6. Don’t Fight It, Flip It
I once had a boss who wouldn’t let me use the bathroom during work hours.
He had a timer on his desk that he used to track every minute of productivity during the day. If I needed to go, he would hit pause, making sure that the ninety seconds in the bathroom didn’t count toward the hours I owed him.
The official company policy was “flex time,” which is supposed to mean you work the hours that best fit your life but actually meant, “We flex all over your nights and weekends.” It’s hard being managed by a workaholic, because you constantly feel lazy. He’d send emails at night, text messages on the weekend, and loved launching big projects at Christmas.
He even kept a checklist to make sure you maximized your commute. There was an approved list of educational podcasts he expected you to listen to if you had to drive anywhere. It was like the state-run media in North Korea only stricter.
One year we raised the company’s revenue by 48×. Let me repeat that, because it sounds made up: we increased the revenue by a factor of 48×. Know what he said when he found out? “Should have been 50×.” We didn’t have a party to celebrate. No one cheered in the office. I asked if we could get a cake for the breakroom and he said, “Do you think Elon Musk is eating cake right now?” How do you even answer a riddle like that? I trudged back to my desk and moved on to the next project.
The worst part is, I couldn’t quit. He was the only person in our small town who would hire me. I was trapped. I spent seven long years walking into the same office, waiting for him to start that timer all over again, knowing that whatever I accomplished that day wouldn’t be good enough.
Finally, it came to a breaking point. It was a cold February afternoon and I had just landed back in Nashville after a visit to Houston. The trip was stressful. In addition to the pressure of speaking at a big event, the car service broke down on the side of the interstate on the way back to the airport. I’d made the most of it, working next to an underpass and the hum of vehicles whipping by at seventy miles an hour, because I didn’t want to seem like I was wasting company time. Even in the breakdown lane I was on the clock! Then I worked on the flight home and listened to a podcast in my car as I headed back to my house. The day was technically over, but I knew I should go back to work to finish up a few last things. As I pulled into the office, I said something I’d said a thousand times before: “This guy sucks. I have to quit.”
There was only one problem, one small wrinkle in my escape plan.
The bad boss in this story was me.
If you listen to true, helpful, and kind soundtracks, working for yourself can be a wonderful experience. This is what I’ve been told anyway by CEOs who seem genuinely happy, but that wasn’t my experience for my first seven years as an employee of Acuff Ideas, LLC.
I was the one with the stopwatch on my desk to monitor bathroom breaks. I was the one who tried to listen to twenty-five educational podcasts a month. I was the one who would dock myself ninety seconds if I went to the kitchen to grab a coffee just to make sure I wasn’t stealing time from—who? Me? The company? None of it made any sense, but there really wasn’t much of a mystery. I was a terrible boss because I was listening to terrible soundtracks.
I kept hearing things like, “You’ve got to get ahead. Other people are doing so much better than you. If you take a ten-minute break, you’ll lose all your momentum. You should be doing so much more. This whole thing could fall apart at any second.”
This situation wasn’t new to me. I’d wrestled with this bad-boss idea for years. My wife pointed that out when I first started the company, but it felt too tangled and difficult to really do anything about. It wasn’t until I first started exploring my overthinking that things began to change. It wasn’t overnight or instant. How could it be? You can quit any terrible job and leave a bad boss in the dust unless you work at home and the boss is you.
How would I storm out after turning in my notice to me? How would I flip myself off? How would I peel away in my car in a blaze of glory in my own driveway?
The process of becoming a better boss wasn’t that dramatic. I just started looking at my soundtracks related to work. There were a dozen different ones playing, but they were all saying roughly the same thing: “The only way to be successful is to be hard on yourself, and if that means you’re a bad boss, so be it.”
I’d given that approach to running my business the old college try for seven straight years, and that felt like enough. When I retire old soundtracks, I often say out loud, “That’s enough of doing it that way. Let’s try something different and see what happens.”
I’d spent fifteen years working in corporations before I started my own business. I had good bosses and bad bosses. This is going to surprise you, but I preferred to work for the good ones. I had more fun, got more done, and actually looked forward to work when I had a good boss. Crazy, right?
That afternoon in the driveway, I asked myself a simple question: “What would the best boss do right now?” The answer was not difficult to find. In that exact situation, the best boss would say, “You’ve been out of town for a few days. It’s five o’clock. Go home to your family! You already worked a really full day.”
That was easy to figure out because I just imagined the opposite of what the worst boss would do. And you can do the same thing right now. If you want to create a new soundtrack, pick a broken one that’s loud and flip it upside down. You’ve identified a few in this book. Look at those and imagine what listening to the opposite of all those soundtracks might feel like. You don’t have to brainstorm or dream. Just imagine a coin. One side of it is full of thoughts that aren’t true, helpful, or kind. If you flipped it over, what would the other side say?
The louder the broken soundtrack is, the more obvious its opposite will be. In chapter 5, I told you one of mine was, “Every time you sit down to write you should be able to finish the whole book.”
If you want to create a new soundtrack, pick a broken one that’s loud and flip it upside down.
What’s the flip side of finishing a whole book? Writing a few pages. That’s the opposite. That’s what’s on the other side of the coin, which is why I came up with, “Three pages is plenty.” I didn’t do a deep-dive analysis of why I thought I needed to write the whole book. I didn’t sit with the broken soundtrack for hours trying to untangle it. I flipped a coin in my head, and so can you.
Deb and Bryan Meyer, a married couple from Missouri, changed their relationship with money by flipping one word. “We renamed the ‘emergency fund’ to ‘opportunity fund’ and began thinking about that cash savings in a different context.” It was no longer a failure bucket, full of sad dollars tucked away for a terrifying season of ramen. They replaced the soundtrack associated with that money and in doing so, transformed their entire experience.
John O’Hearn, a marketing executive in Charleston, South Carolina, changed his fear of the unknown concerning new product launches by flipping a soundtrack. “Projecting negativity around those things was super counterproductive,” he said. By looking at his key objectives for his job, he’d identified a soundtrack that wasn’t true, kind, or helpful. So he flipped it. He told me, “Instead of thinking, ‘What if I fail?’ I had to replace it with thoughts like, ‘What if it’s a resounding success?’”
Melissa Byers, a writer from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, changed her approach to exercise by flipping a few soundtracks. “I had to stop telling myself the lie that unless I had all of the right clothes and gear on, the exercise didn’t count.” She had to retire that soundtrack and replace it with a new one: “Be active.” Once she did that, she came to love her morning walks to work. “I work at home, so this consists of a walk around the neighborhood in my flip-flops while talking to my mom on the phone.” That was exercise too. “I had to get my brain out of the way to see it like that.” She flipped “There’s only one specific type of exercise that counts” to “Lots of things count”—including phone-call walks.
I wish this process was more complicated, because then I could write a longer book and be considered the serious kind of author who poses with a pipe on the cover, but it’s really not. Take out a broken soundtrack. Ask, “What’s the opposite of this?” And then write down the answer.
How to Beat a Common Fear with a Simple Flip
Flipping works for minor soundtracks like turning “emergency fund” into “opportunity fund,” but it also works for big, loud, scary soundtracks. Like change.
Change is the only thing every company I know has in common. At Comedy Central, we discussed how teens with YouTube channels are competing with television shows for attention. At FedEx, we talked about Amazon developing their own shipping methods. At Nissan we talked about millennials changing their driving habits.
Change is afoot, but it’s scary because of all the broken soundtracks it triggers in corporate America. One popular soundtrack says, “We have to change everything immediately.” Another says, “Nothing we’ve done in the past will help us in the future” and “None of your current skills will translate at all to the new way of doing things.” Some people also hear, “If we try this new thing once, we have to do it forever. This is the new normal.”
Broken soundtracks like to traffic in absolutes. Everything, nothing, none, and forever are sure signs that you’re overthinking.
Is it any wonder people are resistant to change? They’ve been listening to soundtracks on repeat that tell them they have to immediately change everything forever and nothing they know is going to help. I’m surprised there aren’t more riots in change-management seminars.
Another indicator that you’ve got a broken soundtrack related to the topic of change is knee-jerk criticism. If your very first reaction to a change or a new way of working is to critique or attack it, be careful. If you can’t even listen to the whole idea without knocking it, dissecting it, or pointing out flaws, there are some soundtracks at work. But that’s great because once you’ve identified them, you can flip them.
What’s the opposite of criticism? Curiosity.
What’s the opposite of a dismissive statement like “That will never work here”? A curious question like “I wonder how that could work here?” The words aren’t all that different, but the results are.
Who do you think people like to work with? Who do you think gets added to new projects? Who do you think gets invited to meetings where the future of the company is discussed? Who do you think gets promoted?
The coworker who asks thoughtful questions or the coworker who shoots down new ideas before they’ve even seen the light of day? There’s plenty of time later to critique and iterate. There will be plenty of situations where you and the team will benefit from valuable critical thought, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
We’re focused on your first reaction to a new idea.
What would happen if you replaced the soundtrack “Change is scary” with “Curiosity beats criticism”?
What if you wrote that down and looked at it every time you got invited to a meeting where new ideas were discussed? I think you’d probably do a much better job handling change than I did with Jeremy Cowart.
The Hotel I Couldn’t See
Jeremy Cowart is a world-renowned photographer. That’s not hyperbole. The Huffington Post, Forbes, and Yahoo named him the most influential photographer on the internet. From taking celebrity portraits of Taylor Swift, to capturing moments of reconciliation between warring tribes in Rwanda, to presenting at the United Nations, he’s done it all. One night, on a flight to Portland, Oregon, where we would both be sharing the stage at the World Domination Summit, he told me his next big idea.
For years, he’d been secretly working on a dream about a new hotel. He envisioned a space called The Purpose Hotel, where every inch of it would be designed to help people in need. There’d be a charity water well in the lobby, each room would sponsor a hungry child, and even the soaps in the bathroom would tie back to sustainability. He excitedly told me about it for a few minutes and then did that pause people do when they’re waiting for your reaction.
My face said, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” and my words said, “I don’t know . . . you think?” He was crushed, and years later he told me, “I thought you’d be interested or supportive of the idea. I was really disappointed by that conversation.” The weird thing is, that idea wasn’t even about me. I wasn’t criticizing that change because I was afraid of the work it would require from me. I just found it a lot easier to criticize than to dream. I wrote a book with the subtitle Closing the Gap between Your Day Job and Your Dream Job, but somewhere along the way I’d picked up a broken soundtrack that said, “Dreams are dangerous. Don’t get your hopes up too high.”
You know who didn’t react that way to Jeremy?
Horst Schulze, the cofounder of the Ritz Carlton. He’s helping Jeremy develop the project. After Jeremy told me how badly I discouraged him, I decided I was done with that broken soundtrack and needed to replace it with a few new ones. When it comes to persistent soundtracks, I think it’s good to replace them with more than one. At this point, I had “Curiosity beats criticism,” but maybe there was a second one I could add to the mix.
What was I really doing when someone told me their new idea and I immediately told them it wouldn’t work? I was predicting the future. This felt connected to the soundtrack that you should prepare for the worst and be surprised when it didn’t happen. What a bleak way to go through life that is, always expecting things to fail and then being mildly surprised when they don’t.
I wrote down a new soundtrack in my notebook: “My predictions are positive.”
If I’m going to predict the future, I might as well pick a positive one. The truth is, my track record for most of the terrible things I predicted would happen but didn’t was roughly 0 for 345,000 anyway. And predicting a negative future for myself and other people didn’t feel very good. I never walked away from that conversation and thought, “I hope I’ve properly discouraged that person.” It felt gross, and it wasn’t even accurate.
On the flip side, I always feel better when I encourage someone. I always feel good when I’ve made someone else feel good. And maybe their idea was going to work. Maybe Jeremy Cowart would build a hotel. I couldn’t know for certain, but he wasn’t asking me for anything other than encouragement in that moment.
I have a choice. I can tell you (and myself) to go for it, or I can tell you it will never work. There’s plenty of time for preparation and realism later, but maybe in those initial conversations what you need isn’t a wet blanket. Gordon Mackenzie, an artist at Hallmark who carved out a thirty-year career as a creative guru, explained his approach to this soundtrack in his book Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace.
In his final three years at Hallmark, his official title was Creative Paradox. He didn’t have any real political power, but the people who came to him with new ideas didn’t really know that. When they were stuck and needed some feedback, they would come sit in his office. His policy was to say that their idea was good. In one of the many speeches he gave about this practice, an audience member tried to poke a hole in Mackenzie’s plan by asking, “Why tell someone an idea is good even if it isn’t?” His response was perfect:
Most companies are peppered with people who are very quick to say “no.” Most newly hatched ideas are shot down before they even have time to grow feathers, let alone wings. In saying “yes” to all those who brought their ideas to me, I was simply leveling the imbalance a bit. And it worked. People who have a deep passion for their ideas don’t need a lot of encouragement. One “yes” in a sea of “no’s” can make the difference.1
The flip side of criticism is curiosity. The flip side of saying no is saying yes. The flip side of declaring why it won’t work is discovering why it could. And finding the flip side is an action you can do in any area of your life.
The Truth about the Flip
Tiffany Dawn wasn’t excited to see math again at her new job in Altoona, Pennsylvania. They had a shaky relationship at best that dated back to high school. “I spent years crying through high school math like algebra and geometry.” I never cried during math, but I recently picked up my seventeen-year-old daughter’s graphing calculator and a cold shudder ran through my entire body.
I lost the ability to help my kids with their math homework in about the fifth grade. Every year as they progress through school, my circle of shareable wisdom gets smaller and smaller. By their senior year of college, I’ll probably be down to how to make jokes if a turtle pees on you during the middle of a speech. It’s niche advice, but it’s critical should you ever encounter the exact situation I did one night in Atlanta.
Part of the joy of growing up is putting things you’re terrible at in the rearview mirror, like math. Tiffany was eager to do that, but just because high school ended doesn’t mean her soundtrack did. “After high school, I spent many years saying I sucked at math.” It’s frustrating to get stuck on something like that for years, but it’s also a clue that can help you. If you want to find a soundtrack to flip, listen to the unkind things you repeatedly say about yourself.
Unfortunately, math is one of those subjects that’s like Michael Myers in the Halloween movie series. It refuses to go away forever. “Seven years after high school, I got a job doing payroll for a living.” For someone who sucks at math, that should have been a real problem, but that’s not what Tiffany discovered. “I rocked it!” she told me. She was amazing at the type of math payroll requires. The change wasn’t automatic—replacing your soundtrack never is—but Tiffany worked at it.
“It still took a few years in that job to stop saying, ‘I suck at math,’” she shared. But flipping it and replacing it with a new soundtrack helped: “I’m really good at everyday math; I’m not good at algebra and geometry.” The key here is that she didn’t lie when she flipped her soundtrack. She didn’t say, “I’m the best at algebra.” That wouldn’t have been true. You never beat an old lie with a new lie.
She’s good at everyday math. She’s not good at algebra. Tiffany Dawn told herself the truth. So did I.
Choose new thoughts that generate new actions that take you new places.
I didn’t tell myself I was the greatest public speaker in the world when I started my adventure in 2008. That wasn’t true. Ask that first audience. I threw Skittles on them between main points because I thought “Skittle Segues” would be funny. Pretty sure that’s how Winston Churchill got his start too.
Whenever I would get discouraged, I would flip “I can’t be a public speaker” to “I can be a public speaker,” and then I put in the work to make that new thought true. Replacing a broken soundtrack doesn’t mean faking a new one. It means choosing new thoughts that generate new actions that take you new places. Like Portugal.
Europe’s Worst Blister
At this point in the book, you’re probably thinking that all this soundtrack stuff is easy for me because I am a beacon of positivity. I laugh in the face of hardships. I don’t call them problems, I call them opportunities! You don’t get rainbows without some rain.
That’s not exactly the case. Allow me to explain with a rather harrowing tale from my travels abroad.
I got a blister once on the coast of Portugal.
Normally, I would covet your thoughts and prayers, but it was two years ago and it went away in about six hours without further complications. I have resilient ankles.
It happened when I was running along the edge of the ocean through the seaside town of Cascais (Kăsh-Kīsssh). Say that word out loud—it sounds like the noise a wave makes as it rolls over a colorful bed of sea glass. Cascais . . .
Have you ever used a treadmill that had a video trail you could pretend you were running on? Instead of admitting you’re in the Newark Airport Ramada you can watch a loop of someone running through Wellington, New Zealand. The trail in Portugal was exactly like that except I was actually there and not in a hotel fitness center.
The waves of the North Atlantic were lapping gently on the shore. The sun was rousing the day from its nighttime slumber with a warm kiss. Tourists were frolicking in impossibly blue pools gathered along the sand as I circled the bay on my morning run along a path Christopher Columbus probably walked as a child. I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I returned to our hotel room after I was done though.
“How was your run?” Jenny asked when I walked into the room.
“I got a blister,” I said.
Poof.
The entire experience, the coast of Portugal, the luxury hotel, the abundant access to at least a hundred varieties of sardines—all of it vanished in the face of my pencil-eraser-sized blister.
That is how powerful my negative thinking is.
I’m not an outside observer to broken soundtracks. I’m your mayor. Oh, you think darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark; I was born in it, molded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, and by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!2
I made the entire Iberian Peninsula disappear with the arrival of a blister. When I tell you that I tend to be negative, I mean it from the bottom of my critical heart.
But something unexpected happened to me.
The more I researched what it takes to turn overthinking from a super problem into a superpower, the more I kept bumping into positive thinking. Oh no, I groaned to myself, I don’t know how to speak that language.
Why can’t the solution be something easier, like Mandarin? Tell me complex Chinese is the answer!
Don’t make me become one of those people I mock on Instagram who are always selling video courses—and you’re not going to believe this, they just extended the registration period they swore they were closing, because they didn’t want you to miss it!
You can have my negativity when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Alas, even I, with blister vision, could deny it no longer. If we’re really going to create fresh soundtracks that propel us to the lives we want, we’ve both got some positivity in our very near future.