier and more successful, if they were just able to pause for a second or two, think things through, put them in perspective, and then take simple logical action.

I am assuming you are smart enough to never get so mad that you eat a $13,600 lottery ticket (If I am wrong, please get off my blog. Now.). But try to think back to this stupid Ryanair passenger the next time you find your anger rising and you feel tempted to take rash and potentially stupid action.

You may not save $13,600, but you just might save your dignity.

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Are you planning an event and looking for a great speaker to add humor and energy? Then visit Avish’s Conference Speaker page now!
 

Sometimes a little knowledge and preparation are all you need to avert disaster and improvise with the unexpected. I discovered this one day a few years ago when I created a quite unintentional flambe in my kitchen…

(Disclaimer: do not take anything I did or even say to do as absolute advice on what to do in case of a kitchen fire. Go ask someone who didn’t almost burn their apartment down…)

One evening, I was hanging at my apartment with my buddy Mike, and we decided to cook dinner. Being men, we opted to make manly steak. Being friends, we decided to collaborate on the cooking process. The challenge with this was that we had two different styles of cooking steak…

My method was to get a cast iron skillet really hot, spread some canola oil onto the steak, and then drop the steak into the pan.

Mike’s method was to heat a regular pan to medium high heat, melt some butter, then cook the steak in that.

If you know anything about cooking, chemistry, physics, or common sense, you can see the problem in combining these two methods. At the time, clearly neither Mike nor I know anything about any of those things…

You see, we opted for my “get a cast iron skillet really hot” method. And let me tell you, a cast iron skillet over high heat can get very hot indeed. We then decided to go with Mike’s “let’s use butter instead of canola oil, ’cause hey, butter tastes better, right?”

For those of you unfamiliar with the culinary arts, allow me to introduce the term “smoke point” to you. This is the temperature at which a fat (butter or oil, in this case) begins to smoke. Butter has a very low smoke point (350 degrees F). Canola oil has a very high smoke point (470 degrees F). If you’re wondering, no, you do not want your fat to reach its smoke point.

The reason you use Canola oil in a blazingly hot skillet is that it can handle the heat. As we were about to discover, a cast iron skillet over high heat gets well above butter’s smoke point.

We toss the butter into the skillet and instantaneously, “WHOOSH!” smoke starts billowing out of the pan.

Lesson #1: If you’re going to improvise, you need to understand the fundamentals of what you are doing. Randomly combining steps without knowing the fundamentals is a sure path to disaster. Bitter, smokey, ugly disaster.

Mike and I look at the smokey skillet, and then at each other. “Um…this isn’t good.”

There we are, staring at smoke pouring from the pan, when suddenly, the smoke turns to fire. Now the butter in my cast iron skillet is on fire.

Lesson #2: Standing around frozen in inaction is generally not a good way to deal with the unexpected

Now here is where the stupidity gets real interesting. Before I explain what happened next, let me give you a little back story…

You see, while I was just a wee young lad, someone said, “never throw water on a grease fire.” I understood the words, but they didn’t make sense to me. Fire was fire, and water puts out fires, right? So I asked an “adult,” and the adult’s answer was something along the lines of, “well, since water and grease don’t mix, the water just pushes the grease and fire around instead of putting it out.” Ok, I suppose that made sense.

(Note: at no point in that conversation was the term “geyser of fire” used. It should have. As you’ll soon see…)

In retrospect, this turned out to be one of the many situations where an adult, for whatever reason, pulled half an answer out of their ass, when they should have really said, “I’m not sure, but you never should, because it would be really, really bad.”

So here I am with a grease fire in my kitchen, and the only reason I thought not to use water was because the water would “just push around the grease.”

“But I have a skillet, a contained area! If I just put in a bit of water slowly, that will mitigate the ‘pushing around’ problem and put out the fire, right?”

Lesson #3: Consider some of the things you have leaned and believe, and then consider the source. Is it time to revisit some of those truths?

So in my ignorance, I

a) pick up the flaming pan
b) move the flaming pan to the sink
c) wait for it….
d) wait for it…
e) turn on the water!

WHOOSH!

My goodness! I suddenly found myself on the set of the Towering Inferno, right there in my kitchen. A “geyser of fire” erupted from the pan towards the ceiling.

This time, I would like to credit my 20 some odd years of martial arts training for the fact that immediately as the “geyser of fire” started erupting, I a) did not drop the pan screaming and b) immediately crouched down and got the pan as low as possible so that the top of the geyser did not hit my ceiling. (yes, in retrospect I know that moving the pan at all may have led to grease spillage, which would have been bad. At the time though, things worked out…)

It is true that water and oil don’t mix, and the water will spread the fire. But not just by pushing it around. There’s a lot more to it. It involves rapid evaporation, steam, grease molecules, and a few other things. I don’t want to misinform you, so look it up on Google yourself.

Lesson #4: The more you know, the better you improvise.

Now I am crouching on my floor with a “geyser of fire” coming out of my skillet. Interestingly, the “geyser of fire” had spread to the oven mitt I was using to hold the skillet, so that was on fire too. Not a big blazing fire, just a little flame on the thumb of the oven mitt. You know, to keep things interesting.

The logical thing to do at this point would be to pull out my fire extinguisher and use it on the fire. That would be the logical thing, except for one small problem:

At this point, I didn’t own a fire extinguisher

Lesson #5: The better you prepare, the better you improvise.

Fortunately, the “geyser of fire” had fallen to a small flame before the fire on my oven mitt ate it’s way through to my thumb. I was able to put the skillet back on the (now turned off) stove, extinguish the oven mitt fire, take off the mitt, and then monitor the small skillet fire until it went out. Which it eventually did.

(If you’re wondering: yes, the next day I did go out and buy a fire extinguisher. I also learned that in a pinch, my big box of kosher salt is good for putting out small grease fires too.)

In retrospect, this is a very funny story because it all worked out, no one got hurt, and my apartment (and the 11 other units in the building) did not burn down to the ground. It could just as easily have turned into a major tragedy. Fortunately, there was only a small amount of butter to start with (as opposed to being a major grease fire with a whole pot of oil, for example)

The overall takeaway lesson here is simple: If you want to be successful and if you want to be able to flow with the unexpected Dings of Life, a little preparation and a little knowledge go a long, long way…

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Are you planning an event and looking for a great speaker to add humor and energy? Then visit Avish’s Conference Speaker page now!