#62 - You Should Throw a Hail Mary Once Per Week
Repetition + Bold Attempts = Dreams Realized (or something like that)
What is a key difference between the people who realize their dreams and those for which dreams will always just be that: unrealized visualizations of a future state?
I think it comes down to reps. Or repetition.
Let me break down my thinking a bit more with an example: becoming a chef.
Now, I don’t really know much about the journey to become a chef… And as much as I love cooking food, I would probably fail at being a chef at a high-quality restaurant (I am terrible at following recipes or consistent formulations of food).
But here’s what I can guess about the journey:
At some point, someone realizes they love cooking. They love cooking so much that they want to make it a career path
They consider going to school, but realize that they can’t bear the financial burden of going
They decide to first work in a restaurant to gain some experience
This is where most people just start blanket applying to restaurants (10 restaurants), probably online. They do the thing that everyone else seems to be doing, and they’re surprised and dejected when the results aren’t affirming. That is, when they don’t hear back from anyone. «HURDLE #1»
If you want unusual outcomes you might need an unusual approach. Or maybe, better yet: you need to mix an unusual approach with repetition. Let’s keep bulleting out how this could work.
After failing to get any traction from applying online, Fortuna (the name of our protagonist here) comes to the realization that she needs to go in person to restaurants to make an impression and increase her chances of actually talking to someone at a restaurant
Fortuna is feeling AMPED about her new approach, and decides to test it out on a few restaurants
Fast forward a few days, and three restaurants have turned her down. She feels discouraged, she confides in her family/friends about the difficulty.
This is where most people will give up «HURDLE #2»
They give up after testing out something and realizing that this path, too, isn’t working. But this is abandoning ship way too early. Here’s how Fortuna is going to overcome the second Hurdle that eliminates most dreamers.
Fortuna cold reaches out 10 chefs. One of them responds. When she gets that one phone call she asks about the chefs path, shares her dream for being a chef, shares the many points of failure she’s had, and critically: she asks the chef what she should do when approaching restaurants in person? “How do I stand out? What would make you give me a chance?”
Fortuna gets some ideas, and now she’s ready to go at it again. Here’s what happens:
Fortuna goes to three more restaurants and this time ONE actually says YES to granting her an initial interview
But unfortunately her car broke down on the way to the interview and she showed up an hour late. She doesn’t get the second interview «HURLDE #3»
UGH! FORTUNA! You just cannot catch a break! She’s experienced three sets of setbacks, and yet again this is where most people would stop. She invariably thinks, “Maybe i’m not cut out of for this.”
But Fortuna then watches a movie about a star chef and becomes inspired yet once again (idk guys, just work with me here). Here’s what she does now:
She decides to sprint for a week. She’s going to go to 20 restaurants, of which 5 will grant her an interview. Now she’s in business
Eventually those five interviews yield 3 follow-up interviews, and she is able to get two job offers
These offers are to help at the front desk of the restaurant, but she’ll have the opportunity to learn more about how a restaurant functions, and now she’s in the game. She’s on the path. She’s started.
I think life kinda works like this story. Sure, it looks different for you and for your friends, but generally the people who make it are the ones who are willing to jump over hurdles over and over and over again, but learn from their mistakes each time. This process of learning tends to be accretive (helpful), in that you learn lessons that will benefit you in future “leaps” you’re trying to make in your life.
And the foundation of the results is repetition.
In the above story, Fortuna reaches out to 40+ restaurants/people to eventually get to two real opportunities. That is a 5% “conversion” rate. And a lot of things go into conversion, not repetition alone but…
Calibrated Repetition.
From every hurdle, Fortuna learns something that allows her to adjust her next attempt. And this is what enables the achievement of dreams. The ability to run at an opportunity, know that it is statistically unlikely to work, and to keep doing it over and over again but with modifications regularly so that you might test and learn and achieve.
This is how my brain works with almost everything, and it’s because that’s what I’ve done my whole life. My entire existence has been a story of repetition and failure and repetition and failure and repetition and… a breakthrough.
Which leads me back to the title of this letter: Throw a Hail Mary Once Per Week.
The thing I didn’t really accomplish with my totally made up example above was the mindset around making a bold attempt. For Fortuna to walk into a restaurant without knowing anyone there and asking for a job is really hard. To this day whenever I make an in-person cold outreach to a potential customer, my heart rate increases. You might not realize it from how it’s coming across, but I feel it emotionally. I feel it because I know this act of putting myself out there will likely lead nowhere, and that’s challenging. And yet it’s doing this on a regular basis that allows you to “unlock” different potential realities for your life.
And so right now, as I’m building Homegrown, I’m throwing a Hail Mary Pass once per week. Maybe it’s to a customer, maybe it’s to a potential local investor, maybe it’s to an investor who I am not already connected to. Maybe it’s to a vendor. Maybe it’s to someone who I want to eventually bring on the team… Whatever it is, one time per week I do something f*cking scary, because sometimes…not all the time but sometimes, it works.
To end this free write exercise, think about something you want to achieve, and ask yourself what you could do once per week to make it more of a reality? I’m not saying what will lead it to just magically happen. I’m saying what could you do right now or tomorrow that would bring you even 1% closer to that dream you have? Just do it. Go do it. Stop waiting. Stop thinking about it. Just try something, and do it regularly.
Michael’s quick appendix of things he’s done this with:
Getting my first job — I reached out to probably 75 companies to get five interviews. Hurdle: most people declined me immediately without an interview
Transferring to different groups within Deloitte — Probably sent 200 outreach e-mails over 8 years, of which 25-30% responded, of which 3-4% became people I worked with. Hurdle: most people didn’t respond.
Joining my first startup — I probably talked to 15 different startups, and met even more people thinking about building one. Most of the time I was told no for a wide variety of reasons, the most common of which being that I had never worked at a startup and there were concerns about my ability to build in that context
Finding my wife — UGH dating sucked. It was 10+ years of dating, making some progress, things not working out, feeling dejected… giving up… giving it another go, trying different apps, working on myself, working on myself, and eventually bam: I found my freaking awesome wife
Making my first sales within consulting / startups — Usually entailed me awkwardly asking for someone’s business and being told no many times. Eventually I sought out very intense coaching on “How to be a top 1% of 1% sales expert” and kept practicing… kept building proposals, kept pitching, kept doing final selections with customers, kept learning, and eventually got pretty good at the art of the complex sale
My own startup — I built my own early versions of startups no less than 10 times and usually realized that the ideas just weren’t differentiated enough or that I wasn’t yet ready to run the full distance. Many of these concepts still permeate my thinking, and Homegrown is oddly close to some of them (#PotentialFutures)
Venture capital — jesus it’s impossible to find seats at VC firms. Like downright impossible. Over the years I was ignored, denied, or given one of 10 reasons for why I wasn’t going to work out (the most common one being, “Our analyst program is extremely competitive with kids coming from (insert ivy league schools), and we simply had to make tough choices here”
I did end up getting opportunities to join VC and PE firms throughout the years, but it only came after … an utterly ridiculous amount of hail mary’s and more non-respondes and rejections than I can count. But here I learned every time.
Eventually I found a few people in venture who were willing to introduce me to other people in venture, who were willing to intro me to founders, who were willing to intro me to their VCs and so on and so forth, and eventually I found my way to opportunities (that for various reasons I ended up not taking), before eventually finding my people @ Overline, who were totally cool with me working with them while also holding down my startup role ==> allowed me to learn a RIDICULOUS amount in a very short amount of time doing both worlds